‘Go to Creede for your soul’

Now celebrating its 60th season, CRT is an unlikely success story of a nationally regarded arts organization rooted in a tiny, remote community. Every summer, CRT employs approximately 75 theater artists to work alongside eight year-round staff members, produces 7-10 plays in rotating repertory, with more than 120 performances and 18,000 patrons. The theater is now the largest employer in Mineral County.

Find season and ticket information HERE.

To help celebrate 60 seasons of mountain-made theater, Alamosa Citizen’s Hannah Eubanks talked with past and present Creede Repertory members about their time in Creede.

Here are the interviews:

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One of the Kansas University students that helped make a theater in Creede a reality.

1.) What is your background, where are you from, how did you end up at Creede Repertory?

That’s quite a question, isn’t it? With many parts to be done with. I was doing graduate work at the University of Kansas starting in January of 1966, and I had many friends there who were in the theater. I think it was three particular friends. We hung out together. Two of us had been in a show that had toured. We had classes together, so we got to know each other very well. We really wanted to do something in the summer of ‘66 together. So we thought, well, maybe we can start a theater here in Lawrence, Kansas, where the University of Kansas is situated. But we looked around and nothing seemed really available, and I looked around in Columbia, Missouri, in my hometown, and nothing was available.

So there were four of us, including me, who drove to Chicago. I think this is on a winter break, which is January.

Then I guess it was a month or two later, Steve Grossman, who was the real head of the theater back then, I think he was 18-turning-19, saw a little letter that was posted on the Green Room bulletin board at the University of Kansas. The Green Room is where you hang out before the show begins or until your scene starts. Steve took down this letter, and it was a place called Creede, C-R-E-E-D-E, Creede Colorado. And it was from the Creede Jaycees, which are the Junior Chamber of Commerce.

“We would like for you to come and check us out, and we would love for you to start doing a theater for us.” So it was the people who were looking for a place to do theater and the group wanting people to do theater and it was just a miraculous collision of the stars there. 

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2.) What is your favorite memory while being involved at Creede Repertory?

A specific memory, in 1967, this was our second year, the girls lived in a trailer this time, and the boys still lived in what we called the Silver Palace. In “The Miracle Worker,” I played Helen Keller, the blind and deaf child. It’s a very moving show of the struggle of her trying to figure out life. And the woman who becomes her teacher.

A Valley group of men with their wives came in and they had been having a good time at the bar beforehand, and it was very noisy. You could hear them backstage. And I thought, “Boy, this is going to be maybe not the show for them to go to. It’s not a comedy.” But they were whooping and hollering, almost rolling on the floors (but they weren’t rolling on the floors.)  

That moment has just stayed with me of how the power of theater and the story it tells can suddenly overcome whatever’s going on. It can give you those hushed moments. It can give you moments of absolute glue. That is a wonderful memory for me. 

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3.) If you could tell your past-self anything about the time you’ve spent at Creede Repertory, or give your past-self any advice, what would you say?

Try what’s new and different, and don’t be afraid. There was so much that could go wrong, that it didn’t go wrong. Try out for things that are so different from you that demand new skills and new talents. Just try.

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Participated in the CRT Young Audience Outreach Tour three times and was a summer acting company member last year. Pictured: Ibarra as Igor in ‘Young Frankenstein,’ 2024, by Brooke Ashlee Photography.

1.) What is your background, where are you from, how did you end up at Creede Repertory?

I’m originally from Wichita, Kansas, born and raised. I started theater in high school and then eventually wanted to pursue it in college. I had graduated from Oklahoma City University in 2023 with my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting and my minor in directing. And so through my studies at OCU, I had known a few (Creede) staff members. One was a professor of Introduction to Theatrical Design for the directing minor, and then I also worked with this director for “The Laramie Project.” The director of that show was Jess Jackson, and she was the former artistic director of Creede. So they shared the story of Creede with me, and we’re talking about a theater of the mountains, which sounded like a dream. Honestly, I’ve never been to Colorado before that point.

It wasn’t until, I think 2021, when a good friend of mine named Alyssa Peters, who was working their front of house staff at the time, reached out to me through text and said, “Hey, our education director is looking for another actor for their Young Audience outreach tour.” With that education program, I auditioned, literally got cast in a week and then started rehearsals two weeks later. It was a really quick process and I had to eventually coordinate with some professors at school to accommodate me because that would mean I had to take a semester off, basically.

That’s kind of how I found Creede. And ever since then, I just loved them.

