CREEDE – On paper, it was a foolish plan. In execution, it was as magical as the destination itself:

Start the day with an 8 a.m. drive to Creede, a tiny town 250 miles southwest of Denver in the remote San Juan Mountains. Arrive 10 minutes before the 1 p.m. start of a world-premiere play being performed by one of Colorado’s most polished and professional theater companies. When it’s over, take a right outside the front of the theater, walk toward the noble peak that juts out from the end of Main Street a thousand feet higher than the town’s already 9,000-foot elevation and step into one of Colorado’s most breathtaking hikes.

Take back your breath, see a different expertly staged play at 7, hop back into your car, white-knuckle your way through an unforecasted monsoon and pull back into Denver just before 2 a.m.

Eighteen hours of a signature Colorado summer Thursday. Replenished. Revived. Restored.

Or, you could do what normal people do: Rent a room and make it last for a weekend, or a summer, or, for the most rugged few, a lifetime. 

“People come here, this place grabs them, and they stay for a while,” said longtime actor and resident Kate Berry.

This is a place of staggering and timeless beauty. The first time I drove up Main Street in 2002, I saw dancers dancing alongside the ghosts of robber and silver barons. I saw actors acting in the shadows of con men. And I saw singers singing through echoes of gunshots.

Creede is a historic former mining town at the headwaters of the Rio Grande River whose crime rate per 100,000 residents is statistically zero in every category. Then again, only 417 hardy souls brave the winters and live here year-round – so it would take an awful lot of tipped cows to move that needle. It’s a town that couldn’t get by without its all-volunteer fire department, ambulance and Ladies Aid Society.

But in the summer, Creede becomes a kind of Brigadoon, swelling to accommodate the 20,000 who come here for its hunting, its hiking and its nationally renowned, 57-year-old Creede Repertory Theatre.

It’s the stuff of legend that also happens to be true. And a powerful example of the economic power of the arts.

The Creede Repertory Theatre saved this dying town for the first time back in 1966. That’s when a dozen naive students from the University of Kansas heeded a desperate plea sent out by the local Jaycees asking for someone — anyone — to come and infuse the town with culture and, therefore, a badly needed economic boost. The population, which had reached 10,000 at the height of the silver boon back in 1889, was now down to 600.

You can imagine how bad things must have been for these proud ranchers and lifelong miners to resort to importing artsy kids to bring life back to their boarded-up Main Street. But Creede hadn’t completely abandoned an opportunistic past that includes Soapy Smith, Calamity Jane and Bat Masterson. Little did the poor Jayhawks know the Jaycees only had $27 in the bank.

“We threw out a line,” the late Sheriff Phil Leggitt once told me with a laugh, “and those thee-a-ter kids took the bait.” Specifically, Steve Grossman, the 19-year-old undergrad who answered the call. He and his fellow idealistic interlopers trekked 725 miles, started a summer theater company in the town’s closed moviehouse and somehow found a way to blend into this hardscrabble, isolated town that only begrudgingly welcomed them. And, over time, they meshed this anachronistic community into one.

The revival began with the first production of “Mr. Roberts” in 1966. And since the last silver mine finally closed in 1985, the theater has been the area’s primary economic generator. Today, the Creede Repertory Theatre employs a professional summer company of 100, as well as a year-round staff of eight. That makes Creede Rep the largest employer in Mineral County by far.

“We pump $3 million back into the town of Creede every year, $4 million back into the San Luis Valley and $5 million statewide,” said Producing Artistic Director John DiAntonio, who is often mistaken around town for a young George Bailey (and the man who played him on film.) 

With the 2011 addition of the Ruth Humphreys Brown studio theater a few blocks down Main Street, Creede now offers five titles in repertory each summer on a $1.8 million budget. Attendance is expected to land at around 18,000 for this year. That’s down about 18 percent from the salad days of 2014, but, importantly, back up to pre-pandemic levels. When you consider that this town can only accommodate about 4,000 at any given time, the fact that these plays attract 18,000 over four months is significant. So, too, that the company’s youth outreach programs impact 37,000 area students every year.

Only 11 percent of Creede Rep’s theatergoers come from Mineral County. The majority come from Texas and Oklahoma, many of whose families have owned nearby vacation ranches for decades. They also come from Kansas, New Mexico and other parts of Colorado. The not-quite-low-enough-hanging fruit the company has long craved has been attracting more audiences from Denver and the Front Range.

Where everybody knows your name

What they will find is, in the truest sense of the word, a community. Take, for example, “Mountain Octopus,” a new play by Beth Kander, directed by Colorado Theatre Guild President Betty Hart and commissioned by Creede Rep. That’s when companies take on the huge expense of developing a brand-new script for its world-premiere staging from scratch – a process that is prohibitively expensive for many companies. Creede’s 2023 audiences were just treated to the rather meta story of a fictional small town that’s pretty much Creede on stage. Only this one is slowly reopening a year after a wildfire shut it down and left everyone broken, in different ways.

