It was one of those “If you know, you know” moments. But if you know anything about live theater in Fort Collins over the past 50 years, you know this one was kind of special.

The married founders of the venerable OpenStage Theatre & Company turned over the daily operation of the company to Sydney Parks Smith in 2019. There was no big farewell party because, well, Denise and Bruce Freestone never really went away. And that was the plan all along.

OpenStage just last night wrapped its season-opening staging of “The Book of Will,” Lauren Gunderson’s imagined take on what it must have been like to get Shakespeare’s canon collected, published and saved for history after the Bard and several of his closest players started dying off. It has been one of the most produced plays in the country since it was birthed at the Denver Center in 2017.

And in Fort Collins, right there in the thick of a rowdy opening bar scene were a couple o’ knaves bullying a stuttering actor. And the prickly pair who got themselves rightly bounced for their oafishness were none other than Denise and Bruce Freestone. The audience howled when a taverner opined: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

And this was no stunt casting. Bruce soon came back to also play the pivotal role of surly old William Jaggard, the unethical publisher who ultimately makes it possible for Shakespeare’s collection to be preserved. And Denise returned to play Anne Hathaway, the long-suffering Shakespeare widow who at the play’s climax becomes the first to see the world’s first-ever bound version of her husband’s works.

It was the perfect ending to the couple’s 50th year with OpenStage. And the perfect start to their 51st.

“This was a marvelous opportunity to put the founders of our company in a play that is about the absolute importance of carrying stories forward, and what theater means to our society,” said Parks Smith. “For them to be on stage together in such pivotal roles for the first play of our 51st season felt just right.”

This was the first time the founders had performed onstage together since an award-winning production of “August: Osage County” in 2017. But they have remained active since. Bruce directed “Murder on the Orient Express” in 2021. Denise appeared in “Steel Magnolias” in 2019 and will be the production manager (the person who keeps all the technical aspects of the play moving along) in Openstage’s next offering, the blue-collar union drama “Sweat” (Jan. 13-Feb. 10 at Fort Collins’ Lincoln Center).

The Freestones started OpenStage in 1973 when the only other performing-arts groups in Fort Collins were a symphony and a children’s theater. Shows were performed on the grass in local parks before the renegade troupe went legit as the primary producing tenant of the Lincoln Center. Denise said she gave her group the unusual name “OpenStage Theatre & Company” for a reason. “We are an ensemble family of artists,” she said.

Since then, “there have been a lot of struggles, and a lot of battles, and a lot of heartbreak over the years,” Freestone said last year as she was being inducted into the inaugural class of “Living Her Legacy” – a Hall of Fame for monumental women in Fort Collins history.

“It has been a joyful, fulfilling journey – but it has been a hard journey, and it has taken both perseverance and stubbornness to make it this far.”

Both Freestones have some pretty stacked resumes. And what a notch on the old belt to now add, alongside credits like Emperor Joseph II in “Amadeus” and Professor Vivian Bearing in “Wit”: “Drunken Barmen” in “The Book of Will.”

Now into their 70s, neither founder is showing any sign of slowing down.

“We both still have all of our faculties,” Denise told me after the show. “So … what the hell?”

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 23rd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.