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2.) What is your favorite memory while being involved at Creede Repertory?

I think my favorite memory, more recently, is probably one of the chat backs I had with my castmates and some of our production members who were running backstage helping with the costuming as well as just scene changes. We got to do a chat back for “Prima’s Guide to Funerals,” which was also taken to Alamosa and Pueblo as well. And I think one of the chat backs we had in Creede. This was a particular weekend where they invited a lot of Alamosa people to come watch it. And they came up to us and some of them got a little too excited, I think, as far as beverages and stuff, but they were blown away by the representation of the community. I think that for a new play, there’s always this …

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3.) If you could tell your past-self anything about the time you’ve spent at Creede Repertory, or give your past-self any advice, what would you say?

I’d probably say you are as professional as you think you are and be prepared to make some of the most important relationships you’ve made in your life. 

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This is Rodriguez’s second season at CRT. Pictured: Rodriguez in ‘Baskerville,’ 2024, by Brooke Ashlee Photography.

1.) What is your background, where are you from, how did you end up at Creede Repertory?

I am originally from Miami. I am the product of Cuban immigrants. I lived the first 18 years of my life in Miami, and then I went to AMDA, which is the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City. To get your BSA, you have to go to their Los Angeles campus. So I ended up in LA for eight years after graduating, I stayed there, wasn’t really happy, and then I said “2020 is my year. I’m moving back to New York.” Obviously we know that didn’t immediately happen. So I moved back to New York in 2021.

The way I ended up at Creede is that a friend of mine, one of my dearest friends, saw that the Arvada Center was casting the show “The River Bride,” and she knew the director. She was like, “Oh, you should audition for this.” So I did.

My first taste of Colorado was working at the Arvada Center and then Leonard Madrid, who wrote the play “Prima’s Guide for Funerals,” had done another one of his plays with Jamie (the friend).  They had reached out to Jamie to see if she could do the reading of “Prima’s Guide for Funerals,” and she was unavailable. So she passed along my name. Next thing I knew, I was on a Zoom with Kate Berry and she was like, “We’d love to have you.” And I was like, “Yeah, this sounds fun.” So I came for a week, did the reading. Then I fell in love with the story, and fell in love with this cute little town. I’m a very big “Gilmore Girls” fan, so I really felt I was living out my Stars Hollow fantasy.

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2.) What is your favorite memory while being involved at Creede Repertory?

I was hanging out with all theater people and some Creede locals. We did a bonfire up on the mountain, and again, I’m such a city girl that just getting to hang out around a fire with all these incredible people and then looking up and being able to fully see the Milky Way was, I think, the one memory that really stuck with me in terms of not necessarily maybe involved with the theater, but Creede as a whole and its charm and the beauty that it brings.

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3.) If you could tell your past-self anything about the time you’ve spent at Creede Repertory, or give your past-self any advice, what would you say?

Before I got here for last season, I was really nervous. I mean, I had been here for a week, but living here for a week is very different than living here for four and a half months. And I was really nervous. I mean, I feel like everybody is nervous about making friends. Nervous about being 90 minutes from a hospital. Just nervous about all of the things.

I think that would calm me down. That if anything did go wrong or even if I was just having a bad day, there were a handful of people I know that I could reach out to and go over to their house for some coffee or a walk around town or getting to hike the up-and-over.

I think that’s what makes Creede Rep. what it is. The incredible humans that they bring together to make beautiful art. It’s hard to find a group of people that great, and I think CRT has really found something special in the humans that they bring together each summer.

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Playwright of the 2024 world premiere show, ‘Prima’s Guide to Funerals,’ set in the San Luis Valley.

1.) What is your background, where are you from, how did you end up at Creede Repertory?

I am in New Mexico. I currently split my time between Albuquerque and a small town in eastern New Mexico called Portales, where I teach at a university. I teach in the Theater Department. My entire background is one of the research and creation of stories about the region. And so I tend to write plays that are about Northern New Mexico and then direct and design. I help run a small theater company called Blackout Theater Company in Albuquerque that is devoted to telling regional stories. And so I came to work at Creede Repertory Theatre when my play “Cebollas” was done at the Denver Center in 2024. The previous artistic director saw a reading of it at the Colorado Playwright Summit at the Denver Center in 2022 and asked if they showed interest in doing a production of it, but it was already under contract.

