Leave it to Jamie Horton to take a night that was supposed to be all about him and make it about everyone else.
Back in town to revisit his favorite roles for one performance, the 23-year Denver Center Theatre Company veteran took to Auraria’s King Center stage Thursday and did what all great actors must. He disappeared, making way for Dalton Trumbo, Oscar Wilde, Caius Cassius and Mr. Antrobus, inventor of the alphabet and wheel.
Horton deposited his rapt audience back in the McCarthy hearings, the trials of Wilde, the 1665 plague and places much more fanciful, leaving them to ponder history’s injustices and outrages, as well as life’s many surprising wonders.
Horton recalled characters from kings to dandies, revealing a particular affinity for underdog, the outcast, the outraged and the clown — anyone not grounded by any traditional definition of reality, or beholden to presumed definitions of normalcy.
Horton, who left Denver for a Dartmouth professorship in 2006, came home to play in the sandbox with best friends John Hutton, Kathleen Brady and Randy Moore. Clearly reveling in every syllable, he explored the wonders of women, the corruption of absolute power and “roles we could have done if we’d known Dudley Moore.”
It was, he said afterward, “really a gas.”
Horton opened with “Bernice/Butterfly,” in which he seduced the audience into laughter as a blustery chaos- theory professor who’s receiving a prestigious award but is revealed to be just a sad, old nobody playacting in his Kansas rooming house.
In quick-change fashion, he and Hutton had audiences laughing with a bit from “Beyond the Fringe,” Python-precursor sketches Alan Bennett wrote for Dudley Moore.
He revived his drunken priest from “Racing Demon” and his indignant 17th-century Spanish king from “Life is a Dream” (which he’s directed for the Creede Repertory Theatre this summer). And no one does indignant like Horton.
He shifted from the dreamer Elwood P. Dowd (“Harvey”) to triumphantly reciting Trumbo’s joyous letter to his son on the marvels of masturbation (“Red, White and Blacklisted,” which he performed for Curious Theatre in 2004).
The night was, in many ways, a retrospective on the Denver Center Theatre Company itself.
“It’s a night for nostalgia,” said Denver Center founder Donald Seawell.
And a night for Horton admirers to muse on just what made this particular actor’s impact on Denver audiences so indelible. An appropriate exercise, given the evening was a benefit for the 4-year- old Modern Muse Theatre Company.
“He’s my favorite living actor,” said actor Jim Hunt. “In 25 years, he’s never once disappointed me.”
Superlatives were bandied about like conviction and commitment, cadence and rhythm, passion and believability. But what was most evident Thursday was humility.
When Horton takes to the stage, he becomes the personification of an author’s pen stroke. He’s the epiphany made human. Words come out of his mouth with such authority, it’s hard to imagine the writer harboring any more conviction in his own words.
The most poignant scene for Horton was from Ronald Harwood’s “The Dresser,” in which his Norman discovers the Shakespearean actor he lives in service to has died.
Horton performed the play in 1996 with Tony Church, who died in March. Horton has dedicated his Creede “Life is a Dream” staging to Church.
“There are very few colleagues who meant more to me and to so many people,” Horton said. “He brought a lot to us all, including his sense of theatrical tradition and his zest for life.”
Attributes that could just as easily describe Horton’s 23 years in Denver.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
