When Mark Ragan stepped in to extend the life of the Butterfly Effect Theatre of Colorado in March 2023, he introduced a new economic model that would quickly ripple out to the benefit of neighboring arts organizations like, well, the Butterfly Effect. 

Ironically, the first thing Ragan and creative partner Jessica Robblee did was revert the name back to what the company had been lovingly known for 17 years: The Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company. Still BETC. Still called “Betsy,” for short. But, bye-bye butterfly.

This new financial approach can only be called “Raganomics.”

First, you have to know that Ragan is an ebullient man and a wildly successful businessman who hides his innermost feelings like a skywriter.

To put it simply: Dude loves theater and theatermakers. So much so, he says: “That could be written on my gravestone. 

“I really adore artists. I put them on a pedestal. I admire them. I try to be like them,” said Ragan, BETC’s managing director. “But in our society, it’s nearly impossible to make it as an artist. I think artists are simply not given the support that they deserve, and that obviously starts with money.”

Anyone who runs any arts organization anywhere is on the constant lookout for that elusive, big-time benefactor who can solve all your financial challenges with one fat check. Almost never does that fat-checker also turn out to be your company’s primary administrator. That would be like part-owner Condoleezza Rice playing quarterback for the Denver Broncos.

And in no universe does that benefactor portion out that wealth to neighboring (some might say competing) nonprofit arts organizations. That. Just. Never. Happens.

But Ragan is that unicorn. No, that does not go far enough. He’s that rainbow-colored leprechaun with a unicorn horn and a pot of gold – that he shares freely.

Regan gave away about $1 million of his own money to local arts organizations in 2024. In 2025, he estimates that number will grow to $1.3 million. That starts with about $450,000 toward BETC’s $1.2 million budget for last season. He also gave the Boulder Ballet $100,000, and he is now creating a scholarship there for 50 underprivileged youth.

But here’s the mind-blowing (and completely unprecedented) part: He’s also made BETC, itself a small nonprofit theater company, the primary season sponsor of both the much bigger Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder ($25,000), and the Miners Alley Playhouse in Golden ($30,000). He’s also supporting Boulder’s Dairy Arts Center ($30,000), which hosts many of BETC’s shows, and he’s just decided to underwrite Local Theater Company of Boulder’s upcoming world-premiere production of a play called “Chasing Breadcrumbs” for $10,000. He’s given similar amounts this year to Boulder’s The Catamounts, Stories on Stage, the Boulder Philharmonic and Tara School for the Performing Arts.

“I’m really pleased with all of that because it kind of continues my mission of trying to get these arts organizations in Boulder to work together,” said Ragan, who is quick to point out that this is his money, not BETC’s. So, he is careful to say that these gifts are from Ragan “on behalf of Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company.”

When Ragan first called Colorado Shakespeare Festival Producing Artistic Director Timothy Orr to say he’d like BETC to be his premier 2024 season sponsor, Orr’s first thought was, “He’s nuts,” he said. “And then immediately, I thought, ‘Oh, damn … that is so smart.’”

To Ragan, this would be an act of philanthropy, sure. An example of community-building, no doubt. A nice thing to do, certainly. But he also saw it as Marketing 101 for BETC, given that the festival is a summer-only company and BETC performs year-round, giving Boulder-area festival theatergoers somewhere else to go for an off-season fix.

“We truly couldn’t do what we do without his support and the support of BETC as a season sponsor,” said Miners Alley Producing Artistic Director Len Matheo. “Mark walks the walk, and he truly cares about all of the Colorado theater community.”

Meanwhile Robblee, the company’s artistic director, is primarily focused on programming, and she has been spinning those creative plates nonstop. In 2024, BETC staged five plays, including “An Enemy of the People” – an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic written by Ragan and directed by Robblee that was just honored by the Denver Gazette as one of the high-impact plays of the Colorado theater year.

Robblee also performed a (mostly) one-woman play and directed another, culminating this month with her own adaptation of “Little Women” to end the year.

But the creative highlight of BETC’s year was its new performance model it calls “the two-city stop,” which has vastly extended the life of every BETC creative offering. Now, instead of choosing one venue in Boulder or Denver for its productions, BETC now routinely stages most every show in both cities. And sometimes in vastly different venues, which poses additional creative challenges and opportunities for its performers and designers alike.

Audiences are responding. At a time when most other companies are struggling to solve how to get fannies fully back from the pandemic, BETC essentially sold out the full run of “An Enemy of the People” before it opened at either the Savoy Denver or the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder. “Little Women” was similarly popular.

