For a kid from Park Hill, coming home to Colorado inevitably means coming home to Colorado Boulevard. For Kent Gash, that means passing under the elevated walkway at West 14th Avenue that now provides safe passage for Gove Junior High students.
You’d understand if Gash might prefer an alternate route. For this walkway was built only after his brother Bobby, then 12, was struck and killed by a car while crossing the busy thoroughfare with his gym class 40 years ago.
But Gash was raised with a strong sense of direction, his mom says. And that direction is straight ahead.
“Actually it makes me smile to see it, because I had so much fun with Bobby,” said Gash, who has worked in theaters from L.A. to Washington but is only now getting his first opportunity to direct in Denver. “It’s really a monument to him, so it’s more about his life than how he passed.”
Gash, 46, has been brought home by Denver Center Theatre Company artistic director Kent Thompson to helm “Crowns,” a gospel-infused story of family, faith and home. Not unlike the story of Kent Gash, sister Lee Kathryn, brother Bobby and parents Lee and Thelma.
Lee worked for the federal government; Thelma is a retired school principal. They had their kids reading before kindergarten and exposed them just as early to piano, theater, dance and music. Lee even entertained jazz greats Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Dizzy Gillespie in his backyard.
“So much of what I’m experiencing now is because of what I got from them,” said Gash. “I’d come home one day and say, ‘I’m going to be president, or an astronaut,’ and their response was always, ‘Oh, that’s fine. You can be whatever you want to be … but you are going to college first,” Gash said. “I realize now a lot of kids never get that.”
Gash wanted to be an actor, singer, dancer and choreographer, and he is. He graduated from George Washington High in 1978, the Carnegie-Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh and earned a master’s degree at UCLA. He was a member of Thompson’s first Alabama Shakespeare Festival acting company in 1989 and was later named his assistant artistic director. He’s based in Atlanta as associate artistic director of the Alliance Theatre.
“Think about that,” said acclaimed choreographer Cleo Parker Robinson, who directed Gash as a teen at the Bonfils and Shwayder theaters. “Talk about the reality at that time: Here was this young black man from Park Hill in the 1960s. He had no role model. He fit no mold. He didn’t have the body type to be a dancer. But did he let that stop him from becoming a dancer? Not at all.
“He had a calling …and he responded.”
The Gashes’ story crosses all borders of class, race and stereotypes. Lee Kathryn Gash-Maxey earned Boettcher and Gates scholarships, won a local Emmy Award while at Channel 4, was vice president of the Black Entertainment Network, and is now president of her own media production company.
Kent and Lee were just 5 and 6 when Bobby died in 1965. Their father, in his grief, turned to alcohol. The family could have gone either way had Thelma not been what Robinson calls its tower of strength.
“I lived 20 years with an alcoholic,” said Thelma, a woman of slight frame, soft voice and great stature, “and 27 years with a recovered alcoholic.”
Lee Gash got sober, then ministered to hundreds as a substance-abuse counselor for three decades. He died in 1998.
“Kent grew up in a family of five, and we are all strong,” Thelma said. “By that I don’t mean physical strength. I mean mental strength.”
A nostalgic tour
On a rare free morning since returning to Denver, Gash is taking a nostalgic tour of his old haunts. He wanders the halls of Place Junior High, one of six Denver Public Schools he attended because of forced bussing that Gash credits for opening up his world. Each stop triggers another list of teachers he credits for his success.
Outside G.W., four inquisitive black girls stop and ask why Gash is being trailed by a reporter and photographer. He engages and encourages them. “Succeed,” he tells them, “and people will think you must be important.” As they walk away, lights are going off on the camera and, Gash hopes, in their heads.
The tour ends at Gash’s childhood home, where Thelma Gash greets her son with all the life force a mom with two new knees can muster. The walls are lined with photos and her own watercolor paintings.
“My parents were born here, so it’s hard to find any pocket of Denver where someone doesn’t know a Gash or a
Kinchelow,” said Kent. “If we sneezed in south Denver, by the time we got home to east Denver, somebody here knew about it.”
Kent’s bedroom is a finely preserved time capsule from 1978. A star with his name hangs on the door, a souvenir from “Purlie” in ’75. His walls are lined with black-light silk-
screen posters of plays he saw or performed in, and photos of local peers such as Broadway actors Martin Moran and Rebecca Eichenberger.
