The disability-affirmative Phamaly Theatre Company, already Denver’s most inherently radical company, has grown even more radical in Ben Raanan’s first full year as artistic director. As in, radically inclusive.

“I could program ‘Winnie the Pooh,’ and it would be inherently radical – because it’s Phamaly,” said Raanan.

This singular, internationally acclaimed theater company has existed since 1989 to create performance opportunities for the disabled. And under Raanan, what was already the most welcoming theater company in Denver has become even more so. Over the past year, Phamaly has opened its doors to a new generation of performers who have infused the company with fresh, raw and often embryonic stage energy. He has created not only unprecedented opportunities for these often excluded artists to grow as performers, but for audiences to learn and grow as humans by their example.

Under Raanan, Phamaly audiences are seeing more nonbinary performers, more actors along the spectrum highway, and more actors who are profoundly disabled. And Raanan has moved them from the background into the spotlight – as in, centerstage and in leading roles, perhaps to a degree not seen since the company’s humble beginnings.

There, in his first role as an actor, was Colorado newcomer Romy Lopez, who lives with visual impairment, playing a small-town Sheriff in Phamaly’s highest-profile production of the year, “The Spitfire Grill.” Phamaly toured that musical about a troubled young woman looking for a new life to Northglenn’s Parsons Theatre, the Lone Tree Arts Center and the Arvada Center before taking it all the way to the 2022 Forward Festival of the Arts in Queens, N.Y.

Talk about opportunity.

There, in the insistently sexy “The Rocky Horror Musical,” was opera-trained singer Jasmine Gonzalez, who has brittle-bone disease, playing Janet from her wheelchair. Playing the nonbinary doc’s perfect creature, meaningfully, was a nonbinary young actor with several neurological disorders (Vin Ernst), donning Rocky’s signature sexy gold-lame booty shorts.

All three were new to Phamaly, and all three, simply by performing as who they are, encouraged each of us to dive into essential, confusing and ultimately cathartic questions around gender, spectrum and disability.

The most provocative Phamaly offering of the year was “Vox Vergere,” which commissioned eight intersectional playwrights to write short plays that spoke to their experiences with love, connectivity and joy within the disabled community. “Intersectionality” describes the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination intersect. The eight resulting plays were not only challenging and enlightening for the audience, they gave the ensemble of eight a life-changing opportunity to dig deeper and more meaningfully as actors than perhaps ever before.

One was Paul Migliorelli, who’s been blind since birth and has had onset hearing loss since age 10 (mitigated by revolutionary cochlear implants in 2007-08). He’s been with Phamaly since 2009, but he’s never been given a task quite like this: He had roles in four of the eight plays, including one character, merely called “Darkness,” who lives inside the head of a person who is Black, poor and disabled.

“Phamaly has been fantastic for the opportunity to extend oneself,” Migliorelli said. “In this one, I was convinced to leave my comfort zone and to give more. I pushed further as an actor than ever before.”

In a world without many opportunities for a profoundly disabled actor, Migliorelli has found in Raanan, he said, “someone with the willingness to let you in.”

When Raanan took the job in August 2021, he told me he does not walk on eggshells. He crushes them. His approach has both fans and detractors, some of whom long for a time when the stated goal for the company was to produce theater that aspires to be considered as equal in artistic achievement to companies like the Arvada Center and Denver Center. At times, they met or exceeded those goals. A number of foundational Phamaly company alums are performing all over the country up to and including Broadway, bringing honor to Phamaly all along the way.

If that’s still the goal, then Raanan, like a certain local NFL franchise, is in a rebuilding phase. But I’m not certain that is the goal right now.

Raanan is doing something even more radical than producing picture-perfect art. He’s bringing the next generation along. He’s changing the narrative on how we talk about everything from disability to gender fluidity. And, most important, he’s flung the doors wide open.

“At Phamaly, we are a people-first organization,” he said. “We specifically look for a variety of opportunities for everyone in our company to grow. We are a company that puts our artists first – and in order to be one of our artists, you only have to say that you want to be.”

One can practically hear the echoing mantra from Phamaly’s boundary-obliterating “The Rocky Horror Musical”:

“Don’t dream it. Be it.”

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 22nd 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 of the best stories from the past year without categories or nominations. *