Next up: The Michael Hollinger comedy “Hope & Gravity” plays Jan. 23-Feb. 16 at the Savoy Denver, then Feb. 21-23 at Boulder’s Nomad Playhouse.

Ragan is particularly proud that over the course of the year, BETC employed about 80 artists – and paid them well – a $600 minimum for a four-show week –  which makes him giddy.

For those reasons and more, The Denver Gazette has today named Ragan and Robblee Colorado’s 2024 Theatre Persons of the Year, an annual honor that dates back to 2002.

Ragan would like to say that this most remarkable of years was part of some vast, eternal plan but … no. “We’re so busy doing what we’re doing that I’m not sure our vision is more than a few feet ahead of us,” Ragan said.

Where did he come from?

Talking with Mark Ragan is a little like studying an endangered species. So I turned to Robblee and asked: Who is this unicorn, really?

“I can’t wait to hear this,” Ragan said with a laugh.

The two were cast to perform together in a 2021 Colorado Shakes production of “The Odyssey.” They were backstage chatting and snacking when Ragan, to that point a stranger to Robblee, and himself a 15-year journalist in a previous life, sought with a reporter’s curiosity to know Robblee’s story.

She told him about her many creative efforts over the years to develop children’s theater programs in Denver. How she garnered crowds and adoration from audiences and critics. But not so much money.

“I was telling Mark how much fundraising all-ages theater really required, and how hard I had struggled with that part, and how I just needed to take a break from asking my friends and family for money.”

Then Ragan said the six words that changed the direction of Robblee’s professional life:

“Next time, just come to me.” He wasn’t kidding.

“I was floored,” said Robblee, who was soon to learn that the passion Ragan has for theater, ballet and music – “for the catharsis, and the excitement and the joy and the connection that it gives people” – is genuine. “I don’t know if I know anyone who understands the value of that and invests in it like Mark Ragan does,” she said.

“He’s like a fish in water. He just loves it.”

But the biggest revelation into Ragan’s true character did not come out of this interview. That happened a few weeks before, when Ragan randomly noticed on social media that an actor who is considered part of BETC’s 22-member artist ensemble – a largely symbolic designation – had just been through a lumpectomy, and the Denver Actors Fund had paid off more than $8,000 of her medical expenses. He felt spontaneously compelled to replenish the nonprofit’s coffers with a $10,000 donation in the actor’s name. When he found out another former BETC artist is on a cancer journey, he spontaneously sent the family $5,000. Ragan does that a lot, Robblee said – act in the moment, his heart not on his sleeve but rather the onesie covering his entire body.

Ragan can afford to make such grand gestures because his company, he said, “is going to be doing roughly $23 million this year.”

Ragan Communications was a family business founded in 1986 and run by Mark’s father until Lawrence Ragan was diagnosed with ALS in 1993. Mark has since grown the company – which essentially serves the needs of communications and P.R. professionals – into the largest of its kind in North America.

“So as long as my company continues to do well,” Ragan said, “then I can continue to increase my contribution to the arts.”

They’re an odd couple, Ragan and Robblee, separated in age by more than two decades but both childlike in their playful ways. “I think it works because we’re actually polar opposite people,” Ragan said. “Jess is kind and charitable and sweet and wonderful and intelligent and the hardest worker I know.

“But if I have one gift, it’s that I know intuitively how to hire people. I was so impressed by a server at a coffee shop that I hired her on the spot to be one of our directors of customer service. I hired a young kid out of college to be a reporter for our daily PR news site 10 minutes into the interview. I had this feeling about him, and today he is the executive editor of Esquire. Jess is another prime example of this.”

Robblee, for her part, says, “No one would’ve hired me to be the artistic director at BETC but Mark Ragan. I had zero experience.” But Ragan found her to be capable nonetheless.

“When I observed Jess working at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, I thought, ‘Gosh, there’s nobody more dedicated, nobody who works harder, nobody who plays around less backstage,’” Ragan said. “I thought, ‘This is the person I want as a partner.’”

They started Clover and Bee Productions two years ago, about a blink of an eye before married BETC co-founders Stephen Weitz and Rebecca Remaly decided to wind down the company after 17 successful years. Instead, they turned it over to Ragan and Robblee.

