The Cast: Tim Holt and Erica Holt, co-owners and performers with Soul Penny Circus; Dena Poer, Business & Logistics Manager, Greenlight Creatives; Misha Fristensky, theater technician; Liz Gray, Managing Director, Capital Stage; Kristi Horvath, Director of Venue Operations, Denver Center for the Performing Arts; Mona Wood-Patterson and Charles Ford, Artistic Director and Technical Director (respectively), The Merely Players.
Act One
As you can see, every artist on the cast list enjoys a colorful, successful career tied to theater. And despite their divergent career paths, they share a common launch pad: they are all alums of Durango’s high school theater program. Toupe 1096 was always robust, but in 1989, something rather curious happened that would forever change the trajectory of the program and its students’ lives.
Cue the nostalgia lights…
Act Two
“Could you build a set?” Mona asked Charles.
“I’ve never built an entire set,” he confessed. He was a creative writer turned painter-artisan-inventor-puppeteer-roboticist, and an all-around tinkerer. And he was always up for a challenge.
“I try to keep a beginner mind, like in Buddhism," Charles grins. "Not to know, or think I know, so much that I cannot learn something new."
As the newly minted head of the high school theater program, Mona brought a wealth of theater training and expertise. Of course she wanted to impart practical theater skills to her students, but she also knew teenagers demanded a special kind of guidance.
“I always say, teenagers are the most passionate beings on the planet,” Mona explains. “I told [the students] a lot: I care more about your character off stage than I do on stage.”
Intermission
“I quite literally do not know who I would be if I hadn't started doing theater,” Kristi confesses. “Theater was really the first time that my quirks and eccentricities were things to be celebrated and nurtured.” Kristi now oversees a campus of six performance spaces, with seating capacities spanning 200-700.
Tim and Erica’s romance ignited in high school theater. Today, on top of their day jobs, they run a nonprofit circus in Denver. They fuse the fantastical with clowning, acrobatics, dance, puppetry, and magic. They’ve toured Colorado’s Front Range, the East Coast, and Edinburgh, Scotland. “We get a thrill out of performing. I still get enjoyment making things,” Tim explains. The weekend chore list includes: make space shuttle and hippopotamus.
Ask Dena about her experiences in theater and she lights up. Lighting up is actually her profession. She shares the helm of a theatrical light design company serving arena concerts, product launches, or weddings. But theater remains her paramour. “I found tribe. I found acceptance. You’re strange. I’m strange. Let’s be strange together—YAY!” she explains.
Liz spent a decade acting professionally in New York City. “The theater world takes you on a ride when you're jumping from gig to gig and you're trying to stitch together a life in the arts,” she attests. As she helps lead a major metropolitan theater, Liz finds her talents and passions are fully aligned. “Theater for me has provided such a deep sense of belonging,” Liz says.
Misha also spent a decade acting professionally in New York and around the country. “What drew me to the arts was my love for music,” he says. “When I saw that I could get on stage inhabiting a character and combine it with music and dance, that sparked it for me.” These days, Misha flexes is technical and organizational muscles as a stage manager and theater technician. He’s worked with the likes of Denzel Washington and is currently on the production team for Masquerade, an immersive take on The Phantom of the Opera.
Working with Mona and Charles proved pivotal in each person’s decisions to become theater professionals. For Kristi, Liz, and Misha, Mona’s encouragement coaxed them to apply for rigorous college programs. For Dena, Tim, and Erica, Charles’ wizardry with props, sets, lighting, and creature creation catapulted them into the secret backstage worlds of theater tech.
The alums also agree that Mona and Charles established a supremely ambitious and successful theater troupe built on a culture of a culture of respect and collaboration. By 2011, Mona and Charles retired from the high school, but, they were not about to retire from theater.
Act Three
Can you build a set in an empty swimming pool? How about in an old barn?
Around the mid-90s, Mona’s curious question for Charles morphed into a rather feral critter running amok around Durango. She yearned to stage plays unfit for high school production (either the themes were too heavy or the cast too small). Over summers, Mona, Charles, Tim, and other high school alums began mounting found-space productions. Rather than rent a pricey theater, they would temporarily inject sets, actors, techs, and audiences into any space they could find for free or cheap. They dubbed their company The Merely Players.
But the entire enterprise was so zany, so impossible, it must inevitably fail, right? Wrong.
Challenges spiked. Creativity surged. Audiences grew. Many graduates like Liz, Misha, and Dena returned to perform on stage, to direct, or work tech and lights, or stage manage the whole production. Mona says, “They would come back and with creativity and intelligence and experience and infuse that into the show. And the community loved watching them grow up.”
Finally, in 2021, The Merely Players snagged a gargantuan industrial basement to be their permanent home and headquarters, lovingly dubbed The Underground. Today, the company stages four sellout shows annually, and frequently garners top awards and nominations for acting, directing, and sets. They generously open their doors to other local performers, playwrights, clowns, comedians, and experimental pop-up performances.
Having dedicated their lives to theater and the magic that comes with sharing stories with audiences, Mona and Charles feel immensely rewarded, grateful, and joyful. They heartily applaud today’s leaders at DHS Troupe 1096 who continue a legacy that still proves to be uniquely transformational for young people, regardless of their chosen profession. Says Mona, “Just having a place where they belong…learning creativity, collaboration, teamwork, and risk-taking—the foundations of theater take them into any career.”
Put another way, all the world’s a stage and all people merely players.