So they offered a commission to write a play. And because all of my work is about basically the region that was New Mexico, so that includes Southern Colorado, they asked me to write a play set in the region and I went up and saw a few shows and fell in love with Creede, but also fell in love with Alamosa. I wrote a play called “Prima’s Guide for Funerals” that was set around Alamosa that started in the mortuary and then went to the church and then went to the cemetery. I spent a year working on the play, did a development, went back for that development for the headwaters part of the festival, and then last year was there for a big chunk of my summer writing and rewriting the play in rehearsals until opening night of the show. Got to hang out for a good long time.

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Playwright Leonard Madrid during rehearsals for the 2024 production of ‘Primas Guide to Funerals.’ Captured by Brooke Ashlee Photography. Courtesy of Creede Repertory Theatre.

2.) What is your favorite memory while being involved at Creede Repertory?

I was up there on my birthday and I was wearing a sweater. I am from New Mexico, my birthday is in late June, and you don’t see sweaters. And there was just this beautiful, “I don’t have enough layers of clothing on” and it was just beautiful, I immediately texted my brother like, “I am so cold.” And just in love with that idea, it being June.

I also remember there was a point where I finally stopped wearing my sweaters and Kate Berry comes out and she’s dressed as minimal as possible saying, “I am melting.” And the rest of us were like, “this is hot for you?”

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3.) If you could tell your past-self anything about the time you’ve spent at Creede Repertory, or give your past-self any advice, what would you say?

I am fairly shy and I am a very big person. I’m six-foot-four, like 280 pounds. And so I try not to be in anybody’s way and I tend to assume that I’m already in the way. I think I would’ve encouraged myself to ask if I could sit in on more things. Everybody’s just so generous and so kind and extremely collaborative spirit that I was like, oh, “I don’t want to upset anybody.” But I think it would’ve been great to peek into what other people were doing and not feel like I would be in the way if I asked to sit in on the “Boomtown!” rehearsal or something like that. 

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A member of the Creede Repertory Theatre acting company off and on since 1993. Pictured: Ernstthal in ‘She Loves Me,’ 2017, courtesy of CRT.

1.) What is your background, where are you from, how did you end up at Creede Repertory?

I’m from California till I was 10, and then Connecticut in my teenage years, just outside of New York City. How did I get to Creede? Shortly the year after I graduated undergrad, I was living in Seattle and I was doing a show for the Fringe Festival. It was a feminist wrestling musical, and the one playing my wife had worked in Creede, and I came into rehearsal one day and asked the people, “where’s a good summer place to work? Summer Stock Theater?” And she said, “Oh, I think you’d really like this place I just worked at.”

She sent a letter to the artistic director saying I was good to go. He sent me sides, which are a little bit of script to audition for. This was back in the early ’90s. So I borrowed somebody’s video camera and put myself on tape and sent a VHS, I mean, it was back when they were huge. I put myself on tape and he hired me. I had never set foot in Colorado. I flew into Alamosa on one of those little Buddy Holly-killing planes and drove from Alamosa to Creede and was just knocked out by the landscape. I’d never been in the Rocky Mountains. That’s how I got here. And I remember thinking when I first got here, I was looking at the whole town and I thought, “Well, if everybody comes to the theater, the shows will run a week and a half,” but people come and the vacationers come. And that was the summer of ’93, I think, was my first summer in Creede.

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2.) What is your favorite memory while being involved at Creede Repertory?

I think actually one of my favorite memories was kind of a show that went sideways opening night. One of the actors was not feeling well. This was the opening night of a premiere show. It had never been done. It was the first time the show had been done, and he fell sick and the director had to put on his costume and finish the show for him. So it was kind of a crazy night. It was actually the director’s uncle’s story we were telling. It was about his time behind enemy lines in World War II. The play was called “Beautiful Country.” I mean, there are a lot of crazy theater stories, but that’s one of my favorites when we had to replace an actor mid-show and put the director in his costume and have him carry the book. So that was kind of exciting.

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3.) If you could tell your past-self anything about the time you’ve spent at Creede Repertory, or give your past-self any advice, what would you say?

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Van Fleet started at Creede Repertory Theatre as an actor in 2012. Pictured: Emily in ‘Harry the Great,’ 2012, by John Gary Brown.

1.) What is your background, where are you from, how did you end up at Creede Repertory?

I was born in Colorado Springs, primarily raised in Colorado Springs and Boulder. I went to the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. My dad lived in California and he was an actor and director. So when I would visit him, spend time with him in the summer, I would follow him around at the theater in the various shows that he was doing. And I fell in love with theater through my dad, and I always knew it was what I wanted to do.

