BETC synergizes a new paradigm
Isn’t language marvelous? The interplay between words and meaning, denotation and connotation, is ever evolving, its fluidity influenced by cultural, temporal and psychological factors. A single concept may be referred to in any number of ways, each with its own distinct flavor.
The perceived difference between “reframing” a situation and “spinning” it elegantly illustrates this notion. To reframe an event or to spin it are fundamentally identical endeavors, yet reframing implies a positive worldview realignment — like seeing a crisis as an opportunity. But spinning carries with it the distasteful implication of dishonest, self-interested manipulation — like using the phrase “mistakes were made” to minimally acknowledge culpability while simultaneously maximizing the speaker’s distance from it.
Today’s corporate culture is a wasteland of jargon seemingly devoted to obfuscation. Playwright Aaron Loeb teases much dark humor from the Gordian knot of corporate-speak with his play, Ideation, which is enjoying its regional premiere thanks to the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company (BETC).
With Ideation, BETC succeeds in turning a crisis into an opportunity via some logistical gymnastics. For its past nine seasons, BETC has called the Dairy Arts Center home, but with the massive reconstruction, renovation and expansion of the Dairy in full swing, BETC is unable to stage any of the rest of its 10th season shows there. Homeless but ever-hopeful, BETC has been forced to find new venues in which to perform. Where many theater companies would have struggled with this challenge, BETC has used it to turn its production of Ideation into a site-specific theater event, and the result is outstanding.
As director Stephen Weitz explains, “The play is set in a corporate conference room, so we thought, ‘Why not just do it in a conference room?’ Bring the audience right onto the set, as it were, and do the show practically in their laps.”
And that’s just what BETC has done by staging Ideation in conference rooms at both the Boulder Chamber of Commerce and downtown technology company MobileDay. Call it theatre vérité, if you must, but the intimate presentation — there were only three rows of seats for fewer than 100 people on opening night — draws the audience completely into the play’s world of overhead fluorescent lights, whiteboards and Starbucks addiction… possibly better than traditional, arms-length staging would.