Death as a survival strategy?
Dee Covington and her creative team knew they were in for collisions with paradox when they took on homelessness as the subject of Curious Theatre’s newest world- premiere play.
But an invitation to inflict a gruesome death upon oneself? . . . That has the director shaking her head.
“Every man we talked to had experienced severe head trauma at some point,” she said. Sometimes kids rob defenseless, sleeping street victims — and sometimes men invite brutality upon themselves so that they might not wake up the next day.
“Death is one survival strategy on the street when you feel like you just can’t go another day,” said Covington. “You get really drunk and you walk to the worst part of town by the train tracks, and maybe you hang a couple bucks out your pocket, and you make yourself a target. And you hope they hit you hard enough this time that you don’t wake up.”
Steven Sapp and his wife, Mildred Ruiz, who were commissioned to write “The Denver Project” for Curious Theatre, were born of the Bronx projects. But when Sapp began researching homelessness in Denver 18 months ago, he wasn’t prepared for what he found to so recognizably “resonate in my soul,” he said.
He went to shelters, met with social workers and interviewed transitional housing residents. He also roamed the streets of Denver alone at all hours, especially Colfax Avenue, to get a sense of the city.
“My preconceived notion was, Denver didn’t seem all that urban to me,” said Sapp. “I mean, this is the Rocky Mountains: a happy and sort of country kind of place.”
Instead he saw plentiful crackheads and prostitutes, a disproportionate percentage of them black and Latino. “It’s really urban, really serious and deep-rooted here,” he said. “And I was like, wow . . . Denver?”
Homelessness is an issue in every metropolitan area, but Sapp was compelled by two contrasting factors at play here: the particularly heinous kind of violence that’s been committed against the homeless, including a series of seven transient murders in 1999, two by beheading, which got Denver designated the most dangerous city in the U.S. by the National Coalition for the Homeless; and Mayor John Hickenlooper’s unprecedented 10-year initiative to end homelessness.
That’s not the most politically advantageous of priorities, but Hickenlooper still considers himself an entrepreneur on loan to the public sector. He says it’s not about votes. It’s about saving lives — and money. He’s a businessman who knows reducing homelessness also reduces the public burden. He started by targeting the root problems that cause homelessness.
“We spend $40,000 a year on every chronically homeless individual for nothing more than perpetuating lives of misery,” said Hickenlooper, who cites the average cost of a hospital visit by a homeless person with a chronic disease to be $28,000. The chronically homeless are defined as single people, often with mental illness or substance abuse, who sleep outside and in shelters.
“But for $15,000, we can pluck an individual out of from under a bridge, put them in housing and get them drug or alcohol counseling, get them medications for their mental illnesses and, most important, get them job training,” said Hickenlooper.
And Hickenlooper says an empirical case for progress already can be made.
“After two years, homelessness was down 11 percent overall,” he said, “and chronic homelessness was down 36 percent.” Boulder was the only other metro county that posted drops in that time.
Hickenlooper claims that for every person who finds a home, the city saves between $1,000 and $4,000 per year, not including federal savings on unspent Medicaid.
Denver’s Road Home claims panhandling on the 16th Street Mall is down 92 percent from three years ago, and that faux parking meters now used to collect donations for homeless services — a way of discouraging directly giving to panhandlers — will raise $100,000 this year. The city also partnered with its professional sports teams to raise $600,000 last year, and more than 250 congregations are mentoring homeless families all the way to independent housing.
“Those are real successes,” he said.
Hickenlooper sees the attention Curious Theatre will bring to the issue as a potential double-edged sword, especially with the Democratic National Convention coming to Denver. He’s already been accused of planning to sweep the homeless from public view by opening shelters normally used only in cold-weather months, but he says no.
“In no way would we ever sweep the homeless aside for the convention,” he said. “We’d like to be able to talk openly about the way this community has created innovative ways to help solve the problem. A number of our homeless have been part of the solution here, and I would be happy to have them speak about what we’ve done here long before we ever knew there would be a convention.”
An “in your face” issue
Sapp and Ruiz run a multidisciplinary New York troupe called Universes that fuses poetry, theater, jazz, hip-hop and politics to make barrier-busting, original works. But Denver has no dedicated experimental theater company, so what you have is a subject many people tend to shy from, that will be presented in a style unfamiliar to most audiences. How will Sapp and Ruiz engage them?
