“Eden Prairie, 1971” is a melancholy (and hopeful) swan song at BETC

So much in the Butterfly Effect Theatre of Colorado’s latest production, Mat Smart’s “Eden Prairie, 1971,” shines a spotlight on the many pleasures the Boulder company has offered audiences under the stewardship of artistic director Stephen Weitz and managing director Rebecca Remaly.

The couple co-founded the theater 17 years ago.

The drama’s small, three-person ensemble delivers outsized emotions and big ideas; the show even introduces the audience to two new performers in the lead roles. The production’s elegant design – scenic, lighting, sound, costume, props — is lean and evocative. Director Heather Beasley moves the characters within the Carsen Theatre’s black box space with a sense of intimate concerns and epic quandaries, fitting a play set in the waning years of Vietnam.

This is the final weekend at the Dairy Center for the Arts for the well-wrought drama. It also sets the stage and the bar for what will follow. In December, Weitz and Remaly, who are married and have a young son, announced they were leaving BETC, known for much of its 17 years as the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company.

When BETC and other theaters re-emerged from the pandemic it offered a soul-searching opportunity “to really being able to take a more clear-eyed view of what the next couple of years of the company and the organization might look like,” Weitz offered. One that left them “weighing whether we wanted to, I use the analogy of pushing that boulder back up the hill, having pushed it up the hill one time already. And I think that was part of the analysis of, ‘Hey, maybe somebody else would be better equipped to do this the second go-round.’ ”

The company’s board knew the two planned to depart and had been working on what might be next for one of Boulder’s best theater companies. (In late March, the company announced its new leaders: Jessica Robblee and Mark Ragan.) But the news came as a surprise to the local theater community.

“Steven and Rebecca have dedicated their time and energy to positively contributing to the artistic community through intriguing programming and working with generous, smart, artistic collaborators (actors/designers),” wrote Jada Suzanne Dixon in an email. The Curious Theatre Company’s artistic director counts herself among BETC’s many collaborators but also a beneficiary of Weitz and company’s creative process. Last fall, she helmed BETC’s splendid production of Marco Ramirez’s Jack Johnson boxing drama, “Royale.”

“Steven has always believed in me. I could say he saw more in me than I saw in myself, at times. They took a risk on me as a director with ‘Bloomsday.’ They asked thoughtful questions, respectfully pushed and challenged me to create the best show possible.”

And so, when Weitz and Remaly announced their departure plans, “Eden Prairie, 1971” — the 2022-23 season’s ender — became a swan song of sorts. A bittersweet but also hopeful one, if the tenor of a recent video chat with Weitz and Remaly is any measure.

“It was an unintentional swan song, but it worked out OK,” said Weitz, with Remaly joining in from Pennsylvania where she’s directing Betsy Wohl’s “Grand Horizons,” set to begin its run in Bloomsburg, the town where the pair met. “OK,” because BETC will go on. And OK, the drama speaks of a roiling past in ways that allow audiences to ponder our state as a nation, but also the state of the arts and theater coming out of a global pandemic.

“I think (one of) the things that is attractive to me with any historical play is you like to try and figure out how it speaks to the moment,” said Weitz. “Mat [Smart] has spoken at some length about really looking at a time — when it seems like our divisions are absolutely insurmountable and no one’s actually talking to each other. And he really wanted to look at a different period in time where that felt like it was also true. That led him to this period in 1971, when the country was really driven by feelings around Vietnam.”

That would have been reason enough to program the play, which is having a rolling world premiere thanks to the work that the National New Play Network does with regional theaters But Weitz says he was also drawn to the resounding aches at the heart of the play.

“I think it speaks to the trauma that the characters are going through because of the choices that they’ve made, because of the circumstances that they’re in and what it feels like to live with that trauma all the time. And that is also something I feel is really resonant — whether it’s politics, whether it’s social issues, whether it’s the pandemic, whether it’s war — pick your poison. I think it’s something we’re all dealing with in the moment, and I don’t know if most of us even know we’re dealing with it.”