Shortly out of college, I was working professionally, regionally, and I was doing one show at the Arvada Center with Diana Dresser, who is an alum of Creede Repertory Theatre, and she told me about this company. Having grown up in Colorado, I knew nothing about Creede or Creede Rep. I’d never heard of it, and it sounded like a really magical place to make theater and to spend a summer. It sounded beautiful, and I thought, how do I get there? 2012 was my first season, and I’ve done nine or 10 seasons since then over the course of the last 13 years. In my first season, I knew I wanted to be here more permanently, and my career took me to a lot of different places, but I ultimately ended up coming back. I am artistic director at the theater. I have a home in Creede, and I get to tell stories in the mountains, which is just a dream. 

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2.) What is your favorite memory while being involved at Creede Repertory?

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3.) If you could tell your past-self anything about the time you’ve spent at Creede Repertory, or give your past-self any advice, what would you say?

I don’t know that I’d do anything differently. I think I would give myself a heads-up that doing repertory theater is not for the faint of heart, that it will be really hard at times, but it will make you a stronger theater maker. It will make you a more well-rounded artist, and it will equip you with tools as a human that you couldn’t get any other way, and you’re also going to make some of the best friendships you’ll ever have in your life.

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Berry started at CRT as an actor in 2005. Pictured: Kate in ‘Mountain Octopus,’ 2023, by McLeod9 Creative.

1.) What is your background, where are you from, how did you end up at Creede Repertory?

I found Creede because I had auditioned for, his name was James Bohnen with the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company in Chicago, and he happened to be holding auditions in that space for shows that he was directing at Creede Repertory Theatre with Mo LaMee, and this was around 2002, I think.

I auditioned for both of them and it was one of the best auditions I’d ever had. They were just really kind. They were excited, they gave us direction. It was just a really great process, a really great callback process. And I didn’t get cast that year, but some people who became my friends did.

Then a few years later, I had actually met up with Mo. I ran into him at the UPTAs (Unified Professional Theatre Auditions) one year and had lunch with him. And he told me at that time, “Look, Kate, I think you’re really great. I just haven’t had anything for you, but just know you don’t have to audition for me again. I will keep you in mind.” 

And in 2005, an actor in the season at Creede Rep. dropped out just to take another contract. And so I got a call and I had had a couple of jobs lined up in Chicago. So I agonized for a while about what I should do. I actually had a friend who read Tarot cards. They’re not necessarily magic, but it can help you focus in on some decisions. She said, “You know what? Stay in Chicago for your career. Go to Creede for your soul.”

And so I chose soul.

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2.) What is your favorite memory while being involved at Creede Repertory?

One that constantly comes to mind is one that not a lot of people saw in 2016 called “The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence.” That is a three-person show, it’s got AI in it, but it’s embodied by one actor who plays Watson through all of these different times. He’s the Sherlock Holmes Watson, he’s Watson, the IBM AI. He is Watson, who was Alexander Graham Bell’s first phone call. These three actors go through space and time, and he’s also this contemporary human that this woman forms this connection with.

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3.) If you could tell your past-self anything about the time you’ve spent at Creede Repertory, or give your past-self any advice, what would you say?

Relax, man. It’s going to be okay. Trust yourself more.

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One of the Kansas University students that helped make a theater in Creede a reality.

1.) What is your background, where are you from, how did you end up at Creede Repertory?

I grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and so I went to Kansas University and I was in the theater taking some theater courses. I started in the fall of ‘65, but then in the spring of ‘66, I was trying to decide what I was going to do for the summer, and I was approached by another theater student, Steve Grossman, saying that he was going to start this summer theater out in Colorado and if I’d like to join them. It just seemed so wonderful, I was 18 years old, so it seemed like this great adventure in the mountains for the summer. So I said, “Yes, of course.” It was in June, early June of ’66, that we all went.  There were 12 of us that first summer, and we all drove out to Creede from Kansas University. That’s when I first saw Creede, in the early morning of June 10.

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2.) What is your favorite memory while being involved at Creede Repertory?

My favorite memory, it must’ve been opening night of the first show we did, which was “Mr. Roberts.” It’s a play that is set during World War II on a ship, a warship in the Pacific Ocean, and it’s a comedy drama. It had been made into a movie just a few years before that. So I think audiences were very familiar with it, and the whole idea of patriotism, World War II was still very palpable because many people in the audience had participated in that war. And so it really had a real connection with the audience. I remember that opening night because we were backstage and we really had no idea what kind of reception we were going to get. I think the audience too, which was basically at that first opening night, was made up almost completely of townspeople from the town of Creede. A lot of them were members of the Jaycees, the Junior Chamber of Commerce sponsored the whole effort.

