Words that are often used to describe Neil Truglio’s work as the artistic director of Lakewood’s Benchmark Theatre are both a marketing director’s dream … and nightmare:

“Fearless,” “audacious,” “visceral” and “unflinching,” live right alongside “brutal,” “harrowing,” “unflinching” and even at times “unwatchable.”

And that was before tonight’s opening performance of “Blasted,” an unapologetically controversial and confrontational 1995 play by Sarah Kane that no previous Colorado theater company has touched with a pole 5 feet and 28 years long.

Since coming to the small boutique theater in Lakewood’s 40West Arts District in 2019, Truglio has taken on Orwellian dystopia, the Jan. 6 insurrection, COVID and the 1969 Stonewall riots. (“1984” famously features a grisly scene with a man having his caged face eaten by a rat as punishment for thought crimes.)

His greatest creative success was a True West Award-winning devised piece called “Elephant.” That was an immediate response to the George Floyd murder that reimagined Bernard Pomerance’s classic play “The Elephant Man” with the hideously deformed carnival freak John Merrick recast as the collective contemporary American Black man. Since company co-founder Haley Johnson named Truglio artistic director in 2021, Benchmark has additionally taken on gay conversion and youth gun violence under other directors.

Two words Truglio would use to describe all those stories are “urgent” and “immediate.” And they have helped to fill a cavernous hole in our local theater ecology. They’ve given us meaningful, topical stories and a safe space to explore dangerous and intensely polarizing issues of the day in real time. And they have set Benchmark far apart at a time when most of Colorado’s 80 or so theater companies are largely leaning on friendly and familiar material in the uphill and largely unattainable climb back to pre-pandemic attendance numbers.

Still, this is difficult, aggressive theater that can be hard to sell, and it’s a creative strategy that makes Benchmark’s chances of long-term success a long shot at best. But that’s just fine with Truglio.

“We have to have a reason to exist – and if we’re doing the same thing as everyone else, then we don’t have one,” said Truglio. “That’s why, as a storyteller in this town, my first question is always: ‘OK, so what isn’t being done anywhere else?’”

While live theater, as an art form, has often been seen as necessarily slow to react to rapidly changing current events, Truglio has been nimble to the point of dizzying.

Last year, “Our American Cousin: A Nation Divided” assaulted audiences with a relentless rewind through events that led to the desecration of the U.S. Capitol. Truglio and his team conceived, researched and developed an entire original play that opened on Jan. 6, 2022 – one year to the day after the rebellion. That’s unheard of. New plays at the Denver Center are often developed for three years before they are ever fully staged. Broadway musicals typically take eight years to develop.

Truglio will have none of that.

“If something happened today in the news, we believe we can be working on that play the next day,” Truglio said, “and we can be opening a play about it in six weeks.”

No one else runs a theater that way. But even though Benchmark’s edgy performances sometimes attract crowds in the single digits, Truglio thinks the strategy will not only work – it already is. In part because Benchmark is a tiny little theater with just 60 seats and limited risk.

“I’m not trying to get 500 audience members in my venue every night,” Truglio said, “and that’s what allows us to pursue more niche storytelling opportunities.”

“Stonewall” was the best-selling show in Benchmark’s seven-year history – “and second was ‘1984,’” Truglio said. “So we’re doing something right. Are we selling out everything? No. But the shows that you could say have been the most aggressive have actually been our best sellers.”

Truglio’s background as a local filmmaker infuses his original stage pieces with an uncommon kinetic live energy and the kind of sound and visual effects you more often see at the movies. If that’s unsettling to traditional theatergoers, that’s OK, because, frankly, that’s not the audience he’s going after.

“There is one thing I know for sure – and that’s if we don’t find new audiences for live theater and cultivate them, then there won’t be live theater in 10 years,” Truglio said. “But I believe there is an audience for this kind of theater at Benchmark. If people will go to R-rated movies and sell them out, then R-rated plays have an audience, too. So I’m not trying to program for the audience we already have. I’m trying to program for the audience we don’t have yet.”

And who are those people? “I want theater audiences who consider themselves brave and ready for a challenge,” Truglio said. “I want plays that are braver than most of the plays that are out there. I also want people who would not historically consider themselves theater audiences. Do you like ‘Game of Thrones’? Well, this is the live equivalent. People write plays like that, too.”

Which leads us to “Blasted.”

“And why has no one in Denver staged “Blasted’ since it was written in 1995?” Truglio said. “What is everyone so afraid of?”

I asked Truglio to answer his own question.

“I’ll tell you why: Fear and risk,” he said. “We’ve got scared directors. We’ve got scared designers. We’ve got scared actors. We are scared of our own audiences. And that means audiences are dictating more of what should be on stage than we are. The Denver Center can’t afford a bomb, and the Arvada Center can’t afford a bomb, so they can’t take that risk. Not to say that Benchmark can afford a bomb, but we’re not afraid to put this kind of art on the stage. I think ‘Blasted’ has frightened theatermakers away for fear of how an audience might react.”

Well maybe that’s because “Blasted,” inspired by the atrocities of the Yugoslav wars, offers a brutal vision of a war-torn society viewed through a heightened series of atrocious, violent acts. As Stefan might say on “Saturday Night Live,” it’s got everything: Violence, misogyny, frottage (I had to look that one up), suicide, sexual assault, full nudity, rape, torture and … well, let’s just say not all eyes are safe. The script contains the trifecta of offensive language: “It is ableist. It is racist, it is homophobic,” Truglio said. If you are the kind of theatergoer who depends on a  trigger warning of any kind – this is not the play for you.

So why are we doing this again?

Because, Truglio says, “Blasted” has something important to say about our world in 1995 and 2023. About Yugoslavia. About Israel. About Palestine. About man’s immortal inhumanity to man.

“‘Blasted’ is about the human cost of war,” Truglio said. “Some of those wars are the ones we’re watching on TV, and some of those wars are the invisible kind we don’t even know are happening.”

“Blasted” is risky. It is bold. But is this kind of theater economically sustainable for a little company like Benchmark?

“We’ll see,” Truglio said. “I believe so.”

How are you going to make it work?

“One ticket sale at a time.”

And is there a clear roadmap for success?

“No. But if we aren’t paving that road, then we’re just riding coattails.”

Neil Truglio/At Benchmark Theatre

Titles directed (and some devised) by Neil Truglio:

• 2019: “1984,” a scripted adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian novel about living under totalitarian rule

• 2021: “Elephant,” a world-premiere devised work adapting Bernard Pomerance’s “The Elephant Man” as an immediate response to George Floyd reimagining the deformed John Merrick as the modern American Black man

• 2022: “Our American Cousin”: A devised piece using found text to recap events leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection

• 2022: “The COVID Wife,” an original play by Suzanne Nepi about her husband’s near-death in the early days of the pandemic

• 2023: “Stonewall”: A devised piece that told the true story of the 1969 New York City riots that sparked the LGBTQ civil-rights movement

• Through Nov. 11:  “Blasted,”  by Sarah Kane