“Eden Prairie, 1971”

Smart’s play begins with an unexpected knock at a window in a modest clapboard house in a Minnesota burg. It is the night of the third lunar landing. Nixon is president. The United States is pursuing its bombing campaign of Cambodia. There are two more fraught years ahead for the Vietnam War. All of which weighs heavily on Rachel Thompson (Kate Hebert), her mother (Adrian Egolf), and Pete Walcott (James Giordano). Rachel’s unseen father, Hank, is an active-duty pilot.

Pete’s visit is not entirely friendly. Along with two other high school classmates, he headed to Canada to evade the draft. One of those friends changed his mind and was killed in action. It is the death of that friend that leads Pete to return to his hometown — without his disgraced parents knowing — and to tell Rachel that their friend decided to return because of her.

Pete thought this would be oddly heartening to the young woman. It isn’t.

What follows is a smart and prickly minuet of two young people wrestling with a vast array of grown-up quandaries. Crises do that to the young. Rachel makes clear her mother’s nerves are fragile. That’s why she didn’t go off to college at Berkeley. Every knock at the door threatens a solemn visit and heartbreak. For his part, Pete wants to confess and appears to seek a kind of absolution. Rachel isn’t so easily swayed, although they clearly had — and may yet again – a spark of connection.

As Mrs. Thompson, Egolf confirms but also rebuffs her daughter’s estimation of her frailty. And the one-act play’s twists and conclusions are devastating and earned.

There’s something poetic in Egolf’s casting. The actor was delightful as Marie Antoinette in one of BETC’s finest productions, “The Revolutionists,” Lauren Gunderson’s hysterical-historical, female-cast comedy. It’s a show Remaly shined in; she portrayed French author Olympe de Gouges, a political thinker and (sort of) abolitionist.

Looking back

Asked to give a shout-out to some of especially memorable works, Remaly doesn’t hesitate. “‘Stupid [Expletive] Bird’ was, for me, a special experience.” She was in the cast and Weitz directed Aaron Posner’s tart riff on Chekov’s “The Seagull.”

“Not just being able to work with Stephen on that, but being able to work with the whole cast and on a play that has a really profound script,” she added. “There are a lot of plays about theater. Not all of them are great. Not all of them have stood the test of time. And that was one that just really resonated with all of us.”

Weitz recalls collaborations on the “Star Power” series with the Fiske planetarium and the University of Colorado-Boulder. “The thing I really enjoyed about those is they were really world premieres from the ground up,” he says. “The playwright, the other artistic creators at the planetarium, we literally hatched it from a little baby bird and grew it all the way up.”

“It was even different than a normal new play process, having just gone through the ‘Eden Prairie’ process of, ‘Hey, this is a new play, but it has some foundations.’ The playwrights here, we’re still tinkering, but it’s kind of a largely baked pie. But both of those processes were very much kind of build it from the ground up and sort of insanely collaborative that way.”

As for “Eden Prairie,” Weitz finds hope in the drama – for all of us, but also for a theater community still finding its way after the blows of 2020. “It ultimately is a hopeful play, I think, in which the characters all leave the play very much hurt — and heartbroken in some cases but the play’s still hopeful that maybe we can get through it. And I think that’s a good sort of metaphor for where the theater industry is and the challenges that the industry faces and the challenges that BETC will face in the future.

“That we keep putting one foot in front of the other, and we keep working hard, there’s hope that it will all be fantastic in the end.”

Remaly: “Wow. You really made that work, Stephen.”

Weitz: “Nailed it.”

IF YOU GO

Eden Prairie, 1971. Written by Mat Smart. Directed by Heather Beasley. Featuring Kate Hebert, James Giordano and Adrian Egolf. At the Dairy Center for the Arts, 2590 Walnut, Boulder, through April 29. For tickets and info, go to BETC.org.

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