Flamboyán Theatre envisions Boricua theater hub in Colorado with launch of new program
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DENVER — Flamboyán Theatre, Denver’s first Puerto Rican theater company, wants to create a Puerto Rican theater hub in the Mile High City with a bridge to San Juan.
It starts with the Ramas Project.
The ambitious brainchild of Flamboyán Theatre founder Jonathan Marcantoni, the Ramas Project plans to use grants, donations and Marcantoni’s professional network to produce and promote work by Puerto Rican theater artists.
Support from the project would be accessible to Boricua playwrights throughout the United States and in Puerto Rico. Marcantoni hopes to reconcile the distance between artists living in Puerto Rico and those in the diaspora by producing U.S.-written plays in Puerto Rican theaters and producing Puerto Rican-written plays at Flamboyán Theatre in Lakewood.
“This whole mission of mine is to do my little part in repairing that relationship and creating not just a hub where Puerto Ricans — no matter where they are, no matter where they grew up — feel welcome and at home and that their particular expression of their identity is appreciated,” Marcantoni said.
“But it's also, let's create the opportunities that nobody else has created for us. Let's build that bridge between Denver and San Juan,” he said.
Flamboyán Theatre plans to launch the Ramas Project in February after a three-month-long crowdfunding campaign. The campaign raised $1,245, falling short of the theater’s $50,000 goal.
The low crowdfunding turnout didn’t surprise Marcantoni. As federal cuts exacerbate the need among nonprofits and a challenging economy discourages donors from opening their wallets, he said he’s not the only one struggling to raise money.
Denver’s Su Teatro Theater, along with many other arts organizations across the country, had its National Endowment for the Arts funding pulled last May. The Buntport Theater is currently advertising a fundraising campaign of their own in order to buy their building. Some venues, like Curious Theater, The Bug Theater and now Flamboyán, go the nonprofit route in order to be eligible for grant funding.
This financial struggle among Denver’s independent theaters sits in stark contrast to the city’s most recent economic impact study, which found that arts and culture events brought in three times more revenue over the last two years than all five major sports teams combined.
Marcantoni also applied for several grants from Verizon, Denver Arts & Venues and the Colorado Health Foundation. He didn’t receive the Verizon small business grant and is waiting to hear back about the remaining sponsorships this month.
Las Bodegas, the newest campus of the Latino Cultural Arts Center, received major funding from federal and state grants. But Marcantoni said he avoided applying for national grants because of the federal government’s push against grant funding for “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives.
“Latino plays are not ever, even in the best of times, considered safe. Putting out something like the Ramas Project in this moment is bold and necessary because it's saying that we are not beholden to the standard of retraction. We do not think that these voices are problematic just for speaking,” said Baylee Shlichtman, a Puerto Rican playwright based in California. Flamboyán Theatre produced her play “You’ll be Made of Ashes, Too” last year.
“I think that's really important in this moment. Just continuing to affirm that Puerto Rican voices matter in this climate, when so much of what's going on would like to argue otherwise,” she said.
Puerto Ricans make up the second-largest Latino population in Colorado, according to the U.S. Census American Community Survey. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, so people born in Puerto Rico have U.S. citizenship but cannot vote in presidential elections or elect representatives to Congress if they live on the island.
President Trump recently reopened shuttered military bases in Puerto Rico and sent thousands of soldiers to the island for training. Puerto Rico sits between the U.S. and Venezuela. In January, Trump ordered military strikes on Venezuela's capital and the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Shlichtman said she’s concerned about Puerto Rico’s precarious position in this conflict.
Flamboyán isn’t the only independent theater in the area producing plays that spotlight diverse voices. Aurora’s Two Cent Lion theater’s upcoming show, “PUF: A Completely Factual and Objective History of The Publick Universal Friend,” centers a nonbinary character. Su Teatro will stage “Just Like Us,” a play about four Latina high school friends navigating their immigration status, in March.
Born in California, Shlichtman has never been to Puerto Rico. Her playwriting has been an outlet to explore the precarious connection she has with her cultural identity and navigate what it means to be Puerto Rican in the diaspora, she said.
Schlictman’s work has taken her around the country, including Florida and New York, but she said her experience with Flamboyán Theatre was her first time working with a specifically Puerto Rican theater, which felt “very affirming.” She’d love to have a play she wrote produced in Puerto Rico.
“I feel like there is a longing for the island that would make a production or an opportunity like that just amazing,” Schlictman said.
Playwright and actress Ana Sophia Colón grew up in Puerto Rico and moved to New York in 2017. After performing her one-woman play, “Puerto Rico es una Cama Twin” (or “Puerto Rico is a Twin Bed”), for audiences in New York City, Colón produced the show in Puerto Rico.
Colón serves as writer, actress and producer of “Cama Twin,” a drama about womanhood, familial ties and Puerto Rican identity. Each time she brings the play to another city, she feels like she’s starting from scratch, regardless of the show’s success in the previous city.
“Being a Puerto Rican theater artist, we often have to fundraise from zero each time and rebuild audiences repeatedly. We don't have an infrastructure designed to carry the work forward,” Colón said.
Colón hasn’t worked with Flamboyán Theatre yet, but she met Marcantoni while writing “Cama Twin” and requested his input on early drafts of the play. She’s excited about the potential of the Ramas Project to facilitate the distribution of Puerto Rican theater in the U.S. and on the island.
“It's centralizing support and making sure that we're raising the next generation. As a Puerto Rican artist, you arrive at the Ramas Project knowing that you're an artist. You don't have to explain yourself,” Colón said.
“I think that it creates a canon of Puerto Rican work that's going to be experimental. It's going to be joyful. It's not just going to be about our trauma, but it's also going to celebrate what our culture is and our complexity.”
Colón hopes to bring her “Puerto Rico es una Cama Twin” to Colorado audiences at Flamboyán Theatre this summer.
Nicole Caron has performed in one Flamboyán Theatre production so far, a political satire about the relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S. called “We Reserve the Right of Admission.” She’s excited about the potential to bring more Puerto Rican stories to the stage in Colorado through the Ramas Project.
“I got kind of slapped in the face with the script and a story of an island that is part of the United States, and I had no idea about the history or what that connection really means from a political, economic, social, cultural standpoint,” Caron said about "We Reserve the Right of Admission."
“So that is a huge benefit…getting to hear stories directly from people who experience these kinds of things, what it means to be in the diaspora,” she said.
Flamboyán Theatre will host its New Latiné Play Salon March 27 and 28. The event will feature several short plays written by artists from Puerto Rico and serve as a preview of the programming the Ramas Project wants to champion.
Marcantoni had hoped to dedicate $20,000 to the New Latiné Play Salon to pay for the production costs, cover travel expenses for the Puerto Rican playwrights and offer competitive wages to the cast and crew.
Despite the funding challenges, the show will go on, even if it means a stripped back production and virtual attendance of the playwrights.
Throughout his career, Marcantoni said he’s been frustrated by the limited funding opportunities for Puerto Rican theater and the lack of infrastructure for independent theater on the island. The Ramas Project is his attempt to address this disparity, and he’s willing to start from the ground up to build a better ecosystem for the Puerto Rican artists who come after him.
“The ingenuity of Puerto Ricans to figure out how to make something happen even when they don't have the amount of support that they wish they had is inspiring. And it keeps me motivated, too,” Marcantoni said.
Rocky Mountain PBS arts & culture reporter Sarah Shoen contributed to this article.
Type of story: News
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Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.