Kent Thompson, you will have seriously mismatched shoes to fill this week when you become the Denver Center Theatre Company’s first new artistic director in 21 years. Think of one as a size 5, the other roughly the size of the Denver Performing Arts Complex.
Compared with your enigmatic and aloof predecessor, Donovan Marley, you should find charming the socks off Denverites to be as easy as arranging a marriage between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.
But in your zeal to put Denver back on the national theater map, know that the walk down the aisle toward a lengthy creative honeymoon is lined with thorns. You are replacing a man who brought Denver 245 productions, 75 of them world premieres, and the 1998 Tony Award as the nation’s best regional theater company. You must respect that legacy.
But Marley was a phantom who was perturbed by the job’s public and fiduciary responsibilities. He was just a guy who wanted to make art, not hobnob with benefactors. That made him beloved by the insulated and fiercely loyal company he meticulously built and ferociously protected over 21 years, but it also made him unknown and therefore underappreciated by the people of Denver.
You are a smooth operator who will shake every hand, kiss every baby and attend every fundraiser – and like it. Onstage, there is little wrong you can do in reinvigorating a company that has grown financially strapped, artistically staid and somewhat oblivious to female and minority voices. Your first season wisely includes a variety of playwrights – four women, two blacks and one Hispanic.
But if you move too quickly – either in sweeping out key members of the resident company Marley built into stars their fans adore, or if you become too adventurous, too fast – you might scare away more subscribers than you win.
You are essentially inheriting an organization that is greatly respected but not universally adored by its community. That’s because the material here often has lacked a local connection to its audience. A theater company’s health is based on two things: its ability to put butts in the seats, and its ability to put well-executed, challenging pieces onstage that matter to the people seeing them.
Here are 10 pieces of advice that might assist you in finding your way to center stage in the Colorado theater community, and help Denver’s biggest theater company win the hearts and minds of its audiences:
1. It’s a risky business: Take a stand and test the limits of your community’s desire to be thoughtfully provoked. You have promised, and so are now expected, to bring in America’s most cutting-edge new voices. This will thrill some and frighten others who believe that “contemporary” has become synonymous with cruel and nasty. Don’t be dissuaded. Entrust your stages to rotating artists from all the ethnic, political and sexual communities that reflect our state and nation. In Colorado that means not only Hispanic voices but rural voices.
“Always remember,” advised Caridad Svich, the playwright who encouraged you to schedule José Cruz González’s “September Shoes” in your first season, “if you encourage the McTheatre phenomenon, it only encourages the deadening of our national theater and American character.”
2. What, then, of classics and comedies? They always will have their place, and your first season especially reflects the need for smart, topical comedies such as “Jesus Hates Me” and “After Ashley.” Hit ’em with the hard stuff, yes, but allow people out of the dark and into the sunlight as well. Never fall into a formula that requires a certain number of “types” of shows, such as classics or Shakespeares, each year. You cannot be all things to all people all the time. Don’t try to be.
3. Open up your casting: The bad part of maintaining a resident acting company is that the Denver Center has been hermetically sealed for 20 years. That has kept good, local actors out while nationally recruited actors have been signed for entire seasons and are at times badly miscast. New blood is good, but resist the urge to automatically import when you see a hole.
4. Death to a salesman: The marketing department did flips when you said you would attend every Denver Center fundraiser for the next year. The actors cheered when you scheduled an unexpected 11th play and promised you’d go out and raise the money yourself if necessary. But you must be vigilant against earning the reputation of being more of a raiser of funds than a director of plays.
Guard against your noble but ancillary responsibilities from compromising your primary duties. In your first year, your sole focus should be on laying the organizational and creative foundation of your new company. Nothing should distract you from establishing your artistic credibility. Revenue will flow from that.
5. That’s the ticket. That said, make a point to go out and see other local theater companies; you will foster goodwill and you might just discover an actor you’ll want to put on your stage one day. And don’t limit your choices to the biggies such as Curious and the Arvada Center. Discover Paragon, Buntport, Su Teatro and Bas Bleu. And keep in mind many of our best actors work at our dinner theaters.
Thankfully, we seem long past the days when isolationist and elitist attitudes ruled the Denver Center. Showing an interest in the work done by others, and making an effort to encourage local talent whenever possible, can take you a very long way.
6. Go into business together: Colorado theater companies staged 27 original world premieres in 2004, many by local playwrights. Seek them out. If you happen to see a play at a small theater in town that you like, bring it to your audience, with the small theater company as a co-producer. Be a leader, not a separate institution.
7. What’s true for the little theater is true for you too: Your buildings should always be open, even when they’re dark. Find a use for the intimate Jones Theatre, which you sadly will leave empty your first season. Invite local artists to host salons and to moderate panels. Give the community co-ownership in your dream.
8. Careful with those beloved stars. Readers were livid to learn that you have no place for longtime favorite Annette Helde, but we understand other veterans such as John Hutton, Jamie Horton and Kathleen Brady will be back. So your new company will be a blend of old and new faces, giving you the opportunity to make all of them the collective face of the new DCTC – not only onstage but at the grocery store, at the mall and at sporting events. People who interact with actors as their neighbors are more likely to come to the theater to see them perform.
9. Resist the urge to cast within the family. Your wife, Kathleen McCall, is an experienced and talented Broadway actress who worked beside you for years at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. So everyone here naturally wants to know just how large a role she will play within your company here. It stands to reason McCall will star in “Jesus Hates Me,” and that call is yours to make.
But in what should be a glorious inaugural season for you, why open yourself up to even the slightest possible suggestion of favoritism? Fair or not, it’s cleaner if you encouraged her to instead establish her own identity and professional credibility with a production or two for another theater company here before her highly anticipated debut on a Denver Center stage.
10. Let new-play development fly: Hiring Bruce K. Sevy back to head your new-works department was brilliant, and your goal to present a festival that might one day rival the Humana Festival of New American Plays is valiant and even doable, if only because Denver is more centrally located and offers more one-way flights from both coasts than does Louisville, Ky.
But an ideal DCTC would become an incubator for all kinds of new works, even those that are interdisciplinary, uncategorizable, foreign language and have no real commercial potential. Yes, let Sevy seek out the next great American play, but also allow him to create new models for making and presenting new works independent of their potential to be put on a mainstage season. Let him play with methodologies and visions from other countries, and one day he might just come back with material that works for a wider audience.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
