A new name, 12 new plays
In its 10th year, Theater Company of Lafayette is stretching its muscles
By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News Spotlight Columnist
January 14, 2006
Never heard of the Theater Company of Lafayette? Well, until last month, it was Lafayette Community Theatre. The name change is just one of the small group's attempts to raise its level of performance, a superficial change compared with its collaboration this month with the Lafayette Public Library.
"We really felt like the group had changed in a pretty significant way, and we wanted to mark that change with the name," says artistic director Madge Montgomery.
The theater began in 1996 as community theaters do, and continued for many years on that track.
"It was kind of a loose-knit group, and they would get together a few times a year to put on plays, and they didn't really have a season or a clear direction of what they wanted to do. It was kind of a friendly, informal group," Montgomery says.
"Over time, that's really changed. We now have a pretty solid group of people on our board who are experienced and really dedicated, and we've really spent a lot of time trying to build and solidify the group."
The entire season budget remains at a teeny-tiny $15,000, with no paid staff. Montgomery joined the company after moving to Denver in 1999 from the Seattle area, where she earned an MFA in directing at the University of Washington. While in Washington, she did freelance directing and ran her own theater company, Acme Theatricks, which produced new work.
So it's not surprising that this weekend Lafayette is taking a deep plunge into new work with The Frankenstein Experiment, premiering 12 short plays inspired by Mary Shelley's novel.
The production was triggered three years ago by a call from the Lafayette Public Library, which is hosting a touring exhibition Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature.
The theater company invited three writers Montgomery knew from Washington state and one who had contributed to a similar project in Georgia. Then it put out a call for writing samples, and selected eight more writers from the 35 who responded.
They were told to write something without extravagant technical requirements (the tiny Mary Miller Theatre can't accommodate them) and for a cast of fewer than seven.
"We asked them to shoot for 10 minutes, and we weren't very firm about that, because most of them are slightly longer," Montgomery says.
The result was two programs of six plays each that take divergent paths from the original story. Several of the writers seized on Shelley's parent-child motif between the doctor and the monster.
Among the offerings:
• Man by Committee, by Linda Berry, features Victor Frankenstein defending his doctoral dissertation, a newly created human being.
• Act of Contrition, by Matt Pinkerton, looks at the role monsters fill in society.
• Promethea Unlaced, by Marki Shalloe, imagines the birth of Shelley.
So does this ambitious project, with a budget of one-third the company's annual budget, mean the death of community theater in Lafayette?
"We still want to remain a community theater in the sense that the majority of our work is done by volunteers, and we're open to people with a wide range of experience," Montgomery says. "But the reality is that you have to offer good work to your audience in order to survive."
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