Balagula Theatre may be gone, but its influence will endure

When word spread in December 2014 that Balagula Theatre’s co-founding artistic directors Ryan Case and Natasha Williams had resigned amid financial troubles, you could almost feel the theater community collectively hold its breath to see what would happen next.

We had just lost Actors Guild of Lexington the previous month, when it announced it was entering “hibernation” from which it has not awoken. Regardless of Balagula’s fate, it felt like the end of an era.

We now know that the Balagula era is indeed over, despite the laudable efforts of a subsequent group of all-volunteer staffers to keep the theater alive.

The theater quietly dissolved at the end of 2015 after honoring its 2014-2015 season commitments.

“After completing the remainder of the 2014-2015 season, and presenting our first collaborative and musical production, the board decided it was Balagula's time to become part of Lexington's theatrical history,” said Scott Halvorsen Turner, president of the now defunct board of directors.

There is plenty of room for debate and analysis about what went wrong, but I find myself nostalgic for what went right.

Balagula is the first theater whose entire life cycle I intimately witnessed as an audience member and critic. As it changed and grew, so did I.

I remember attending the group’s earliest shows in the early 2000s while cutting my teeth writing criticism for an alternative monthly publication. I’d never experienced anything like the quirky evenings of “surprise theatre” it periodically hosted, when unsuspecting (and often suspecting) guests dining at Natasha’s Bistro & Bar were treated to sudden outbursts of drama in the dining room. My favorite “surprise” was probably when a young couple dining at a table in the audience broke out into a raucous verbal fight. I had seen them enter not long after me and they seemed like a totally normal couple for most of the evening. Turns out, they were part of the show.

These evenings taught me to appreciate short forms of drama, and I was excited to get to see theater artists experiment so wildly. More experimentation followed with the restaurant, Williams’ namesake, serving as the setting for edgy, artistically bold shows — an eclectic combination of full-length plays, one-acts, staged readings and even a radio script, all produced on a shoestring budget.

The theater garnered a reputation as artist-centric. Producers weren’t afraid to take on deeply challenging material, whether emotional, intellectual, or both. When Balagula announced its first full season in 2009, it featured difficult, existentially ponderous works by Beckett, Sartre, Ionesco and Kopit.

Frankly, no other theater in town could afford to risk mounting a season of avant garde thinkers. But by that time, Balagula had a loyal niche audience that embraced the theater’s penchant for intensive experimentation.

The coziness of the restaurant space, and later the small black box theater that replaced the former boutique side of Natasha’s, allowed the audience a very close view of the action. The notion that the audience, too, had a role to play was more pronounced there than in traditional theaters and was the main reason I wasn’t a fan of their eventual move to the Central Library’s Farrish Theater. The intimacy, the eclectic, Bohemian atmosphere, the sense that you were part of some radical experiment was gone when the theater made the move to a more traditional space.

In Balagula Theatre’s heyday, being in the audience felt like you were part of some radical underground art movement. As it transitioned to more mainstream ways of presenting and operating, it lost some of its magic, although artistically, the theater remained one of the most consistent in the area.

In its best times, Balagula created a haven for artists to be artists with a capitol A. I delighted in watching talents such as Ryan Case, Adam Luckey, Rachel Rogers, and many others grow. Balagula would often also take risks on brand new talent, backstage as well as on stage. Some shows that stuck with me through the years were Neil LaBute’s American Buffalo, Tennessee Williams’ The Two Character Play and Howard Zinn’s Marx in Soho, a one-man show that required no set at all.

Balagula is now part of Lexington’s theater history, as Turner said, but it is important to acknowledge that its era played a pivotal role in the professional development of so many theater artists. What’s more, it elevated the standards of artistry for the entire community. As we look forward to new theater ventures like AthensWest Theatre Company, which just opened a new production of 33 Variations this weekend, and The Lexington Theatre Co., we should be grateful for theaters like Balagula, AGL, and the others that came before for setting the stage for a new era in Lexington theater.

This story was originally published February 14, 2016 at 8:48 AM with the headline "Balagula Theatre may be gone, but its influence will endure."