Dick Devin has spent 17 seasons as the producing artistic director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. He has been on hand to greet his company on its first full day of work for 16 of them.
Two years ago, as his cast and crew were descending on Boulder from all over the globe, Devin was driving to rural Wyoming. Hours before, longtime lighting designer Michael Wellborn and his wife, props master Jolene Obertin, were rushing from Seattle along a pitch-black Interstate 80 when their Jeep Cherokee slammed into a 1,000-pound moose, spraying fur and bits of glass the couple would still be picking out of their skin four days later. In a company of 170, only Devin had a car large enough to rescue the pair and their belongings.
“In how many theater companies would you be transported personally across the country from an accident 140 miles away by the artistic director?” said Obertin. Devin merely calls his action “the result of 20 years of close friendship and collaboration.”
Devin can talk cold numbers as intimately and intuitively as he can any sonnet or soliloquy. How about Devin’s 26 years with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival – or 46 since his last summer off? The 28,000 people the CSF brings onto the University of Colorado campus each year, or its $5 million annual economic impact? He’ll also talk with glum resoluteness about the $200,000 hit his annual operating budget has taken since 9/11.
But 170 is the number that matters most to Devin. “That’s how many people are in the family,” he said of his cast, crew and staff. Their status with a successor, expected to be named by Aug. 1, is what Devin cares about most as he prepares to open his final season Friday with “The Tempest.”
At 62, Devin won’t miss the administrative hassles, or the constant effort to find or replace revenue sources. He will miss the work. He’ll miss the people more.
“I am most proud of the company we have built over these past 17 years,” he said. “I am proud of the year-round staff who have been running this festival for 20 years. I am proud of the actors and crew who come back year after year, and I am proud of the new people we welcome every summer. It’s a real family kind of atmosphere, and I really want to see that maintained.”
The 49-year-old CSF is the second-oldest Shakespeare Festival in the country. It offers four titles each summer, some inside the university theater, others under the tame or tempestuous skies that roof the magnificent Mary Rippon Amphitheater.
Each summer draws a cast of 40 and a crew three times greater. About half return from any given previous season. They include college kids from here and there, and professionals from as far away as Morocco. Devin first arrived from Seattle as a seasonal lighting designer in 1981; a decade later he was hired as the fest’s first permanent artistic director.
A man of many talents
Dick Devin: When “The Tempest” director Patrick Kelly first heard the name, he was sure the man behind that moniker must be some kind of daredevil superhero – “perhaps the subject of a series of boys’ books like ‘Tom Swift,’ ” he said.
Instead, Devin was a soft-spoken techie. But years of watching Devin play his dual role of artisan and administrator proved Kelly’s first instinct true: “He’s a theatrical whiz-kid who can as ably argue the merits of a Shakespearean interpretation as he can rewire a defective telephone answering machine,” Kelly said.
Through 26 years, Devin has compiled memories as vast as Shakespeare’s canon: Val Kilmer’s “unscripted spontaneity.” Fraternity pranks. Stolen equipment. Fire alarms. The death of actor Charles Hallahan two months after his final performances. Thunderstorms boiling over the Flatirons. Windstorms. A hailstorm (last week). Real lightning blending with the staged lightning. Falling trees. Full moons. Bureaucracy. Raccoons on stage, baby raccoons in dressing rooms. One massive moose.
And years of great storytelling.
Shakespeare may have written only 37 plays, but Devin will have seen 107 stagings and overseen 68 by season’s end. Way back in 1975, the CSF had become only the seventh theater company in the country to complete the entire canon, so repetition is inevitable. This year marks the seventh “As You Like It.” Devin keeps things fresh by demanding a fresh artistic perspective from his esteemed directors each time.
He has seen “Much Ado About Nothing” set in the American West; in a Rough Rider-era New England town square; and as a Jazz Age, Duke Ellington-inspired riff. “The Comedy of Errors” has landed in Morocco, in 1920s New Orleans and in a 1930s Italian street – the latter an homage to Fellini’s 1973 absurdist classic, “Amarcord.”
In 1991, a year after being named boss, Devin expanded the season from three to four plays and limited actors to no more than two plays each. That relieved exhausted actors and increased rehearsal time for each play from 96 to 130 hours. He also launched a corporate sponsorship program that now generates more than $200,000 a year. Remarkably, he said, “Up to that point, no one was asking.”
The most significant artistic accomplishment of Devin’s tenure may be the completion of the eight-play War of the Roses cycle, which began with Jim
Symons’ “Richard II” in 1998 and ended in 2001 with Tom Markus’ “Queen Margaret” – an original consolidation of the three “Henry VI” plays into one.
There have been dozens of prominent CSF alumni during Devin’s stay, among them Jimmy Smits (“NYPD Blue”), Annette Bening (“Being Julia”), Barry Corbin (“Northern Exposure”) and Michael Moriarty (“Law & Order”). But they all Barded in Boulder before hitting it big – unlike Kilmer, who starred here in a 1988 “Hamlet” two years after “Top Gun.”