“Eighteen months later, I am still saying every day that hiring Jess was one of the greatest decisions I ever made, because Jess is like five employees in one,” said Ragan, citing both her organizational and “unbelievable” artistic skills. “So, she can direct a play. She can star in a play and win awards for it. Meanwhile, she can make a budget and organize an entire season of actors. Really, my only job is to back her up with whatever she needs.

“That’s because I am ultimately an artistic entrepreneur. And I just happen to be lucky because I’m an artistic entrepreneur with financial resources.”

Robblee calls you-know-what on that. Ragan, she said, is a playwright, as he showed with his masterful adaptation of “An Enemy of the People.” “What Mark does is expand possibilities of thinking and creativity,” she said. 

BETC had both a strong and innovative creative year. But what made its co-leaders the 2024 Colorado Theater Persons of the Year was their decision to proactively help so many other companies with razor-thin financial margins.

For Ragan, the strategy is simple: “The world needs theater more than ever,” he said.

“When I sit in the theater and I watch ‘Little Women,’ and all around me, kids are giggling and later others are sobbing, I’m thinking, ‘This is what’s missing from our world today. We increasingly don’t have this. We have a lot of dopamine addiction that comes from algorithms produced by TikTok and Facebook. We don’t have good, healthy connections with our fellow humans.’

“But then you look around a theater and there’s that stunned silence as people see their humanity on stage being portrayed. You can see that revelation in their eyes. The connection with their fellow human beings. I truly believe theater is really the healthiest thing you can do for yourself. There’s nothing healthier than sensing the empathy between humans sitting in a dark theater.

“And we wonder, ‘Do we really want to live in a world where that doesn’t happen?’ To me, that question is the driving force behind everything we do with BETC. We’ve got to keep this art form alive. We can’t just sit in our basements watching Netflix.”

Robblee, likewise, thinks “we humans really need each other,” she said. “And I think theater gives us to each other in a lot of different ways.”

Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company/2024 

• “What the Constitution Means to Me,” in Denver and Boulder
• “The King Penny Radio Hour,” in Denver and elsewhere
• “Grounded” in Boulder
• “An Enemy of the People,” in Denver and Boulder 
• “The Ballot of Paola Aguilar,” in Boulder 
• “Little Women,” in Boulder  

Coming up: 

• “Hope and Gravity” by Michael Hollinger, Jan. 23-Feb. 16 at the Savoy Denver 
• “Hope and Gravity,” Feb. 21-23 at the Nomad Playhouse, Boulder 
• “The White Chip” by Sean Daniels April 10-May 4 in Boulder

Jessica Robblee, Producing Artistic Director/2024  

• Heidi in “What the Constitution Means to Me,” BETC, in Denver and Boulder 
• Margaret Page in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Colorado Shakespeare Festival
• Ross in “Macbeth,” Colorado Shakespeare Festival
• Greene in “Arden of Faversham,” Colorado Shakespeare Festival
• Directed “An Enemy of the People,” BETC, in Denver and Boulder 
• Adapted and Directed “Little Women,” BETC, in Boulder

Colorado Theater Person of the Year/History

• 2024: Mark Ragan and Jessica Robblee, Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company
• 2023: Kenny Moten, director
• 2022: Jada Suzanne Dixon, Curious Theatre Company Artistic Director
• 2021: Everyone who kept a Colorado theater company afloat
• 2020: No designation given
• 2019: Bobby LeFebre, playwright, slam poet, actor and activist
• 2018: Jessica Austgen, playwright, actor and improviser
• 2017: Regan Linton, Phamaly Theatre Company artistic director
• 2016: Billie McBride, actor and director
• 2015: Donald R. Seawell, Denver Center for the Performing Arts founder
• 2014: Steve Wilson, Phamaly Theatre Company and Mizel Center for Arts and Culture
• 2013: Shelly Bordas, Actor, teacher, director and cancer warrior
• 2012: Stephen Weitz, Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company co-founder 2011: Maurice LaMee, Creede Repertory Theatre artistic director
• 2010: Anthony Garcia: Su Teatro artistic director
• 2009: Kathleen M. Brady, DCPA Theatre Company actor
• 2008: Wendy Ishii, Bas Bleu Theatre co-founder
• 2007: Ed Baierlein: Germinal Stage-Denver founder
• 2006: Bonnie Metzgar, Curious Theatre associate artistic director
• 2005: Chip Walton, Curious Theatre founder and artistic director
• 2004: Michael R. Duran, actor, set designer, director and playwright
• 2003: Nagle Jackson, DCPA Theatre Company director and playwright
• 2002: Chris Tabb: Actor and director

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 24th 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.