Creede strikes paydirt with summer theater

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 10, 2005 at midnight

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CREEDE - I'd been in this southwestern Colorado town 24 hours when Creede Repertory Theatre filled with five times as many people as I'd seen in that time.

Where had they come from? They weren't in the restaurants, shops, bars, or the town museum with the $1 admission fee and century-old hearse.

They came from Texas, Kansas, nearby South Fork and the surrounding rural areas an hour and a half from the nearest movie theater. They came to see the world premiere of a play at a theater USA Today earlier this summer called one of the country's 10 best "way off Broadway."

This summer, the theater's 40th, it sold about 18,000 tickets in a county with a year-round population of fewer than 800 people. With 60 summer employees, the theater becomes the county's largest employer and certainly its largest revenue producer, bringing $1 million to Mineral County.

"I know a lot of people who come down here, and the reason they come down here is for the theater," says Maurice LaMee, Creede Rep's artistic director. "There's a significant amount who come in and they're just vacationing here."

It's what brought Denver native LaMee here five years ago, after getting degrees from Loretto Heights College and the National Theatre Conservatory and visiting for occasional directing jobs.

"I'm well-suited for this job, because my family is here and I love the mountains and I love everything to do with the mountains. So I'm actually in a unique situation where I can do what I love to do in a place that I care about."

The hills surrounding the town are dotted with crumbling mine shafts, caved-in log cabins and rusty tin remains, remnants of its life as a mining town.

The boom was short. Nicholas C. Creede opened the Holy Moses mine in 1889. By the end of that year, there were 10,000 people in the new town and 30 saloons. Two years later, the price of silver crashed; by the end of 1893, there were only 900 people left in Creede. Today, the town has a year-round population of about 400.

The mines struggled along for nearly another century, until the last one closed in the 1980s. But long before that, town leaders longed to inject a little life - and cash. In 1966, the local Jaycees saw a theater as their salvation, sending letters to several colleges offering a theater to someone willing to get it started. At the University of Kansas, Steve Grossman took the bait, and arrived in Creede with 11 other KU students and $32. They opened with Mr. Roberts.

Within days, they had three plays running in repertory, a system that continues to this day. That means at any given time, four plays may be in production, alternating nights on the stage. It encourages the tourist audience, LaMee says.

"Sometimes they'll come down for three days, when they know they can see four or five shows at once."

In his tenure, LaMee has seen the theater's budget more than double from $340,000 to $725,000, using a handful of Equity actors each season.

"A part of that is because we added a fall season," LaMee says of the larger budget. "We play through September and it used to play through the third week of August. I just felt like one of the reasons they had built the housing and had made major theater renovations in 1992 was they wanted to extend the season."

In the fall, family vacations end and the audience becomes a bit more adult, allowing LaMee to program riskier fare. This month, that includes the world premiere of Steve Hughes' play Slabtown. Hughes, himself an NTC graduate, is a frequent actor at Denver Center Theatre Company, where his play was workshopped last spring. Nagle Jackson, then a Denver Center director and in charge of new play development, showed the script to LaMee in the summer of 2004.

It was a perfect fit. Slabtown, which takes place near Leadville in 1877, is a rough-and-tumble comic tale of miners and gunslingers.

"This town was known as being a tough, little, hard-nosed little town, and there's still some extraordinary mining structures that are up the canyon from where we are," LaMee says. "And this story, although it's a fictional story, feels like it captures to me an essence of what it might have been like."

Hughes, who now lives in New York, arrived in Colorado for his graduate theater studies.

"I had always been kind of fascinated with the Old West just from Western movies, but then when I moved to Denver and I started to explore some of these mountain towns and I started to read some of these books, I just got completely fascinated," he says.

"The drive from Denver up to Leadville seemed to me to be so remote and I was just imagining how hard it would have been to have gotten there in the 1870s. And that's what started the idea of the play."

He wrote the play in 2001, and got a bit of a shock when Deadwood debuted on HBO, with its own harsh language (harsher than Slabtown) and depiction of the Old West's less glamorous side.

"I was kind of worried when I saw the first episode of the show, because it's happened to me a few times in my career where I've written something and something else comes out, and I think, 'Great, they're all going to think I copied from them.' "

Slabtown runs through Sept. 23. After that, Hughes doesn't know where it will go.

"I'm so thrilled that this play is being done here," he says. "When I wrote it, I hoped it would be done in a place like this, and I would love it if it had a life simply in other Colorado towns."

Creede Repertory Theatre

• The shows: Slabtown continues in repertory through Sept. 23; Broadway Bound through Sept. 24; Shirley Valentine through Sept. 24; Sight Hound through Sept. 22

• Where: 124 N. Main St., Creede, a former mining town about five hours southwest of Denver.

• Cost: $15 to $24

• Information: 866-658-2540 or www.creederep.org

Lisa Bornstein is the theater critic. bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5101

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