Best Introduction of a Major Contemporary Playwright 2004 | Fucking A, LIDA Project | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword

Best Introduction of a Major Contemporary Playwright

Fucking A, LIDA Project

Suzan-Lori Parks has been a force in the theatrical world since she won an Obie in 1996, following it with a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. But until the LIDA Project produced Fucking A, none of her work had been seen in Denver. Artistic director Brian Freeland deserves a lot of credit for mounting a solid production of this evocative play. It's set in a cold-eyed, amoral world in which misery is so universal that a knife drawn across a throat can be an act of love. The rich exploit the poor; the poor hate the rich; there's no such thing as justice; and just about everyone is plotting murder.

Best Director

Mare Trevathan Philpott, Waiting for Godot, Bug Theatre

Mare Trevathan Philpott directed Waiting for Godot with an immediacy and clarity of vision that cleared away the crust of time, fashion, opinion and academic analysis to let us see the play's bones -- and what a solid, extraordinary pattern they made. She brought a sophisticated sensibility to the fifty-year-old script, and everything about the production came together. The set and costumes were clean and defined, the on-stage groupings were carefully composed, and -- most important -- Philpott won first-rate performances from a group of excellent actors.

Best Departing Director

Donovan Marley, Denver Center Theatre Company

Donovan Marley has been the artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company for 21 seasons. During that time, he founded the company's acting school, mounted a thoughtful mix of classic and contemporary dramas -- including a ten-hour production of Tantalus staged in conjunction with the Royal Shakespeare Company -- and brought Denver a Tony Award for outstanding regional company in 1998. Frustrated by budget cuts, Marley resigned this year, effective July 2005.

Best Departed Shakespearean

Jack Crouch, Colorado Shakespeare Festival

Cymbeline is rarely mounted these days, but it was performed at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival last summer. It was last seen there in 1975, directed by festival founder Jack Crouch. At the age of 84, and shortly after attending this season's offerings, Crouch died. His friends say that one of his favorite lyrics in all of Shakespeare came from Cymbeline:

"Fear no more the heat o' th' sun

Nor the furious winter's rages;

Though thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone and ta'en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney sweepers come to dust."

Best Salute to a Colorado Master

Frank Sampson Retrospective, Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities

Fifty years of paintings filled the entire set of lower galleries at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities this past fall when the epic Frank Sampson Retrospective was installed there. Throughout his career, Sampson was interested in figural abstraction, a taste that has come and gone and come back again during the intervening half-century since he first started doing them. Rudi Cerri, a former curator and exhibition designer at the Arvada Center, ably put together this spectacular and edifying exhibit, completely outdoing himself with this, his swan song.

Best Lesson in Colorado's Art History

Vance Kirkland: A Colorado Painter's Life -- Early Works and Beyond, Colorado History Museum

Vance Kirkland: A Colorado Painter's Life -- Early Works and Beyond is more than a solo devoted to Colorado's most famous modernist. It's a big-picture look at the mid-twentieth-century art world in this state. In addition to Kirkland's paintings from the '30s to the '70s, the show features pieces by most of the other major artists working here during those decades, as well as fine examples of modern furniture and decorative art. Hugh Grant, the director of the Kirkland Museum, and Judy Steiner, a curator at the CHM, organized the exhibit, which is open through April 4. It was designed by David Newell, who did an admirable job, considering that he had to deal with way too much stuff for the size of the space.

Best Friends of Denver Culture -- Family

The Caulkins family

When George Caulkins wanted to surprise his wife, Eleanor Newman Caulkins, he asked his five children -- George, Max, Mary, David and John -- and their spouses to pool their money to help with the grand gesture: an opera house named after her. Their combined $7 million is helping to build the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, which is being fitted into the shell of the historic 1908 Quigg Newton Auditorium Theater at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Eleanor will have to wait until 2005 to see her namesake completed.

Best Friends of Denver Culture -- Couple

Jan and Fred Mayer

Jan and Fred Mayer outdid themselves in 2003. With a gift of $11 million, their foundation established an endowment for the Denver Art Museum's New World department, which features pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial art. Over the past few decades, the Mayers have made many contributions to Denver's cultural life and have been particularly instrumental in the success of the New World department. Not only have they given substantial financial support, but they have also donated many of the collection's most magnificent objects.

Best Friend of Denver Culture -- Individual

Frederic C. Hamilton

Frederic C. Hamilton has long been a supporter of the Denver Art Museum. For the past 25 years, he's served on the board of trustees, sitting as chairman since 1994. Last summer, when funds to maintain and program the under-construction, Daniel Libeskind-designed expansion were needed, he got the trustees to ante up $60 million, throwing in the biggest chunk himself : $20 million, to be precise. The gift led the DAM to name the new structure after Hamilton, who came by the distinction the old-fashioned way: He earned it.

Best Art Visionary

Cydney Payton

Cydney Payton, director of Denver's Museum of Contemporary Art, has her hands so full that she could be a professional juggler. She administers the institution, raises funds, does programming and even, at times, curates and installs the museum's exhibits. And as if all of that weren't enough, she also recently oversaw a series of six enormously popular presentations by renowned architects vying to design the museum's new facility. But she's not done yet: As soon as the choice is made next month, she must launch a multimillion-dollar capital campaign to pay for the building. Experience shows that if anyone can keep so many balls in the air at once, it's definitely the amazing Payton.

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