A New Theater in the Rockies

By Gerald Clarke

The future meets the present in Denver

"The Dawning of the Denver Decade in American Theater," proclaim the promotional brochures. "What other cities did in the '60s and '70s, Denver is doing better in the '80s!" It is home-town boosterism, of course, but in this case the hyperbole is close to the truth. There is an advantage to being last, and Denver's Helen G. Bonfils Theater Complex, which opened with the new year, has learned from everybody else's mistakes. Elegantly beautiful, it also boasts what may be the most flexible and workable cluster of theaters in the country.

The $13 million complex is an unusually solid marriage between architect and artist. Theater Consultant Gordon Davidson, director of Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, worked on details for six years with Architects Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. The result of all that planning, says Artistic Director Edward Payson Call, can only be compared to a wonderful playpen for directors, who can use dramatic concepts impossible in many other places.

The largest house, named simply the Stage, has a thrust stage, with the audience on three sides. Not one of its 643 seats is more than 50 ft. from center stage. Six hydraulic lifts can carry actors and scenery up and down; plays will be done in repertory, so there is ample room in wings and flies for sets from at least two productions. Behind the Stage's thrust is the second theater, a pentagonal house, 100 ft. in diameter, which is aptly dubbed the Space. All seats are movable, and the director can use the room any way he wants, his only restraints being the limitations of his own imagination.

The entire complex is so adaptable, in fact, that the Stage and the Space can be combined into a giant cyclorama merely by raising the soundproof screen that divides them. "Just because everybody else was building shoeboxes didn't mean we wanted shoeboxes too," says Donald R. Seawell, chairman of the Denver Post and the man behind the arts center.

For audiences, the most obvious pleasure is Roche and Dinkeloo's stunning design. Entering from the plaza, which the complex shares with the rest of the arts center, patrons come into a great glass tent, held up by concrete and steel girders. The effect is both dramatic and exhilarating. The sense of excitement is heightened as visitors walk up to a second level, which curves around the Stage and offers -- smog permitting -- views of the Rocky Mountains. The feeling is like that on the promenade of an ocean liner, and in warm weather doors will be opened to an outdoor balcony. The architects, who designed the Ford Foundation building in Manhattan and the new wing of Deere & Co. headquarters in Moline, Ill., have always been masters of glass-enclosed interiors. The Bonfils site has shown them equally adept at providing dramatic vistas to the world outside.

Dimly lit, tunnel-like passageways provide a transition between the bright public areas and the theaters and their mysteries. The only real weakness in the Bonfils design is that it bears no relationship at all to its two-year-old neighbor, the brick-walled Boettcher Concert Hall, designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates for the Denver Symphony. Both buildings are admirable but in disquietingly different ways. It is unfortunate that the same architect was not assigned to both. The disunity may be less noticeable, however, when the 76-ft.-high glass Galleria, which now leads to both entrances, is extended to cover the entire plaza. Shops and restaurants will soon be opened along the sides of the 60-ft.-wide Galleria, and eventually the city's dreary downtown may be provided with some of the street life it now lacks.

Beautiful as it is, the theater complex is only as good as those who work inside, and in that respect Denver is particularly lucky. Almost at once, Call has fashioned a true repertory, capable of switching between Moliere's The Learned Ladies and Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the Stage and Orson Welles' Moby Dick -- Rehearsed in the Space. Performances are uniformly excellent, and the only quibble is Call's choice of plays. Moliere is always Moliere. But all Brecht is not good Brecht, and it would take more than the Denver company to turn the overlong, tedious Chalk Circle into an exciting evening. Welles' play shows the enormous capabilities of the Space, but that is about all. It is good theater, but not good drama.

The people who run the Bonfils, however, are testing themselves and their audience. Center Chairman Seawell, who was a successful Broadway producer (The Great Sebastians with Lunt and Fontanne) before he moved west in the '60s, is already satisfied with Denver's response. "I thought I was building for the future," he says. "The audiences made me realize I was building for the present."

--Gerald Clarke

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