Sometimes Ed Baierlein makes it look almost too easy. Along with his wife, Sallie Diamond, he is the soul and driving force behind Germinal Stage Denver, the city's oldest serious theater company, directing plays he selects and starring in many of them. Baierlein's performing style is so low-key and relaxed that it's easy to miss the skill and authority that shape it. In Habeas Corpus, he played Wicksteed, a doctor disgusted with sex because he's examined so many genitalia. Disgusted, that is, until the nubile, young Felicity swans into his orbit. Baierlein also brought ferocious but carefully repressed depths to the upper-middle-class Tobias of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance. But it was in Heartbreak House that he showed the passion that animates his work, particularly in the magical scene in which the female protagonist, Ellie, realized her love for him, and he advised her with soul-penetrating sincerity not to marry for money: "You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life, and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live." It was one of those moments that stay with you long after a play's over.