Westcliffe – Pastor Wayne Riddering, who lives in this small town with 25 churches and only two bars, is “just glad it’s not the other way around.”
His values are shared by many in this small ranching and farming community west of Pueblo where locals like to say they live an hour from anywhere, encompassing everything from big-city crime to cellphone service.
A town of fewer than 1,000 – where you can’t buy the new Harry Potter book because the nearest bookstore is 60 miles away – seems an unlikely home to a budding performing-arts center that hosts films and nine live plays a year. But that unusual coexistence of art and small-town social conservatism also makes for a collision of values, beliefs and neighborliness that has become evident in a struggle within the local theater company.
The tempest revolves around the company’s New Rocky Mountain Voices playwriting competition. For five years, the Westcliffe Players have chosen up to three short plays that are then performed. But this year, founder Anne Relph is refusing to stage one of the three winners chosen by her resident director, Chris Tabb.
“What We Don’t Know” was written by Tracy Shaffer Witherspoon, a Denver playwright who spent two summers working for the Westcliffe Players. It concerns a young man who returns to his small hometown to introduce his Spanish-speaking wife to a family that freely utters casual conversational epithets about blacks, gays, Latinos and others. Eventually a Ku Klux Klan robe is discovered in the closet.
Play called mean-spirited
While the town in the play is not specified, it hit Relph as far too close to home.
“I think the play is mean- spirited in the way that it pokes fun at the mores of small- town people, and I just didn’t feel its themes were appropriate for Westcliffe,” Relph said.
But Relph went ahead and awarded Witherspoon the competition’s $200 prize, in effect validating the artistic value of the work and then censoring it.
It was not the first time art and small-town values have clashed in this community.
Two years ago, a planned weekend screening of a Harry Potter film prompted letters of protest from several local religious leaders, including Riddering on behalf of his Hope Lutheran Church, at 135 the oldest Lutheran congregation in Colorado. The theater’s regular projectionist even refused to thread the film because of its positive depiction of witchcraft, sending Relph scrambling for a replacement.
“Conservative Christian”
In a town with one church for every 40 residents ranging from Baptist to Jehovah’s Witness to Latter-day Saints, one might expect a community fragmented within its small-town commonalities.
“But we have the unity of the basic core beliefs,” Riddering said. That means morality, decency, respect – and Christ. There is no mosque or synagogue here.
“Our community is exceedingly conservative Christian,” said Westcliffe Players board member Don Bishop. “So we have to be very careful about the plays that we perform here.”
A few years ago, Bishop drew letters of disgust for an already sanitized production of “The Gin Game,” just because an older character loses his civility with an elderly female friend.
In “What We Don’t Know,” Relph saw “some very specific references to Westcliffe,” particularly a passing comment about the Harry Potter controversy.
Witherspoon said the play was conceived before she ever came to Westcliffe, but it was later informed by personal experiences she had with locals there.
“One day I heard a man use the N-word in a normal public conversation, not out of anger but because he thought he was in ‘good’ company,”‘ Witherspoon said. “Lots of people express their racism without thinking it is inappropriate or wrong.”
Relph initially announced the play would not be staged “by mutual agreement” of the playwright because “I don’t have an actress who can speak Spanish.” Relph, who moved to West cliffe from California in 1992, now concedes that neither statement was exactly true. When asked if her decision was really more of a pre-emptive strike to avoid a repeat of the Harry Potter controversy, she said, “Maybe.”
But if she were to do anything different, it would only be not to award Witherspoon’s play the prize.
“I just don’t think it was all that good,” Relph said.
But the play also was selected for the Playwrights Showcase of the Western Region at the Arvada Center, where it was read Aug. 12 without incident.
“I don’t see the point of theater if you don’t ask an audience to think,” Witherspoon said. “Why even do a playwriting competition if you are going to change the rules when you don’t like the results?”
Michele Woods, who sells ads for the Wet Mountain Tribune, has acted in two productions for Relph and speaks Spanish. She believes Relph is acting out of fear and said when a town’s arts leader acts pre-emptively out of fear by sheltering audiences from controversial ideas, that should give everyone in Westcliffe pause.
“I love Anne and what she has done here, but I have to wonder what she sees in this community that makes her think that of us. And what is it that we are projecting that makes her think that of us?” Woods said.
“What does it say about us as a town when we are afraid to put on a play that causes people to open their eyes and ask questions? Who are any of us to say what people can or cannot tolerate? That’s being judgmental, too. I wish Anne would let people make up their own minds.”
“We all have struggles”
Riddering may have had a problem with Harry Potter, but he thinks a play about racism would have been a good opportunity for an important community dialogue about prejudice. But when you shine a light under a bushel, you must be prepared for what you might find there.
“The issue of racism definitely needs to be explored everywhere, and Westcliffe is not an exception,” Riddering said. “Most of us like to think we aren’t prejudiced, but we all have struggles in our own hearts with racial issues. Just because you run away from the big city does not mean you run away from the problems there. These are things we need to talk about, and theater is a good way to talk about it. So I am not against any play that would attack any kind of prejudice.
“But Anne has to consider her audience, and maybe she is thinking that the problems it would cause are greater than the good it would do if it offends some people and causes ill feelings toward her theater. It might be construed that way. I wonder if people might think, ‘Are we being mocked?’ Can you learn something when you feel you are being threatened?”
Live with the aftermath
Bishop was asked if the problem is whether Westcliffe audiences might become offended upon hearing expressions of racism and homophobia because they are wrong, or is it that they might become offended because perhaps they recognize elements of these prejudiced characters in themselves?
“I think, very frankly, it’s both,” Bishop said.
But unlike in a big city, Relph always has to work within the fabric of an interdependent small community and plan her every move accordingly.
“It doesn’t take a whole lot to stir things up in a small town,” Riddering said. “But once a controversy blows over in a place like this – and it always does – we will all still be here. And we all have to continue to live together.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