Thelma says she knew her son would be a performer when she played him her cast recording from “The King & I.”
“Kent said, ‘Someday, Mom, I’d really like to play that role of the king,”‘ she said. “I looked at him and said, ‘Well, Kent, you do realize you don’t look much like a Siamese king?’ And you know what he said back? ‘It’s not my problem. That’s for the audience to adjust to.’
“He was 12 at the time. I never, ever said another discouraging word to him.”
Gash’s seminal stage experience was when G.W.’s legendary Nancy Priest cast him to play Higgins in “My Fair Lady.” She didn’t see color; she saw character – for better or worse.
“I never thought being black meant I couldn’t play Henry Higgins,” Gash said with his burly laugh. “Anybody will tell you I was a really pretentious guy in high school, so the idea of being this egocentric linguistics professor controlling everyone’s life made perfect sense.”
Though Kent was largely oblivious to racial issues, his mother was ferociously attentive to any perceived injustice. She removed Kent from one elementary school when he tested at a 7.5 reading level, but was assigned a 3.1-level book. Not a good presumption to make about the child of a schoolteacher. “This woman was the most prejudiced teacher who ever existed,” Thelma recalled.
But Gash considers the 1970s a golden period for the Denver Public Schools. “There was great foundation but also great experimentation and great support for the arts. My sense is that it’s very different now,” said Gash, who finds the impending closing of Manual High, and the state of funding for arts education in public schools, to be outrageous.
“‘No Child Left Behind’ is nonsense because the only accountability now is test scores,” he said. “So all they are teaching anymore is how to pass tests. They are not teaching critical, analytic thinking or anything that stimulates imagination. And so literacy rates are ridiculously low. Then we wonder why we have no leaders and why we have no vision.
“Well, for about 2½ generations now, we haven’t been training vision. And coming from my home? That makes me nuts.”
Making Gash nuts in a more positive way is the excitement his return is generating around town, including at his mom’s People’s Presbyterian Church.
Author Regina Taylor directed the first staging of “Crowns” at the Alliance Theatre, where she made Gash promise to direct the play himself one day. When Thompson slated the work for Denver, Taylor championed Gash for the job.
“I knew Kent had grown up here, and that this is an important place to him,” Thompson said. “So when Regina suggested Kent, I just said, ‘That’s good.”‘
Directing “Crowns” here “adds an emormous amount to it for me,” said Gash. “I got my basic training and learned my ethics about work from people like Cleo Parker Robinson, Nancy Priest, Carolyn Jones Martin, J. Joe Craft, Joan Brown, Lillian Covillo, Friedan Parker and Buddy Butler.
“These were my wonder years, and they happened here,” Gash said. “So it’s important to me to be here now – as a native, a theater artist and a person of color.
“I know there have been complications around artists of color working in Denver in the past, but that’s a challenge every theater in the country faces,” he said. “You cannot exist as a viable arts institution and only reflect the strata of your population that you think is your subscriber base. The theater, at the end of the day, has got to be the people’s trust. And if it’s the people’s trust, that’s all the people.”
Gash realizes he’s home now only because he was once encouraged to do what he wants, with as much creativity as possible. “It’s one thing to have a passion,” he said. “It’s another to have a mother or teacher helping you realize your potential.”
Gash had both in one person.
“The thing I’m most glad I taught Kent and his sister is that people are like mirrors,” Thelma said. “What you see in other people is what you are reflecting in yourself. So if you treat someone for what he is, he will remain what he is. But if you treat him for what he ought to be, he will become what he ought to be. That’s Goethe.”
“That,” said Gash,” “is a teacher.”
Thelma is quick to add: “The only thing I actually taught you academically was phonetics and long division. I’m still trying to teach you how to live.”
“That,” said Gash,” “is a mother.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Due to a reporting error, it originally incorrectly identified the mother of theater director Kent Gash. Her name should have appeared as Thelma Gash. The story also incorrectly identified one of the honors that his sister, Lee Kathryn Gash-Maxey, has received during her career. Gash-Maxey received a local Emmy award while working for a Denver television station.
