My good friend Roger back in the late 80's had read about a play that was being performed in Denver at Jack's On the Platte theater on Platte Street, a half block north of My Brother's Bar. The theater was on the second floor of the building, and the theater company was the Hunger Artists. There is still a coffee shop on the first floor, but I am not sure the theater is still there.
The play was called Breaking the Code about the British mathematician and wartime code breaker, Alan Turing. After a robbery at his home by a man with whom he had had sex, his admission to the police branded him as a homosexual, still a crime during post-war Britain, no matter the contributions of the law-breaker. This was the same law that had entangled, and eventually also broken, Oscar Wilde fifty years earlier.
The play was both powerful and sad. Roger and I had stuffed ourselves on fajitas and hot fudge Sundays at Racines restaurant earlier in the evening. We had driven from Colorado Springs to Denver to see the play and, of course, had the hour-long drive back afterwards. But in those days, few of us who lived in the Springs thought of the distance as any impediment since we drove to the bars in Denver almost weekly.
That was my first experience seeing a gay play in Denver, but it would certainly not be my last. The next play was a bit more hazy to me. Eastern Standard was a sophisticated look at the relationship between people of privilege and those who were not well off in New York in the 1980's. About the aptly called "greed generation" of the Reagan Era, this play looked at the consequences of those years upon those who suffered from the excesses, either those who had benefitted or those who had been crushed. The theater could best be described as a belfry of a church a couple of blocks west of Broadway. I later saw the same play in North Hollywood where one of the lead actors had played the on-again, off-again gay son on Dynasty.
During the 90's, many gay plays turned up all over Denver in venues as varied as the plays themselves. Ten Percent in Maple Grove ran for several months in the same theater, Jack's, as Breaking the Code. There was also a four-actor (two men, two women) musical called Ten Percent Review that was performed at the original Theater On Broadway venue at 135 S. Broadway. Later, in the same theater The Boys In The Band played. I do recall that Lonely Planet ran for a time in a former movie theater somewhere along S. Ogden St., well past I-25. Later, at the Acoma Theater, a former church on Acoma and 1st Street, just a couple of blocks north of the old Racines location just off Speer, the two parts of Angels in America debuted, along with an actual bat in its belfry during at least one performance that I attended. The Acoma Theater and Industrial Arts company also premiered Take Me Out, a baseball-themed gay play.
Not to be outdone, the Denver Center also provided several gay-themed plays throughout the late 80's and well into the 90's: Torch Song Trilogy, Angels in America, Lily Tomlin's Search for Intelligent Life, and Forever Plaid. Obviously, the last two were not specifically gay, but the performers and creative talent behind the two productions were as gay as one can get. I met a few of the actors in Forever Plaid over the two different, lengthy runs of the musical. The last time I read the CD insert, one of those same actors was still performing in Forever Plaid in Las Vegas. (I wonder how much longer he can play any of the characters because he's got to be getting a bit long in the tooth to still be a member of an early 60's boy band, temporarily resurrected.)
In a much smaller venue at the Denver Center, now the location of the gift shop along 14th Street, premiered more intimate plays such as Five Card Stud and a pair of plays by a Texas playwrite and actor who performed his own one-man pieces. At Five Card Stud my friend Frank and I sat so close that we could have played a hand with the actors and also could see the ice in their glasses slowly melt over the course of the play.
Of course, the most consistent and long-lived venue for gay-themed plays throughout the 90's and early 2000's was Theater on Broadway. But I will save that discussion for the next blog.
