Summers with Will

Artistic Director Dick Devin begins final season with Shakespeare Festival

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 1, 2006 at midnight

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Dick Devin is looking forward to his first summer vacation since arriving 26 years ago at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

Actually, it's been longer than that: The 62- year-old Devin has been working in summer theater since he finished his master of fine arts at Yale in 1969. But now he is about to open his final summer as Colorado Shakespeare Festival artistic director.

"I've been doing summer theater for 44 years," Devin says, sitting in his office just off the University of Colorado campus.

During his tenure at the festival, it has grown in size and professionalism. But since 2001, Devin has found himself scrambling for dollars and watching some of his innovations fall off the shrinking budget. And that's something he's not going to miss.

"What I'm really retiring from is fundraising," he says. "It's gotten harder since 9/11. All of the revenue streams have become more difficult."

Devin now works in a world of ironies. The number of corporate sponsors has risen to 34 from just a handful a few years ago, but they give less and it costs more for the festival staff to bring in each one. Individual giving, however, is up.

"We've increased the number of people who give almost threefold in the last few years," Devin says. "We value the 1,000 people more (who are giving) because that's building for the future. Two years from now it's really gonna pay off."

Over the decade the festival has begun creating endowments for the first time in its 49-year history; it now has nine endowments totaling about $250,000.

It isn't all progress. The summer after 9/11, the festival sold 7,000 fewer seats, representing more than $200,000 in lost ticket revenue and has never recovered that audience. For every dollar CSF requests from grant donors, it receives 26 cents.

"I write about a grant a week for 50 weeks a year," Devin says. "All of that is by way of saying, it tires you out."

Rooting for Tony

Although Devin grew up in Iowa and studied drama education at the University of Northern Iowa, the launchpad for his career was the Yale School of Drama. At Yale he specialized as a lighting designer and technical director, and much of his career as an artist has been in lighting design.

Just out of school, he was hired by the prestigious Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where Peter Hunt was the resident lighting designer. Hunt had just directed his first Broadway play, 1776, and was nominated for a Tony Award in the 1969 ceremony.

"If Peter won the Tony award that spring, his agent was not going to allow him to go back to Williamstown," Devin remembers. "I watched the Tony Awards to find out whether I had a job or not."

Hunt won, which meant Devin had a job, albeit working for the mercurial Nikos Psacharopoulos. In the first week of Devin's second year on the job, Psacharopoulos fired the managing director. Suddenly, at age 26, Devin was second in command, working on a production of The Seagull with Frank Langella and Blythe Danner. He stayed 10 years at Williamstown, teaching in the winters at Temple University in Philadelphia.

"I have the longevity record for the manager that worked longer with Nikos than anybody else," Devin says. "If you stood up to him and screamed back at him you had his respect for life."

But Devin is so quiet, so gentle, surely he never screams.

"I don't," he says. "But I did."

Devin found work during those years Off Broadway, but New York's siren call never attracted him enough to want to make it his home.

"I enjoyed working there, but I didn't want to live there," he says.

Instead, he found his home in the regional theater, moving in 1976 to lead the design program at the University of Washington. That year he bought the only theater subscription of his life, for shows at Seattle Repertory Theatre. He ended up designing five of them. Devin went on to design regularly for Seattle Rep and San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre.

"It's not so money-driven, and there's more variety and it's a little less hectic and laid-back," he says of the regional theater. "It's more of a family. It's an artistic home."

Making his mark

After 14 years in Seattle, in 1981 Devin showed up in Boulder for his first summer as a lighting designer at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

Then-artistic director Dan Yang was hoping to upgrade the visual attributes of the productions in the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater, where lights tended to be stuck in front of the stage.

That summer, Devin built a truss over the stage and towers on the side so the lighting could sculpt the actors. He installed the theater's first computerized light board, then went to New York to buy lighting instruments on the cheap from a shop going out of business.

"I came back for a second year just to be able to enjoy all the work that we'd done the first year," Devin recalls.

Beyond the technical challenge, he found in CSF an environment similar to that in San Francisco: "a crew and a group of actors who really loved working with each other.

"And because they had worked together a long time, they didn't have to spend a lot of time getting to know each other."

When Devin arrived, between 30 to 40 percent of the company returned year after year; today, that number is at 55 percent.

In 1991, he took on the job of artistic director, and as a condition he wanted to move from three shows a season to four.

"For me it was the opportunity to put my money where my mouth was and stop complaining about the places I was working around the country and the way they treated people and to do something about it," Devin says of his move into the artistic director's position. "And I think we have."

It might seem like a slight increase, but expanding to four plays changed the system at the festival. Rehearsals used to take place in the tiny Loft Theatre, and when there were three plays, the entire company was in all three. That meant one rehearsal in the morning, one in the afternoon and a third (or a show) in the evening.

Now the acting company is split in two, with each half doing two shows in repertory. The result is an increase in rehearsal time and a decrease in pressure on the actors. Under the old system, each show had 96 hours of rehearsal; now each has 135 hours.

