Nagle Jackson's wingspan felt across the globe | Arts news

It’s fitting that perhaps the most significant accomplishment of Nagle Jackson ’s esteemed career as a director, playwright, translator and champion of new works for the American stage was a deceptively simple little play called “Bernice/Butterfly: A Two-Part Invention.”

He wrote that 2003 gem, made up of two companion one-acts, as a showcase for Denver Center Theatre Company stalwart actors Kathleen M. Brady and Jamie Horton. They played two insignificant small-town Kansans reduced to near-nothingness by fluttering forces outside their control. Brady played a folksy waitress and Horton an off-beat math professor in Jackson's gut-wrenching yet comic character study, which premiered at the Denver Center and was in the mix for the Pulitzer Prize.

The Butterfly Effect is a chaos theory that, as Horton’s character explains in the play, suggests that the simple flap of a butterfly in one part of the world could build into a typhoon in another.

Jackson was the human embodiment of the Butterfly Effect, Horton said.

“The idea that we are so strongly interconnected that the actions of one person can, and will, change the lives of others, is potent to me as I think of our good friend, Nagle,” Horton told the Denver Gazette.

Jackson died Monday of COVID-related pneumonia in Rhinebeck, N.Y., his daughter Hillary confirmed. He was 88.

Twenty years ago, Jackson was among the most towering figures in the Colorado theater community. In fact, he was named (by me) as the 2003 Colorado Theatre Person of the Year. By then, he was already a 20-year Denver Center Theatre Company member.

“It’s absurd, really. I should be retired,” the then-67-year-old said of the honor at the time. “I should be thinking about a boat or something like that.”

Instead, he had just founded the Denver Center’s nationally acclaimed new-play development program called WorkingStages. “New works are the transfusion,” he told me. "It’s the new blood. It’s essential.”

Jackson’s 1999 play “The Elevation of Thieves” was awarded the $150,000 Onassis Foundation International Playwright's Award. The play, which included an offstage mass shooting, premiered at the Denver Center amid great sorrow just two weeks after the Columbine massacre.

Jackson was part of a band of 66 artists who came to Denver in 1983 with incoming Artistic Director Donovan Marley. He went on to direct 20 plays for the DCTC, with a particular acumen for classic French farces like Moliere’s “The Misanthrope,” which he would often adapt himself. He was also a longtime member of the Creede Repertory Theatre, a summer repertory company 250 miles southwest of Denver. Creede took Jackson’s 2010-11 stagings of “The Road to Mecca” and “The Ladies Man” on the road for runs at the Arvada Center.

This is just a tip of the man’s personal and professional legacy, which included directing “The Utter Glory Of Morrissey Hall,” starring Celeste Holm, on Broadway in 1979.

“His illustrious career stretched across a remarkable era in the American theater and included so many of us,” Horton said. “He loved Colorado, he loved the theater, he loved life and his friends.

“And he had a most memorable and infectious chuckle, which many of us strove to imitate.”

Longmont shenanigans

The Longmont Theatre Company , the third-oldest theater company in Colorado, is embroiled in a no-longer internal power struggle between current and former board members that has resulted in a complaint filed in Boulder County District Court.

At its most reduced: Former board members Peg Bolan and Charlie Wright allege that longtime board chair Faye Lamb “has conspired to eliminate volunteer company members and consolidate all corporate power in the board.”

Longmont is a 67-year-old community theater company that performs for about 8,000 locals each year in the massive former Trojan movie house on Main Street. It generally does not pay its actors, which is not uncommon at area community theaters.

But the one thing Longmont’s “volunteer artists” have always been given in lieu of payment is a say. Unlike almost any other nonprofit arts organization, Longmont's volunteer company members have long had a vote in important company business that, frankly, at nearly every other company is the sole domain of boards of directors.

But it’s written into Longmont’s bylaws that anyone who has participated in the making of any show in the previous 12 months – but, importantly, has not been paid – gets a vote at the company’s annual board meeting. That could be about anything from season-selection titles to proposed board members.

But now, the lawsuit alleges, Lamb is trying to take that away.

The complaint contends that the theater company’s current board secretly changed its bylaws to allow for it to eliminate certain members’ volunteer status – without putting the matter before the company for a vote.

