Re-enter, Stage Right

Dan Hiester remembers the days when he dealt with exhaustion by sleeping round the clock after completing the run of each show. Then, somewhat rejuvenated by his two- or three-day slumber, he’d hurl himself into the next project. But soon after the artistic director of Denver’s CityStage Ensemble got the news that his troupe would lose its performing space at the former Theater at Jack’s, Hiester found himself dealing with a different sort of fatigue.

As he tried to figure out how he was going to keep together an ensemble of actors who no longer had an artistic home, Hiester broke his hand while working for the city’s summertime Theater in the Park program — and the cumulative effects of perpetual overwork suddenly set in. “We had been cranking out six or seven shows a year for twelve, thirteen years, and it was also my son’s last year of high school,” he recalls. “All the gods, theater and otherwise, seemed to be saying, ‘Let’s take some time, finish up these loose ends and kind of see where we are.'”

Although taking a break meant putting his creative life on hold — as well as temporarily interrupting CSE’s mission to produce whole seasons of thematically related plays — the hiatus actually opened more doors than it closed. Instead of merely stepping back for a few months before plunging into the usual routine, Hiester and company decided to make their collective sabbatical more of a comprehensive self-assessment. That meant putting their fingers on the larger forces that were affecting the entire theater community — some for the better, some not.

“There are lots of people doing projects, but I don’t feel like there is as much of a sense of a community or a style or a range of things that address each other,” says Hiester. “It’s not the same as ten or fifteen years ago, when there was a great deal of hunger. Actors would say, ‘You’ve got a role, I want to do it whatever it is.’ Now there’s a need — I don’t think it’s good or bad, it’s just different — to say to actors, ‘If you’re doing this for less than a living wage, we need to make it compatible with other stuff you’re doing.'”

Making matters more difficult, the Denver theater scene suffers from a lack of viable performing spaces. “They’re either not there, or they’re proscenium or converted proscenium,” says Hiester. And the smallish thrust stage at Jack’s was perfectly suited to the kinds of plays that CSE prefers: those that mix high theatricality with gritty feeling. Since there’s been a marked increase in the number of people mounting the occasional show (as opposed to full seasons) in recent years, there’s also been greater competition for those few stages that are available. “But small theaters aren’t served by competing in the same way that corporations and big businesses are,” he notes. “So finding a way of actually being a theater community is the challenge.”

To that end, Hiester says, “we found it was important to ask ourselves, ‘What is it we want to say and do, what’s worth saying and talking about? What kind of debate is or should be going on in the community?'” After contemplating those concerns, he and his colleagues decided to look for projects that were consistent with CSE’s artistic vision but also compatible with newfound realities of backing, financing and space.

While the task of reconciling past and present demands sometimes seemed an impossible one, serendipity soon intervened in the person of David Earl Jones, a playwright who co-founded CSE in 1984; his play Road, directed by Hiester, was one of the company’s first productions. Having recently relocated to Denver after spurning the Hollywood scene (he’s now an institutional advisor for Janus), Jones asked Hiester if he was interested in staging his newest play, Bad Money. “In addition to being a good way to jump back in with a play from David,” says Hiester, the drama, which opens this weekend at the Phoenix Theatre, examines relevant issues in a highly theatrical manner. “David’s plays have always addressed the underbelly of the good side of American life. This play deals with corruption in big sports, church and police, and how all those things are determined by money. In the last several years, the bottom line has become definitional for all kinds of professions in a way it didn’t used to be. Making money has always been important, but this play addresses what the need for money as equated with value in society is doing to us.

“David terms it ‘a noir for the stage,'” continues Hiester. “So that’s an interesting challenge, to create a movie kind of experience and atmosphere without trying to be a movie. There’s a stylistic and theatrical challenge and excitement, as well as a thematic one, which is what we’ve always looked for.”

As much as he’s looking forward to the company’s re-emergence, Hiester says it’s important to remember that the company never left. “We never stopped and said we’re not going to be here anymore,” he explains. “We’re still looking for a good space situation, because space is an important aspect of how you plan and how you think about the theater that you do. It’s going to be a different kind of style for us. Popularity and sell-ability are issues for us, [but] they aren’t the primary issues. It’s so difficult for any of us to step back and say, ‘Why are we doing this?’ We need to re-ask ourselves that every year, not because we like to do shows and we’ve always done shows, but because we have to find out what place theater has in the community. Is it worth doing? We have to ask ourselves that question in a new way.”