It wasn't the only improvement during Devin's tenure:

• From 1996 to 2001, Devin operated Working Stages, a new play series that presented staged readings and workshops. Unfortunately, it was one of the first programs eliminated in post-9/11 budget cuts.

"It's not the kind of thing that makes money, even with the grants we could bring in," Devin says. "We couldn't afford to do anything that was not a revenue producer."

• Since 1992, Living Shakespeare has taken the Bard's work into area schools throughout the year, giving daytime acting jobs to four or five local actors a year.

• For six years, the CSF season wound up with a tour to Vail, where the company performed in the Ford Ampitheatre and later the Vilar Center in Beaver Creek. It made its money back, but not a profit, and as a result was eliminated.

• Once the historic Elitch Theatre reopens, CSF plans to make a regular end-of-summer stop there, performing two shows out of the rep.

Zen master

Devin is so calm, sometimes you want to poke him just to see what he'd do.

"It's not that he's so quiet, it's that he's so mellow," says Molly Gardner, his partner of 42 months (she knows because he celebrates every month as if it's an anniversary).

"He just takes things in stride like no one I've ever known. I've learned a lot from him about not sweating the small stuff. He lives that. Nothing really gets to him, even though I think he's been through some tough times with the realities of the Shakespeare Festival."

Two summers ago the company's longtime lighting designer, Mike Wellborn, and his wife (and prop master), Jolene Obertin, were driving with lighting equipment and props from Seattle to Boulder. Somewhere in Wyoming, they collided with a half-ton moose.

"It totaled their Jeep Cherokee and totaled the moose," Devin says. "They were picking moose fur and glass out of their skin for the next four days."

Someone needed to pick them up and bring them and the equipment to Boulder, but there were production meetings the next morning. So Devin himself left in the middle of the night to retrieve the pair.

"Jolene commented several times after that, 'In how many theaters would you be able to get the artistic director out of bed in the middle of the night to come pick you up after an accident?' " Devin says, then quickly shrugs off any self-aggrandizement.

"Twenty years of both personal and professional relationship certainly leads to that kind of response."

There have been multiple mid-play fires, back in the days of smoking, when cigarettes would get tossed into leaf-crammed air conditioning vents. There was the 1990 production of Much Ado About Nothing, when a half-dressed Beatrice missed her cue and had to run onstage in her bloomers. Through it all, Devin seems unflappable.

"I wondered for a long time how people who are over 50 or over 60 could say 'This is the best time of my life, I wouldn't trade it for any reason,' " Devin says.

"And I finally figured out what it means when I got to be 55, and it's because you've had those experiences before and they're a lot easier, particularly when you're dealing with personnel issues. By that time of your life you've been through it enough times that you don't lose sleep over it. You just do it."

Moving on

Recently the University of Colorado, which operates the festival, began interviewing five candidates for artistic director it found following a national search.

"I would hope that a new artistic director with a new vision would be successful in attracting new audiences and be able to rebuild where we were before 2001," Devin says.

That new director will have a steep road. This season, the CSF's budget was cut again, this time by nearly 9 percent, from $980,000 to $896,000. Ticket sales continue to struggle as well.

"Last summer was such a dichotomy," Devin says. "We had audience members who have been coming for 40 years saying it was the best season CSF has had artistically, and yet we played to half-houses."

For Devin, the job ends on Sept. 1, but his career does not. He will teach a final course at CU next year, and already has four design jobs in the wings at Curious Theatre Company in Denver, Seattle Shakespeare, California's Mercer Playhouse and an unnamed project in New York.

Next spring, Gardner, a geography teacher, also will retire. She has spent her summers traveling the globe while Devin manned the Mary Rippon. Now, Devin says, it's his turn to travel.

"I've got a lot of catching up to do."

Colorado Shakespeare Festival

• The Plays: The Tempest, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice and the improv show, Unexpected Shaxpere

• When and where: Thursday through Aug. 19, Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater and University Theater Mainstage on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder

• Cost: $10 to $52

• Infor- mation: 303-492- 0554 or www. colorado shakes.org

Festival facts

• Founded: 1958; the festival enters its 49th season this year

• Budget: This season's budget of $896,000 is nearly 9 percent less than last year's; the festival also has nine endowments totaling about $250,000

• The company: Each summer CSF hires 4 directors, 9 designers, about 40 actors and more than 150 production personnel.

• Completing the canon: In 1975, CSF became the seventh theater in the world to have staged all 37 Shakespeare plays.

• Living Shakespeare: More than 600 performances have been staged in Colorado public schools since 1991; they are seen annually by about 5,000 students and teachers.

• Famous alumni: Val Kilmer, Annette Bening, Jimmy Smits

Dick's picks

Outgoing Artistic Director Dick Devin shared a few of his favorite things about the Bard and productions of his work at the Festival:

• Favorite Shakespeare drama: Richard II

• Favorite festival production of that drama: 1998, directed by Jim Simon

• Favorite Shakespeare comedy: Much Ado About Nothing

• Favorite festival production of that comedy: 2003, directed by Jane Page

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

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