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3.) If you could tell your past-self anything about the time you’ve spent at Creede Repertory, or give your past-self any advice, what would you say?

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A member of the Creede Repertory Theatre acting company since 1973. Pictured: Christy Brandt and Trary Maddalone in ‘Picnic,’ 1989, by John Gary Brown.

1.) What is your background, where are you from, how did you end up at Creede Repertory?

I was born and raised in the Chicago area, and I transferred to the University of Kansas for college when I was a junior, and that was in 1968. And all I heard about the whole time I was beginning my first semester there was Creede and the Creede Theatre, and “you’ve got to go there, try to get in, go there if you can.” In fact, my college roommate, Rebecca Balding, had been in the company in ’68, and she absolutely loved it. She said it was like theater bootcamp.

That next summer, the summer of ’69, I was hired by somebody, a guest director at KU, to do summer theater in Pennsylvania, which I did. And then I went back to KU, and then in 1970 was the student strike.

The Creede Theatre was started by KU students in 1966, and three of them at least, were friends of mine from high school in Winnetka, Illinois. 

We all went to New Trier High School, and Steve Grossman, who was the actual one who signed up with the Jaycees and Creede to start a theater here, was somebody that I knew at New Trier High School. Joe Roach, who was his friend who came out and checked it out with him, was also a friend. And David Miller was somebody I’d known since early on. So I knew about it and I wanted to come here.

1970 was the student strike all over the country because of the Vietnam War, we closed down the university and went home. Becky, my roommate, and I moved back to the Chicago area. In fact, we lived in the city. We’ve never lived in the city before. We’ve always been in the suburbs. So we went to the city to be actresses when we did community theater, and she worked for an insurance company and I cleaned apartments. Then in ’73, John Gary Brown (Creede Repertory Theatre company photographer for nearly 50 years – 1974 to 2023.), who is an artist and photographer, came to Chicago to bring Becky a painting that he had done for her and named after her. And he and I fell in love. 

That year, Steve Scott was the artistic director, I guess the producing artistic director at that time of the Creede Theatre. And he said, “Would you come to Creede?” And I said, “As long as I don’t have to audition, I hate auditioning.” It makes me sick to my stomach and makes me sweat and shake. And he said, “Yeah, yeah, no, I want you.” So that was my first summer ’73. Last year was my 50th anniversary here. This was my 51st summer. 

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2.) What is your favorite memory while being involved at Creede Repertory?

Out of 50 years, it’s hard to pick one favorite memory. I think maybe in the early years when we got to meet all of the old-timers in town, all the people who knew the whole history of Creede. We got to see pictures, slides, we had slideshows with the old-timers, and they would explain how it used to be. There was one couple in particular who really took the theater in and had dinners and parties for us. And that was Al and Marie, and they lived right up from City Hall, catty-corner from the theater. And they were just like theater grandparents. If you walked by their house to take a walk up the canyon, Marie would stick her head up the door and say, “Hey, kids, you want to come in for a chocolate chip cookie?” 

We’d go in and play her piano and eat cookies and talk about the old days. And it just made us feel like we belonged right away, which was fantastic. Of course, we didn’t, it was a mining town and we were interlopers, but fortunately, some of the miners were in the Jaycees and the Jaycees were the ones that asked for somebody to come and start a theater.

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3.) If you could tell your past-self anything about the time you’ve spent at Creede Repertory, or give your past-self any advice, what would you say?

I would say, don’t stress about your future. The most important thing is to have a life. And if you can have a life in your art, if you can have a life in art somehow, if that’s what you desire, you don’t have to be famous, and you don’t have to go to a big city if that’s not your thing. There are plenty of places where you can get a lifetime’s worth of satisfaction doing your art in a place where you can also have a truly rewarding life.

Christy in a mirror preparing to go on stage, 1974, by John Gary Brown. Courtesy of Creede Repertory Theatre.

That’s what I would say, because for a long time, I, as well as all of my friends in theater thought, “Oh my God, I got to get to New York. I got to live in Chicago, or I got to get an agent, and I got to get famous.”

My friends from years ago said, “You’ve been at Creede an awfully long time. You might think about going somewhere else to work.” And I said, “I’ve been other places to work, and none of them were really as rewarding as Creede.”

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