AURORA | The cramped, 1940s-era newsroom disappeared in a matter of hours.
Vintage wooden desks and heavy typewriters vanished. The framed portraits that hung on the walls, the reams of paper and the clunky chairs became invisible. The newspaper office gave way to an interior from a modern, Midwestern home from another era, and it happened quickly.
“All of their stuff gets pushed back,” said Johanna Jaquith, an actress and founding member of the Silhouette Theatre Company. Along with other members of the Silhouette troupe, she was working to transform the stage at the John Hand Theatre a few hours before curtain call on a Saturday afternoon. “We have a main curtain that we’re going to hang on this beam,” she said, pointing to the ceiling of venue tucked away on the grounds of the Colorado Free University in the Lowry neighborhood. “It’s going to create a black box theater.”
The Silhouette’s production of Neil Labutte’s contemporary drama “This Is How It Goes” is running concurrently with “The Front Page,” the latest comedy from the Spotlight Theatre Company set in pre-World War II America. With two very different plays sharing the same stage in a single day, a quick turnover from set to set was necessary. But it was also impressive, considering the humble size of the stage at the 72-seat John Hand Theatre.
This is no Denver Center for the Performing Arts, with its complex of multiple stages and thousands of seats. It’s not even on par with the smaller Aurora Fox theater, a venue that includes a main stage and a smaller, black-box theater in a different section of the former Art Deco movie palace. At John Hand, the tiny stage plays every role. It’s smaller than most high school auditoriums. Audience members have to cross the stage to reach their seats, and the backstage area is part of the maze of classrooms and halls that make up CFU.
But that small scope hasn’t kept the venue from keeping up an ambitious menu of theater since CFU founder John Hand opened the small space in 2001 as Toad Hall. It’s become the home for two resident companies, the Spotlight and the Firehouse Theatre troupes. Within the past two years, the newly formed Silhouette company has joined John Hand’s ranks, putting on at least two shows a year.
“It’s a healthy way to run a theater … You have to be able to engage people before you can try different things. It’s a very organized approach,” said Carol Petitmaire, who’s directing “The Front Page.” “It’s not a presenting house where people come in and nobody knows anybody. People here function as a family, as a team. It’s valuable for logistics.”
There’s a lot of traffic here, and that much is clear in the schedule for the two shows in March. “The Front Page” runs on Fridays. “This Is How It Goes” runs on Thursdays. Both run at different times on Saturdays and Sundays.
That simultaneous schedule doesn’t mean the two shows share much in the way of content, theme or layout. “The Front Page,” based partly on the 1940 film “His Girl Friday” and the 1974 remake, is the product of another theatrical era. Penned by Chicago newspaper vets Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in 1928, the show features a cast of nearly 20 actors and plenty of pop culture references from a different time. Some actors don’t make appearances on stage until well into the second act, and the pace of comedy is rapid.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m going to confront a warmed-up audience,” said John Greene, who plays Pinkus in “The Front Page.” He doesn’t come on the stage until late in the show. “Sometimes it’s an audience that doesn’t get all the ‘in’ jokes of the time period, and they still need a little warming up.”
In comparison, the Silhouette company’s production of “This Is How It Goes” is minimal. There are three actors in the cast. The theme deals with modern questions of race, prejudice and social hang-ups. Instead of looking for laughs, Neil LaBute’s show poses uncomfortable questions.
That fits in with the larger arc of the company’s short history. So far, the troupe has presented shows about class and parenthood; it’s explored uncomfortable questions about coming of age in the 21st century. Just as the titles “Spotlight” and “Silhouette” indicate, one company is focused on the lighter side of theater while the other is happy to explore darker themes.
“To be challenged and to be changed is sort of our mission, which is very different from what Spotlight is doing,” Jaquith said. “My whole idea when I came up with that model is that great theater changes you … Ours just happens to be the challenging side of theater. We want you to come and face your own truths, your feelings about some of these very complex issues.”
The troupes that share the John Hand Theatre may have different approaches to their art, but all of the creative missions seem to easily fit in the small space. On the opening weekend for both shows, Silhouette and Spotlight crews worked together to reinvent a limited space. They scaled ladders to hang black curtains, they lugged heavy wooden furniture to the back of the house and they cycled through different lighting cues for the two shows.
“We’ve taken pictures of everything. We know where it goes so that the other stage manager doesn’t need to freak out when she comes in and say ‘Nothing is in place,’” said Paul Jaquith, another founding Silhouette troupe member. “We want people to come back and want to work with us again.”
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or
720-449-9707