Kim Bent and Kathleen Keenan sit on the steps in front of Montpelier’s City Hall Arts Center. Photo: PHOTO BY STEFAN HARD

By Patrick Timothy Mullikin

Hunkered down on a well-worn sofa in the tiny Green Room backstage at Montpelier's Lost Nation Theater, Kim Bent, founding artistic director, is recovering from a bout with pneumonia. He's a bit subdued today as he sucks on throat lozenges. But he still has plenty to say about the 30-year-old theater. So does his wife and producing artistic director, Kathleen Keenan, sitting next to him.

"Lost nation is an area near where I grew up. There are lost nations all over the country. They are always rural. Their boundaries are nebulous. Sometimes they are on the map; sometimes they're not. I wanted to come up with a theater that was based here, one that would be relevant to the area," he says.

In 1997, Bent founded Lost Nation Theater in Bristol. Next year the organization celebrates its 20th anniversary at Montpelier City Hall.

"There are people that don't know that there is a theater on the second floor of City Hall in downtown Montpelier, a professional theater in Montpelier," Keenan says, amazed at such a notion. "On the other hand, some people call City Hall and ask, 'What's going on? Are you a city hall, or are you a theater?'" she says with a wild laugh.

Indeed, many Montpelier residents are baffled about the theater's status in this community of 8,000.

Lost Nation Theater is their passion, their source of livelihood, and Bent and Keenan are familiar faces in downtown Montpelier — he, usually dressed in black ("A lot of theater people wear black so that you don't show up backstage") and she often in purple ("Purple is a hereditary color in my family, our signature color").

Kim, 59, who grew up in Bethel, says he became interested in the theater as way of overcoming his shyness. His original plan was to study to become an English teacher at the University of Vermont.

He says he was always interested in literature. "I managed to stay away from the theater group most of my freshman year, but then I got involved, and it was all downhill," he says, deadpan.

He said his first role was the hired man in "Death of the Hired Man," a dramatization of the Robert Frost poem.

Bent says that while his mother acted a little in school and an aunt did some theater work in Ohio, none of his three siblings was bitten by the acting bug. Bent was, however, and once bitten, the theater became his life.

After UVM, he headed west, and for four years was a member of the Iowa Theater Lab in Iowa City. He also spent time in the San Francisco Bay area, where he became a member of the Blake Street Hawkeyes – whose alumni include Whoopie Goldberg.

He eventually landed in graduate school in Long Island University, where he met Kathleen.

Kathleen, a 44-year-old New Yorker, says she grew up in a large Irish family that loved music and singing, especially jazz and pop favorites.

In high school she played bass and guitar in a basement band, doing Beatles and Stones covers. Later, at Long Island University, she started writing incidental music for theater, which is how she met Bent.

"I had wanted to do a dramatic treatment of an Edward Dorn poem called 'Gunslinger' as part of my graduate work," Bent recalls.

Keenan created musical themes for about half a dozen characters for Bent. During this time she was also playing gigs at night while holding a day job as a teller at Chemical Bank in Huntington, N.Y.

In 1985, the two moved to Montpelier and in 1988 they married.

As a business partner, she helped Bent with Lost Nation Theater's transformation from touring group to resident professional theater at city hall. As a touring group from its founding through the late eighties, says Bent, Lost Nation Theater chose to do plays that aimed at social and cultural relevance, dealing with such subjects as the Vietnam War and the then-emerging AIDS crisis.

City Hall became available after another group, the Atlantic Theater Company, moved to Burlington.

During Lost Nation Theater's first season at City Hall, Keenan remembers thinking: "Damn we only need 40 people a night to break even. How (hard) could that be? Well 18 people a night later, I found out we were in trouble. We took out personal loans. I still had musical gigs lined up, and money from those gigs went to the theater. It was a little crazy."

During the past two decades, the theater has had its ups and downs financially: a general malaise after 9/11, and in 2004, cuts in federal funding for the arts. But, says Bent, a self-described optimist, Lost Nation Theater is here to stay.

He credits Lost Nation Theater's longevity to its programming.

"We're committed to doing a diverse program, a six-play program annually. Of those six productions we know the fall production's going to be a Shakespeare. Another production is probably going to be a new play of some sort — even a world premiere — one is going to be a drama, one more in a comic vein, and one of these is going to be a musical. Each season at Lost Nation Theater you're going to get that variety," he says.

Bent and Keenan are equally optimistic about the future of theater in Vermont.

When Lost Nation Theater opened its doors in 1989, it was the only summer theater in the area.

Today there are at least four other groups between Montpelier and Burlington.

"If it were just our audience spread among those other groups, nobody would be making it, and yet everybody is finding a way to make it," says Bent.



Patrick Timothy Mullikin, an editor at The Times Argus, writes regularly for Vermont Sunday Magazine.