BORNSTEIN: Company staging a comeback

Saturday, September 8, 2007

For eight seasons, Curious Theatre Company seemed to live a charmed life, sailing on a sea of critical love, anointed as Denver's most exciting theater.

Then Season Nine came along, and the star got a little tarnished. Three of its five shows were world premieres, and not one was particularly successful. The script was to blame for tempOdyssey, while A House With No Walls and Mall-Mart the Musical were fatally flawed, both on the stage and the page. Audiences thinned out.

One subscriber, an erudite consumer of theater, wondered aloud: "Is it worth going back next year?"

Artistic director Chip Walton heard it all and agreed with much of it. "Last season, in my opinion, was a challenging season for us. We worked hard, but I'm not sure it was up to my standards. To start an organization and build it for nine years is an enormous investment of energy and time and effort. We were all tired."

Part of the problem was that in the quest for new material, Curious was staging lesser work. For years, Walton had had first choice of Off Broadway and Broadway hits. Former Denver Center Theatre Company artistic director Donovan Marley hadn't been interested. But the new leader, Kent Thompson, was getting properties Walton wanted, including The Clean House, The Pillowman and Pure Confidence.

"There is no bitterness there," Walton says. "Kent came in with an artistic vision that was much more closely aligned with my vision than Donovan's was."

Walton reacted by looking for more new work, even as he knew "that we were rolling the dice on some scripts that weren't finished."

This season, Walton is pulling back on the reins, directing three shows and staging two world premieres.

"I learned some lessons," he says. "Part of the reason that I'm directing three shows this year is we feel like it's kind of time to get back to artistic fundamentals."

There's a lot of loyalty in the subscriber base. Last year the company had 1,126 subscriptions; so far, 70 percent have re-upped. A budget shortfall at the end of the season resulted in a plea to subscribers, which filled the gap and more.

Now the company is working toward purchasing its home at the Acoma Center. In October, the theater will go before the city's Office of Economic Development for funding. The purchase has a closing date of April 1. Walton hopes to raise enough so that the capital campaign will go only toward renovations, not acquisition.

Also on the slate: a five-year goal of reaching Tier 2 in the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District. That would require increasing the current $850,000 budget to at least $1.5 million. At that level, Curious would share more money with fewer groups. Currently, the company is capped at $40,000 from the district, a number it reached when its budget was only $250,000, Walton says.

First, though, Walton has to shore up the quality of the work. He's starting by remounting the company's inaugural production, How I Learned to Drive. The acclaimed Nine Parts of Desire will feature Karen Slack, and Walton will direct Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The premieres will include two commissioned scripts: Eric Coble's For Better and The Denver Project, a piece about gentrification and homelessness by Steve Sapp and Mildred Ruiz.

Past mistakes only feed the future, says Walton.

"Developing new work is definitely a learning process. I don't know we've ever done the level that we're doing on The Denver Project."