And here’s where it all gets downright “Succession.” The plaintiffs allege the board went about paying certain company members “token compensation” – and then used that exchange to cancel their status as voting volunteers. The complaint specifically alleges that one individual was given a $100 gift card as acknowledgement of “hundreds of hours of work on one production.” And then the company took away her volunteer status after she accepted the gift.

The complaint further calls into question the validity of all board members who have been appointed without full company election participation over the past two years.

If no resolution is reached, the case is expected to go to trial in six to nine months.

Turnover at Curious Theatre

The timing is terrible but Jeannene Bragg swears there is nothing dire to be read into her decision to leave Curious Theatre as its managing director.

Bragg and Artistic Director Jada Dixon have been the combined public face of the beloved, embattled company since it announced that it is facing an immediate, existential financial shortfall . But that was before the company announced that it has put its forever home at 1080 Acoma St. up for sale , and that it will find a new way forward after one more season in the crumbling Acoma Center.

Presumably, the sale of the building will solve the company’s short-term cash-flow problem but it leaves wide open the discombobulating question of where it will go next. If ever Curious needed to present stability and consistency in its leadership ranks, it is now.

But Bragg simply got an offer that she said was too good to refuse, she said. She is joining the team at Denver Arts & Venues, the org that manages everything from Red Rocks to the Denver Performing Arts Complex, as well as the city’s public-art program. Bragg promises she’ll be supporting Curious all the way in a volunteer capacity.

Let's go quantum, cowboy!

I am claiming .00004% credit for news that " Quantum Cowboys ," a local film I have been championing since it was the darling of the 45th Denver Film Festival , is being brought back for a special screening at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 24, at the Sie FilmCenter. That will be followed by a Q&A with Geoff Marslett , a bronco-bustin’, tenure-bound film professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Marslett's masterful and wholly original labor of love meaningfully employs every style of animation there is while also taking on big existential questions through a mind-blowing cast that includes Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone , indie-music icons John Doe ("X") and Neko Case , as well as Broadway legend Patrick Page , a completely dialed-in David Arquette and Danish New Wave cinema icon Anna Karina . You won’t regret it.

Briefly …

The Colorado Theatre Guild has announced that the winner of its 2024 lifetime achievement award will go to longtime actor and long-ago agent Sue Leiser, who will be honored at the annual Henry Awards on July 29 at the Lone Tree Arts Center …

Aspen is the place to be Tuesday (July 23), when megastar Shuler Hensley leads a full cast of Broadway veterans and locals with an orchestra of 60 in a concert version of “Fiddler on the Roof” in the Michael Klein Music Tent. Tickets $30-$125 at theatreaspen.org/fiddler …

It’s a big deal whenever the Denver Center is chosen to launch the first national touring production of a Broadway musical. The upcoming premiere of “ Kimberly Akimbo ” at the Buell Theatre got even bigger when it was announced that 16-time Broadway vet Carolee Carmello will star in the unusual musical about a typical 16-year-old girl with an atypical genetic predisposition to age at a rapid rate. It runs Sept. 22-Oct. 5 …

A celebration of life for BDT Stage drummer Nick Gnojek is being planned for 4 p.m. Aug. 10 at the El Rancho Colorado restaurant in Evergreen, 29260 US-40. Matt Gnojek asks that memorial donations be made either to Cap for Kids or the Denver Actors Fund . ... A celebration of life for playwright and poet Marty McGovern is planned for 7 p.m. Aug. 2 at the Acoma Center, 1080 Acoma St.

And finally …

Once more for the people in the back: No, “The Bear” is not a comedy series. So why did it win the Emmy Award for best comedy last time, and why is it a shoo-in to win as best comedy again in September when it is, you know … not a comedy?

Networks are allowed to enter their shows in whatever category they want, and last year, FX Networks cynically chose to enter "The Bear" as a comedy to avoid competing with “Succession” – and that strategy clearly paid off.

If it seemed dumb when “The Bear” won all the comedy awards at the strike-delayed Emmys in January, just wait till the great Jamie Lee Curtis inevitably wins as guest actress in a comedy series for her epic Thanksgiving dramatic meltdown that was just the greatest thing since Elizabeth Taylor showed her claws in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." A laugh riot, it was not. Curtis deserves an Emmy, just not in that category.

This is on all those Emmy voters who didn't show a spine and refuse to vote for "The Bear," even though they know this is all going to seem pretty ridiculous come September. End of rant.