Love’s Labors Continued

Lately it seems San Marcos is experiencing a comforting cultural resurgence. Some of our well-loved local treasures have made their return. Sundance Records, for example, recently made a comeback as Sundance Record Lagoon. Then on Wednesday, Valentino’s Pizza reopened.

Now, San Marcos also boasts Broke Thespians Theatre Company, its very own nonprofit community theater troupe.

“It really started like, ‘We want to do this show. How many friends can we get to join us?’” said Mitchell Oden, one of the three co-founders of Broke Thespians. “No one seems to be doing it, and we want to do it.”

Oden, along with fellow co-founders Nate Nelson and Tommie Jackson, met during a Shakespeare Ensemble class they took together at Texas State University. “It was a brand new class where you put on a Shakespeare show, but all the props, costumes and set pieces had to fit into this big old trunk,” Oden explained. “Then you’d go around to different libraries and public schools and perform Shakespeare.

The play they chose was Love’s Labour's Lost, a comedy in which Nelson — described affectionately by Jackson and Oden as a “Shakespeare Superfan” — played King Ferdinand.

As excitement for the project grew, Oden and Nelson began to realize they could pull this off.

“We started talking through it and casting people who were in the class with us,” Oden said, which is how Jackson — now the theater arts teacher at San Marcos High School — came on board.

“It wasn’t a theater yet,” Jackson said. “It was two friends starting a thing. Nate said, ‘I need a dude to play a part. I was like, ‘Okay, I guess.’ When I got there, I saw that this was trial and error. We were learning how to do things. But the great thing about Nate and Mitchell is that they took that feedback, and it’s started to get incorporated. Now we’re going the next step.”

That next step was to start the Broke Thespians Theatre Company, which officially opened in 2019, right before the pandemic hit. “We did a couple things during 2020,” Jackson said. “We did smaller productions. We had some streamed shows. We were active, just quietly and tiny.”

The Broke Thespians channeled their quarantine energy into obtaining status as a nonprofit organization and began the process of grant writing in order to fund future productions, the largest of which was their outdoor summer musical,The Wizard of Oz.

This show, supported in part by The Price Center and the San Marcos Arts Commission, was a labor of love three years in the making. With a cast from all around the Hill Country, and Campbell Duncan, the show’s director, who made the commute all the way from Leander to participate, the show was a vivid and colorful musical extravaganza enjoyed by goodsized crowds who braved the July heat wave just to see the show.

“This has been an amazing experience,” Jackson said, halfway through The Wizard of Oz run.

“And probably the most stressful,” Oden and Jackson said at the same time

Oden, who is starting his first year as a theater teacher at Jim Barnes Middle School in Seguin, suffered heat stroke during rehearsals, but as they say in the theater, “The show must go on.”

“It’s been a work in progress since the beginning,” Oden said. “This has been a huge learning year.”

“For next year, I’m very excited,” Jackson said, already turning the company’s sights to the shows that lay ahead.

The Broke Thespians have two more productions remaining for 2022: White by James Ijames, and Murder’s In the Heir, by Billy St. John, which they hope to open as murder mystery dinner theater.

Currently, the Broke Thespians put on most of their productions at the Price Center, to whom they express their gratitude for their constant support. That being said, the founders of the Broke Thespians have one big item on the theater company wishlist.

“A building,” Jackson and Oden said, once again in unison.

“We talk about this every day,” Oden said.

“There are so many empty buildings in this town. There are so many empty warehouse spaces. They're all around, right? But they’re so expensive. We need a donor who supports what we’re trying to do by making community theater. We need someone who can help us pay rent. Just to have somewhere we can call our home space. Nothing fancy. A big open room. But that’s why we’re getting the word out. We don’t have one of those spaces yet.”

With the acquisition of a home base, Oden and Jackson envision using it as rehearsal space for local musicians, as a theater camp for elementary and high school students, as well as a place for sharing quality theater with the community. Because, after all, there is no place like home.

“It would provide more support for the arts in this town,” Jackson said. “Lockhart has the Gaslight. New Braunfels has three theaters. Wimberley has two. We’re right in the middle of all that. We want to really harness the people who want to make this happen.”

With the success of The Wizard of Oz under their belt and upcoming shows to look forward to, the founders of The Broke Thespian Theatre Company will continue to work to realize their dreams, one show at a time.