square product theatre featured in American Theatre magazine

Check out this great feature on theatre in Boulder in the most recent edition of American Theatre magazine! I'm honored that Lisa Kennedy chose to include square product theatre on her list of companies giving the Denver theatre scene a run for its money.

Bolder Colorado

How theatre in the college town 25 miles from Denver is rising to the occasion—and raising the stakes for the region.

by Lisa Kennedy

Last October #MeToo went viral, and we’ve been reckoning with the repercussions ever since. But in Boulder, Colo., four theatre companies were already on the case. Because seasons take time to shape, the productions were gestures of foresight, not reaction—they were prophetic, not parasitic.

At Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (BETC), its 12th season opened with a deft production of Lauren Gunderson’s The Revolutionists, about the 18th-century playwright Olympe de Gouges and three other women during France’s Reign of Terror, including an improbably touching Marie Antoinette. Meanwhile a troupe called the Catamounts convened the protagonists of Jane Eyre, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights for Jaclyn Backhaus’s archly clever You on the Moors Now. Square Product Theatre presented House of Gold, Gregory S. Moss’s cultural critique as told through the eyes of JonBenét Ramsey. And Local Theater Company presented a full production of a play workshopped during the 2016 installment of its Lab: Michael Yates Crowley’s The Rape of the Sabine Women by Grace B. Matthias, about a young woman who finds in the Roman tale of the Sabine women a way to understand her sexual assault at the hands of a high school football player.

Meanwhile, in the same period, just 25 miles away, Denver’s two most intellectually muscular theatres were differently engaged. At the regional powerhouse the Denver Center, rabble-rousing director Robert O’Hara was challenging subscribers with an all-male version of the Scottish play. And Curious Theatre Company was giving local audiences their first taste of playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins with his Southern Gothic family drama Appropriate.

It was the kind of one-two punch you might expect from theatres that have raised expectations about idea-wrestling theatre. Still, for years there’s been a sense that what Denver really needed to make it a more formidable player in the nation’s theatre scene was a third, mid-sized independent theatre to complement the Denver Center and Curious. Could it be, though, that the role of this dreamed-of “third theatre”—an outside catalyst to keep theatre in Colorado’s largest city on its toes—is already being played by a brace of artistically ambitious theatre companies in nearby Boulder?

Read the full article HERE.