Remembering Ed Baierlein: Actor, Director and Germinal Stage Founder

It was sad to discover five years ago that after more than a forty-year run, Germinal Stage Denver was closing and artistic director Ed Baierlein had left the building, along with Sally Diamond, his talented actor, director, and costumer wife.

Sadder still to learn this week that Ed has died. Death simply didn’t seem possible.

Germinal saw the light when there was very little theater in the Denver area and was put together by Ed’s intelligence, curiosity, courage, and out-and-out stubborn intention. His choice of plays was intriguing. The shows might be tragic (Ibsen) or funny (Alan Bennett). They might come from the minds of  American talents (Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams) or Europeans (Harold Pinter, Ionesco). 

While change swirled in the Denver theater world outside — from ditzy musicals and 1950s hits, to experimental or highly political or sweetly soothing — Ed stood firm in his beliefs and introduced audiences to works that they were unlikely to have encountered before. Germinal spoke and breathed Ed, and soon became a courageous backbone of the theater scene.

 One of the first things you noticed on entering the building was the waft of Ed’s pipe smoke, the second the photographs of productions past that filled the walls with images of dozens of actors, many of whom you saw at their youngest and, moving on, developing maturity over the years. Then you went to the ticket booth where you’d find Ed behind the window, like a kindly genie holding out the gift of a ticket. 

Ed himself was a first-rate actor. Not flashy, not hilariously funny (though he could be), not preening or self-conscious. Quiet, somewhat soft-spoken, yet so fully immersed in the role that he effortlessly drew interest.

As a reviewer over some fifteen years (or perhaps twenty, as so many theater experiences tended to meld together), I saw hundreds of plays — two every weekend — some thrilling and others causing you to check your watch every twenty minutes, hoping soon to be freed. But to this day, I find onstage moments that linger and never leave my memory.

Many years ago Ed played in Death of a Salesman, and the scene that sticks is the passionate fight between Willy Loman and his angry, desperate son Biff, played by then youngster Conor O’Farrell. As I remember it, they were standing together on a staircase, the older man grieving the failure of his life, the younger full of heat and sorrow…and there was something so deep moving between them.

Then there was George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, in which Ed played Captain Shotover and Kristina Denise Pitt appeared as the much younger Ellie, who had nonetheless fallen in love with him. As they sat talking quietly together, she was thinking with some trepidation about a marriage to which she felt committed; he was offering advice. Watching, I couldn’t help thinking that this Shotover, assessing his life, a little weary but offering the wisdom of accumulated years to a bright young woman, was a representation of Ed himself.

News of a death like Ed’s, a man whose art had so long strongly affected viewers and also influenced Denver’s theater world, leaves a hollow in the chest, a sense of irreparable loss. I have conjured up a fantasy in which somewhere in the universe there’s a floating booth exuding swirls of pipe smoke; you can see a man behind the glass window inviting you inside.

Deepest thanks to Ed Baierlein and Sally Diamond for what they have given us.