The Catamounts Premiere A Town Called Harris, a Ghostly Comic Romp in a Historic Schoolhouse

“We’re operating under the thesis of: what if immersive was fun?” says Colorado playwright Jessica Austgen with a laugh inside a coffee shop in Westminster near the site of her latest immersive work. “Like, what if we played and we had an adventure? Immersive doesn’t always have to be, I don’t know, gut-wrenching and dredging up memories.” 

That guiding idea became the heartbeat of A Town Called Harris, the Catamounts’ newest world premiere, which transforms Westminster’s Historic DeSpain Schoolhouse into a comic haunted mystery. The show, which runs October 23 through November 15, invites audiences into a world that combines small-town history with whimsical immersive theater.

“It is very silly,” says director Adeline Mann. “The tone is somewhere in the realm of a Scooby Doo mystery meets an Agatha Christie mystery, with a little bit of The X Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer thrown in there, so we’re really living in a very specific genre place.”

For the Catamounts, a Boulder-based theater group now entering their fifteenth season of producing “adventurous performance,” A Town Called Harris is a continuation of their tradition of crafting site-specific, Colorado-centric stories. This new production is their seventh collaboration with the City of Westminster Parks, Recreation & Libraries, and the fifth to mine Westminster’s past for theatrical inspiration. But unlike some of their past collaborations, Harris is deliberately playful, a chance to riff on history with a wink and a few ghostly surprises.

“Many historic buildings are, by reports of folks who work there or who have experience there, haunted,” Mann says. “Our play is happening in a historic building in October and November, so in honoring the reality of many real folks experiencing real haunted elements, both in this schoolhouse and in many of Westminster’s historic buildings, we felt that it would be important to have a ghostly element to the Westminster Junior Historical Society’s Show.” 

The premise itself is knowingly silly: the Westminster Junior Historical Society — made up of exactly two students and their reluctant faculty sponsor — attempts to stage a reenactment of the town’s name change from Harris to Westminster. But when the power cuts out, things go awry, and the society’s earnest production spirals into a haunted whodunit.

“We sort of asked ourselves the question, ‘If there were a ghost here in this building, how might they respond to a Junior Historical Society putting on an immersive historical realism reenactment in their domain?’” Mann says. “We thought about how the ghost might interact with the people who are putting on the show and the audience they’re in, and that became the initial inspiration for A Town Called Harris.” 

Mann noted that she and the Catamounts’ artistic director began work on the production in fall 2024. Once they had the idea for the project, the next step was to find the right venue to match their vision.

“We toured a couple of buildings in Westminster,” she says. “We considered the Bowles House because there were a lot more beautiful, stunning, historical relics but it was a much smaller space. All of our conversation just became, ‘What actually can we do in this small of a space?’ The DeSpain Schoolhouse gave us more room to spread our wings, plus it had these incredible historical artifacts already inside. It felt like another character in the show.”

Indeed, the building itself has deeply shaped the production. The Westminster Historical Society maintains portraits of local figures, farming and irrigation displays, and even collections of antique household items. These details are integral to the staging. 

“I got to be in the space before writing it, which has been so nice,” Austgen says. “If we went into a blank warehouse space and we were like, ‘We are going to build all and put all this ephemera,” it would have been way too big of an undertaking. But for us to be in a site-specific place and take advantage of that rather than pretend that we’re not has just been a gift.”

That world is deliberately heightened and comic. The cast, which includes Catamounts company member Jason Maxwell, Shannon Altner, Peter Trinh, Zeah Loren and Gabriel Hannah Smothers, plays exaggerated, high-stakes characters who take their Junior Historical Society duties far more seriously than the audience ever could. 

“A Town Called Harris is like Noises Off or The Play That Goes Wrong, but immersive,” Austgen says. “We see a show start and we are there as part of it. We meet the cast members, and we’re on their side; they’re trying their best, and then things go off the rails when unexpected ghostly happenings occur.”

While comedy is the driving force, the supernatural lurks at the edges. “We hope that the ghostly elements are fun spooky and not horrifying or scary spooky,” Mann says. “I think people will have a fun time getting a little spooked for the Halloween season and I hope they leave with a flavor of curiosity about the history of the place and the history that goes untold.”

For both Austgen and Mann, part of the thrill has been working in the immersive form itself. The Catamounts are now one of the few Colorado companies regularly producing site-specific work, following the Denver Center’s recent decision to dissolve its Off-Center immersive arm.

“It breaks my heart that Off-Center is gone,” Mann says. “I hope that that void can be filled with new ambitious, small projects from companies exploring the edges and bounds of what immersive theater can be.” 

Austgen agrees: “I think Off-Center closing left such a hole. Denver still has a thirst for immersive but the bottom just dropped out of a really big provider of it. So yeah, I hope that folks come get out of the house to experience something new.”

For both creators, the promise of A Town Called Harris isn’t just its ghostly twists or comic mishaps, but the chance to gather people in a shared, playful space. The show asks audiences to lean into curiosity, camaraderie and the thrill of discovering a story together.

“I want people to feel excited going in and then leave thinking about the history of our community as well as the present community that we have,” Austgen says. “This really is about groups of people coming together for an ethereal immersive experience in a historic setting.”

A Town Called Harris runs Thursday, October 23, through Saturday, November 15, at the Historic DeSpain Schoolhouse, 7200 Lowell Boulevard, Westminster. Tickets are $30 general admission; $20 for students and educators. Learn more at thecatamounts.org.