When C. Kelly Leo was asked to return to the seminal role that helped launch Curious Theatre, her response was an immediate, “Yes, please.”
Yes, please: Let’s revisit the young girl molested since childhood by her step-uncle Peck.
“Well, when I talk to people, I usually skip over that part,” she said with a laugh. “What can I say? Actors are gluttons for punishment.’What, I have to rip my heart out on stage? Let’s do it!”‘
It should be noted that Li’l Bit is considered the role of a lifetime, and that Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-winner isn’t entirely dark.
Yes, it’s the story of a North Carolina girl and her complicated, sick relationship with an abuser. Still, director Chip Walton calls it “a comedy about pedophilia.” Seriously. “It’s a (bleeped)-up love story … that’s laugh-out loud funny,” he said.
“Drive,” Curious’ first and 34th effort, opens its 10th anniversary season Saturday. It reunites four of Walton’s five actors, including stars Leo and Paul Borrillo.
That first staging established Curious as the leading purveyor of contemporary works never before seen on Denver stages. Today, Curious is Denver’s only professional mid- sized playhouse and a leading player in the National New Play Network, making this a success story unlike any other in Colorado theater history.
Curious was first to bring Denver incendiary dramas such as the death-penalty chiller “Coyote on a Fence.” By the time Curious staged “I Am My Own Wife” last year, it was making the Denver Center Theatre Company look a little silly: Curious had now staged the first Denver productions of the four most recent Tony-winning best plays, including “Proof,” “The Goat,” and “Take Me Out.”
The mission has grown to include original, commissioned pieces with direct relevance to audiences, including “The War Anthology,” written by a team including three Pulitzer winners; the Denver history play “Paris on the Platte”; and its first musical, “Mall-Mart.” The results have been inconsistent, but indicative of a company forging ahead.
Curious’ roots trace to a triumphant production of “Angels in America” Walton directed for Hunger Artists in 1997.
“The genesis was this group of artists wanting to continue working together, armed with the belief that we should be able to make some portion of our living doing what we do as artists,” said Walton. “That was not often the case in those days if you were not at the Denver Center or a few other places.”
Officially, the name was chosen in the hope that selected plays would make people curious. Unofficially, it was chosen because Walton’s mother was an elementary school teacher, “and I was a huge ‘Curious George’ fan,” he said.
Walton intended to debut in the 1998-99 season with “Gross Indecency,” but lost the rights to the Denver Center in a transaction bungled by New York licensors. But they made it up to Walton by giving him “Drive,” a hot property that had not yet won the Pulitzer. It was the start of beautiful friendship with Vogel, Curious’ most-produced playwright.
“I don’t know how many theaters I’ve been in, but you can feel the energy in this one,” Vogel told The Denver Post in 2004. “In every town, I figure there are at least one or two places that are on the side of the angels. This is one of them.”
Walton brought “Drive” back as a perfect 10th-season bookend. But it also helps him refashion his mission that, for the first time, will soon include plays previously produced in Denver, like (thanks to Curious itself) – “Drive.”
“This just seems the perfect doorway to go through,” Walton said.
It’s a doorway that Leo and Borrillo go through schooled by a decade of real life. Leo has married, had a child, lost her father, “and I think all of those things add layers of depth to my understanding of Li’l Bit,” she said.
“This is a love story. But it’s more about the human need for love, and how, if we’re not getting love from anywhere else, we will go toward whoever is giving it. Paula strips away black- and-white labels like pedophile’ and ‘victim,’ and says, ‘This is how this jacked-up stuff might happen.”‘
The actors know the minefields in telling a story where the audience is expected to sympathize, if not empathize, with the abuser.
Wait, sympathize – with a pedophile?
“For perspective,” Borrillo said, “consider that when you look at a child who is a victim of abuse, your heart goes out to him, right? Now make that person 45 years old in your head. Now he’s a man, and he’s still working that (bleep) out, at a time when there was nowhere for people like him to get help.”
Leo said the audience must like the actor playing Uncle Peck – without excusing what he’s done. Vogel writes in her script: “Cast the same actor you would consider as Atticus Finch,” the brutally honest character in “To Kill a Mockingbird” who represents the moral ideal.
When “Drive” closed, Borrillo’s next role was … yes, Atticus Finch.
“So I got to play the dark side and the light side, back to back,” he said. “And I have to tell you, it was wonderful to end on Atticus – and not the other way around.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
IF YOU GO
“How I Learned to Drive”
DRAMA | Presented by Curious Theatre | Written by Paula Vogel | Directed by Chip Walton|Starring C. Kelly Leo, Paul Borrillo, Michael Morgan, Melanie Owen Padilla and Denise Perry-Olson (note: Marcus Waterman replaces Borrillo as of Sept. 20) | At 1080 Acoma St. | THROUGH OCT. 26|8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. most Sundays | $26-$32 (2-for-1 Thursdays) | 303-623-0524 or
Curious: Season by season
Season 1, 1998-99: “How I Learned to Drive”
Season 2, 1999-2000: “Full Gallop,” “Praying For Rain”
Season 3, 2000-01: “Art,” “Closer,” “Fences” (with Shadow Theatre Company)
Season 4, 2001-02: “Coyote on a Fence,” “Fuddy Meers,” “Cloud Tectonics”
Season 5, 2002-03: “An Almost Holy Picture,” “The Mineola Twins,” “The Rest Of The Night,” “Proof” (twice)
Season 6, 2003-04: “Nickel and Dimed,” “Bright Ideas,” “Inventing Van Gogh,” “Columbinus” (workshop), “Yellowman,” “The Tricky Part” (special engagement)
Season 7, 2004-05: “Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted,” “The Long Christmas Ride Home,” “The Goat, “Paris on the Platte,” “Take Me Out”
Season 8, 2005-06: “The Dead Guy,” “Bug,” “Frozen,” “The War Anthology,” “Fiction”
Season 9, 2006-07: “I Am My Own Wife,” “Tempodyssey,” “Aphrodisiac,” “A House with No Walls,” “Mall-Mart: The Musical!” “Male Intellect: The Second Coming” (special engagement)
Season 10, 2007-08:
Sept. 8-Oct. 20, 2007: “How I Learned To Drive”
Nov. 3-Dec. 15, 2007: “For Better …”
Jan. 12-Feb. 23, 2008: “9 Parts of Desire”
March 8- April 19, 2008: “The Lieutenant Of Inishmore”
May 10-June 21, 2008: “The Denver Project”