“We sold every seat for that production before it even opened, and the majority of new patrons were 13-year-old girls,” Devin said with a laugh. “They had to put on extra security backstage to keep girls from climbing over the wall to get to him.”
Kilmer was young and “kind of just doing whatever he wanted to do,” Devin said with a smirk, “and that kind of spread into the rest of his performance.”
The challenges ahead
Devin’s replacement inherits a solid infrastructure but myriad challenges, most significantly a drop of 14,000 in annual attendance since 2001. A long-
term but as yet unfunded plan would modernize the Rippon to more effectively combat competing outside noise. And Devin has slowly come around to accepting the inevitability that one day, CSF actors will be miked. “I’m in favor of subtle electronic enhancement,” he said, “if we can do it without it sounding like we are doing a broadcast.”
Devin leaves knowing a change is probably overdue.
“I think any arts organization is better off if they change leadership every 10 years,” he said. “It makes logical sense that a new person coming in has more clout to get things done.”
That said, isn’t he tempted to stick around for the CSF’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2007? In characteristic modesty, Devin sees the milepost as a perfect opportunity to introduce and showcase a successor. “It seems like good timing,” he said.
Devin hopes the new artistic director’s honeymoon translates into greater support from the university and an increase in annual giving from donors – just as Kent Thompson enjoyed when he took over the Denver Center Theatre Company.
As for Devin, he’s hitting the road. He has four lighting design jobs lined up in the coming year at theaters from Sacramento to Baton Rouge, including “Aphrodisiac” for Denver’s Curious Theatre. But long after Devin is gone, those who remain will remember his quiet caring and unfailing dedication to the company.
“I will never forget my first impression of this beautiful place,” Devin said. “I was blown away at the audience’s view of the mountains, and that beautiful sky. What a view.”
No coincidence, then, that among the greatest lessons Wellborn has learned from Devin, he lists:
“Never taking this view for granted.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
Colorado Shakespeare Festival at a glance
A look at how the Colorado Shakespeare Festival has grown under Dick Devin since 1990 and how it has fared in the wake of the Sept. 11 economic downturn :
Category 1990 Most recent High (since ’90)
Operating budget $709,000 $896,000 (’06) $1.1 million (’01)
Attendance 33,526 28,226 (’05) 42,000 (’94, ’00)
Subscribers 892 1,823 (’05) 2,427 (’00)
Ticket revenue $489,869 $650,000 (’05) $761,847 (’00)
Individual giving $2,000 $22,000 (’06) $22,000 (’06)
Endowment funds 0 $277,000 (’06) $277,000 (’06)
Corporate giving 0 $200,000 (’05) $216,000 (’05)
Corporate sponsors 0 36 (’06) 36 (’06)
Productions 3 4 (’06) 4 (since ’91)
Company members 160 170 (’06) 198 (’94)
Performances 44 70 (’06) 70 (’05, ’06)
Actors 32 41 (’06) 44 (’05)
Equity actors 3 1 (’06) 4 (’05)
The Golden 12
Most Shakespeare festivals consider the following titles to be the Bard’s essentials and perform them most. Under Dick Devin, the CSF staged two of the following titles every season (with number of CSF stagings):
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” 7
“As You Like It” 7
“Hamlet” 7
“Macbeth” 7
“Othello” 7
“Romeo and Juliet” 7
“Twelfth Night” 7
“Comedy of Errors” 6
“King Lear” 6
“The Tempest” 6
“Richard III 5
“Merry Wives of Windsor” 4
Colorado Shakespeare Festival
THEATER|At Mary Rippon outdoor amphitheater and University of Colorado at Boulder indoor theater|FRIDAY THROUGH AUG. 19|Outdoor performances begin at 8:30 p.m.; indoor performances at 2, 7 and 11 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays| $10-$52|303-492-0554 or coloradoshakes.org
As You Like It
Opens: July 9 (outdoors)
Genre: A pastoral comedy with more music than any other Shakespearean play
The setting
Bard: A forest near Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon
Boulder: Depression-era America 1934-38, viewed through the lens of madcap screwball-comedy films.
In a nutshell: One of the festival’s most-produced plays starts with two feuding brothers and ends in reconciliation, repenting and not one but four marriages.
Say it! “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
The Merchant of Venice
Opens: July 15 (indoors)
Genre: A comedy – a dark, romantic and, to some, anti- Semitic comedy
the setting
Bard: Venice
Boulder: Italy 1938, with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party at the height of its popularity
In a nutshell: Our merchant seeks a loan from a villainous Jewish moneylender embittered by racist epithets against him. Shylock offers the money interest-free. One catch: If Antonio defaults, Shylock is to exact a pound of flesh from Antonio’s heart.
Say it! “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
Unexpected Shaxpere!
Opens: July 28 (indoors)
Say what?: Seattle’s Unexpected Productions returns for a second season of performing a different Shakespeare-based improv show each night, based on characters and plots familiar to Bard lovers.
Come again?: By taking a few suggestions from the audience, the players will create an entirely original play each night. The key words here are wit and spontaneity.
– Compiled by John Moore