“This is a big issue here in Denver. It is sitting in your face,” Sapp said. “That makes this theater that is immediate; it is very ‘now.’ And to me, that’s what art is supposed to do. Not after the fact, not after the movie comes out, not after some politician says something, but to be in the mix as it’s happening.”
“The Denver Project” is described as a poetic explosion connecting stories of homeless people in Denver through tribal rhythm, physical theater and song. One character provides a throughline for what Covington calls a poetic hero’s journey — with songs.
“There’s not a lot of dialogue between poems, but the songs underscore the rhythm that would be dialogue in another play,” she said.
This is not, they emphasize, “hip-hop theater.” Nor is it “please care” theater. It’s about awareness, not agenda advocacy.
“It’s a piece that says, ‘Look, these are real people,’ ” Covington said.
Hickenlooper, who was scheduled to address Saturday’s opening-night crowd, said he has some anxiety about how this piece of art will interpret his policies, but added, “Curious Theatre has established itself as one of the most creative and innovative theater troupes in the Rocky Mountain region, if not the country, and I have absolute confidence that they will address this in a powerful way that will be constructive.”
Covington said the goal is simply to get under people’s skin. “And the power of words and music is how we are going to do it,” she said.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
Homelessness in Colorado / By the numbers
4,000 homeless in Denver; 600 of those chronically homeless*
9,100 homeless in the seven-county metro area, including 3,260 children
12,050 homeless in Colorado
3,637 homeless in Colorado in 1988
60 percent of homeless are in families with children
29 percent are women
40 percent are working
70 percent have been homeless less than two years
25 percent are mentally ill; 40 percent are alcohol or substance abusers; 15 percent are both
Most common causes of homelessness:
1. Loss of job (28 percent)
2. housing costs (23 percent)
3. family breakup (20 percent)
*Chronically homeless are defined as single people who sleep outside and in shelters.
All figures are estimates.
Sources: Denver’s Road Home; University of Denver’s Project Homeless Connect; Metropolitan Denver Homeless Initiative
“The Denver Project”
Physical theater, poetry and song. Presented by Curious Theatre at the Acoma Center, 1080 Acoma St. Written by Steven Sapp and Mildred Ruiz. Directed by Dee Covington. Starring Tyee Tilgman, John Jurcheck, Jamie Lujan, Jude Moran, Candy Brown, Misha Johnson and Akil LuQman. Through June 21. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. $25-$32. 303-623-0524 or .
This week’s openings
Thursday-June 29: Denver Center Theatre Company’s “3 Mo’ Divas,” Stage Theatre
Thursday-May 24: Square Product Theatre’s “The House of Yes” (at University of Colorado’s Atlas Center) Boulder
Thursday-Aug. 17: Nonesuch’s “Greater Tuna” Fort Collins
Saturday-June 14: Countdown to Zero’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” (at the Bindery Space)
Saturday-May 31: Upstart Crow’s “John Gabriel Borkman” Boulder
Saturday-July 6: Union Colony Dinner Theatre’s “Fiddler on the Roof” Greeley
This week’s closings
Today: Aurora Fox’s “The Emperor Jones”
Today: Town Hall Arts Center’s “Swingtime Canteen” Littleton
Today: Festival Playhouse’s “Squabbles” Arvada
Friday: Boulder Ensemble Theatre’s “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)”
Saturday:National touring production of “A Chorus Line” (Buell Theatre)
Saturday:Firehouse’s “Arcadia” (John Hand Theatre)
Saturday:Denver Center Theatre Company’s “Doubt” (Ricketson Theatre)
Saturday:Longmont Theatre Company’s “Fiddler on the Roof”
Saturday: Victorian Playhouse’s “Crimes of the Heart”
May 18: Dangerous Theatre’s “A Time to Go Walking”
Through May 18: Heritage Square Music Hall’s “The Baseball Show” Golden
May 18: openstage etc.’s “Boy Gets Girl” Fort Collins
May 18: Boulder Broadway Company’s “Kiss Me Kate” Lakewood
This week’s podcast interview
Running Lines with … A.K. Klimpke. This week, theater critic John Moore speaks to the 18-year veteran of Boulder’s Dinner Theatre, who is starring in “The Will Rogers Follies” for a third time. Running time: 16 minutes. Listen by You”ll be taken to a miniplayer. Once there, click its triangular “play” button, and the podcast will begin, with no downloading necessary.
