The Creede Opera House in the 1960s.

Mandy Patinkin performs in The

The Creede Opera House present day.

The Creede Opera House in the 1960s.

The year was 1966, and the tiny mountain city of Creede, Colo., was in imminent danger of becoming a ghost town. Half a dozen local silver mines, the burg’s economic lifeline for decades, were closing. Something had to be done, and fast.

Desperate, the Creede’s Junior Chamber of Commerce brainstormed and came up with an idea: Convert the old opera/movie house on Main Street to a live theatre which would attract summer visitors and stimulate business activity.

But, who could they find that was talented, energetic – and crazy – enough to take on such a project?

The answer was college kids, of course.

So, the Jaycees mailed letters to various university drama departments, hoping some spirited young thespians would answer the call to save their town.

Steve Grossman, 19 at the time and a Kansas University theater student from Chicago, saw one of those letters on the bulletin board in then-new Murphy Hall and called the phone number. It was the only response the Jaycees received.

“My roommate at that time was Joe Roach, who is a very respected professor of drama at Yale now,” Grossman recalls from his home in Chicago. “We drove out there together overnight. Neither one of us had been to Colorado, ever. Got to Creede around breakfast time and it was nothing like I ever laid eyes on. Such a beautiful and unique place. But there were several closed storefronts and kind of a dusty, gray look to it all, you know?”

The Jaycees offered the boys a ramshackle theater with holes in the walls and all the volunteer labor the town could muster. Grossman and Roach recruited 10 of their fellow KU students to work in the southwest Colorado town that summer for room, board and paltry pay. The Jaycees put in new seats and electricity, built a stage and transformed a coal bin into a makeshift dressing room. The fledgling company – an ambitious lot – hammered out their first season.

“We decided to open five plays in five weeks, then keep them running through the summer,” Grossman says.

“The idea was, there were Texans out there fishing (in the area’s gold medal trout streams) and can we bring them into town to spend some money?” he explains. “Then we thought, well, if you can bring them into town one night a week, can you bring ’em in two days a week if you have two different shows?”

The Creede Repertory Theatre (CRT) was born and, after a successful first season, a creative pipeline was established from Lawrence to Colorado.

“It was all (staffed by) KU students for the first 10 years of the Creede Theatre’s life,” says part-time Lawrence resident Christy Brandt who returns to Creede this week with her husband, John Gary Brown, for the 37th year.

“I started working there in ’73 and Brown started in ’74,” Brandt says. “I was an actress and he was a photographer. He’s still the official photographer/archivist for the theater.”

Early companies included one of KU’s most famous students, Mandy Patinkin, with whom Christy performed.

Patinkin, who attended KU from 1970 to 1972, spoke fondly of his CRT experience with the Journal-World in 2005.

“I made some of my most meaningful friendships of my life,” he said. “I still have a home there and some of my closest friends there.”

Expatriate community

Today, CRT is one of the oldest repertory theaters in the country, hailed by USA Today as “one of the 10 best places to see the lights way off Broadway.” In 2007, the National Theatre Conference awarded CRT the Outstanding Theatre Award for achievement by a not-for-profit American theater, a prestigious award previously bestowed on The Goodman and Steppenwolf Theatres in Chicago and The Old Globe in San Diego.

Each summer, the theater attracts 20,000 patrons to town, with a schedule that allows visitors to see five or six different plays in a week, and pumps over $2 million into the local economy annually.

“There are very few theater companies who do theater like we do, which is where the acting company plays different parts in all of the different shows,” Brandt notes.

“It’s not as hard on me as it used to be because they’ve taken pity on me in my advanced age. Now, I only do one or two shows a summer. But I used to do five or six, which was easy back then. It’s way different now,” she laughs.

The KU connection has sparked a bit of a real estate boom in Creede as Lawrence theater folk and fans have fallen in love with the tiny town, 9,000 feet high in the Rocky Mountains, and bought property there.

Guy and Dede Dresser of Lawrence are part of the local contingent that descends on Creede every summer.

“Our connection started with our daughter, Diana, who was a theater major at KU, and was cast in the company about 20 years ago,” Guy explains. “We bought a house jointly with some friends out there. And when I say ‘house’ that’s an exaggeration. It’s a 95 year-old mining shack, basically. About five years ago, our friends decided to move out there permanently, so I bought out them out of their share and now we own our mining shack outright.”

In recent years, Dede Dresser has been tapped to choreograph some of the musicals at CRT.

“We really consider ourselves part of the Creede expatriate community, if you want to call it that,” Guy says. “There are several people from Lawrence who either live out there in the summer or come to visit.”

“It’s interesting because the social life we have in Creede – although we know fewer people – is much busier than it is in Lawrence. There are potluck suppers once a week. The theater’s always having one thing or another. It’s just a fun, interesting place to be in the summer.”

Life and trajectory

Sue Nutt, of Lawrence, who bought a home in downtown Creede seven years ago with her husband, Dave, says it’s the beautiful setting and laidback, close-knit community that beckon her back every summer.”

“I love the mountains, and it’s just really easy to be there,” Nutt says. “I really like not having to drive a car. I work in one of the little galleries so I get to meet lots of people. You can always walk into an event, just by walking up the street.”

In February of this year, Creede received the Governor’s Arts Award, which is given to a town or city in Colorado that has used the arts to enhance the cultural and economic vitality of the community.

Catherine Lynch, CRT’s development director, says the dream of the Jaycees and the risk taken by Grossman, Roach and friends 44 years ago turned Creede around.

“The KU students who came here in 1966 changed the life and trajectory of the town, and it’s all the richer for it,” she says.