When the play ends, the crowd spills onto Main Street. The lone man who just happens to be pushing a baby carriage straight into the suddenly swollen sidewalk throng isn’t getting away anytime soon. He’s Lavour Addison, an actor who will be featured in tonight’s performance of “The Royale” inside this very same theater. He’s pushing his adorable son, Idris, and these admirers will have their baby face time.

“The Royale” will be new to most of this evening’s audience. It’s a boxing play by Marco Ramirez that’s loosely based on the life of Jack Johnson, who became the first undisputed Black heavyweight champion of the world in 1908. But some Denver theatergoers will recognize the title because, late last year, Addison played the Johnson character in the Butterfly Effect Theatre of Colorado’s Boulder staging, which went on to win a record-breaking nine Colorado Theatre Guild Henry Awards, including a best-actor statue for Addison. But here, he’s playing a completely different character in the story.

As Addison’s baby is being admired on the sidewalk, 74-year-old “Mountain Octopus” actor Christy Brandt slips out the front door unnoticed – which is remarkable given she is the closest thing to a celebrity in this town. Brandt just played a deliciously mean old lady (with a heart of gold) in what is estimated to be her 135th role with the company. She takes a left at the corner, walks over a small concrete spillway and in just one block arrives at her house. It’s the pink one. Literally. It’s painted pink, it has a sign that says “The Pink House,” and in front flies a red Creede flag that, appropriately, has faded to pink. (There’s also a sign that says ‘Insane Asylum Entrance” – but it’s not pink.)

It’s impossible to overstate what Brandt and her husband, John Gary Brown, have come to mean to this company and this community since they arrived here in 1974. “Brownie” – an actor, artist and company photographer – will be honored with his own full-blown celebration on Sept. 9. Brandt is the best Colorado actor you may never have seen act before. The couple, who winter in Lawrence, have been coming back to Creede every summer (but two) for the past 49 years, giving her a singular place in Colorado theater history.

“She means everything to the Creede Repertory Theatre,” said DiAntonio. “She’s the connection to our history, but also to our present.”

If you have come to Creede at any time over the past 50 years, Berry added, “Christy Brandt has been part of your experience.”

The praise makes Brandt’s cheeks turn pink. “After all, we’re just a couple of old hippies who never really grew out of it,” she said. And she means it.

Point of clarification: The Pink House isn’t just Brandt and Brownie’s house. They own it with two other couples from the company’s early days. They all have their own rooms – and “I love it the most when we’re all here together at the same time,” she said, “because we really love each other.”

The intertwined history of Creede and its summer theater company is filled with colorful characters who have slowly faded over time. But no one will soon forget Paul Stone, the shop foreman also known as  “The Cannon Guy,” also known as “Captain Ka-Boom.” Each May, when Creede Rep’s company members arrived for the summer, Stone led them into the forest on a pilgrimage blasting bowling balls that could travel a half-mile up in the air and land about a mile away. He died in 2016.

Broadway legend Mandy Patinkin (“Homeland”), the company’s most-esteemed alum, first came to Creede as an 18-year-old rising sophomore from the University of Kansas in 1971. Even while appearing in trifling musicals like “The Boyfriend,” Brandt knew he was going to be a star of stage and screen one day. She also knew Patinkin was pretty darned clever.

“He built a robot toilet-paper dispenser,” Brandt said. “When you pulled the rope, the guy’s arm would go up and he’d hand you a strip of toilet paper.”

Patinkin, who took in a performance of “Clue” on July 27 and stayed for an audience Q&A, regards his two summers in Creede as “a watershed event in my life more powerful than my bar mitzvah. Equal in power to meeting my wife and falling in love with her, and watching the birth of my two children,” he said. (One of those children, Isaac Grody-Patinkin, now serves on Creede Rep’s board of trustees.) 

“Creede is a healing place, and a place that truly gave birth to my professional life,” he said.

For a decade or more, John Arp was among the most acclaimed actors in Denver – and also a classically trained chef. He came to perform with Creede Rep and never left. After seven seasons, he opened a comfort-food restaurant called Arp’s in 2015, and three years later opened a fancier place in the historic Creede Hotel nearby. He hasn’t acted since.

Brandt and Brownie are pretty much Creede’s leading characters now. DiAntonio promises that next season will be built around the celebration of Brandt’s 50th year as a company member. She’s played some heavy roles over the years, like a South African widow in Athol Fugard’s “The Road to Mecca” and a woman descending into dementia in Charlie Thurston’s “The History Room.” But for her Golden Anniversary season, she’s hoping for a comedy – “because comedy is harder than drama,” she said. And she’s mindful of what reaching 50 years with one company will mean.

“It means that I’ve gotten to live most of my life doing my art alongside my husband doing his art, and living the way we want to live,” she said. “I think everybody wants to follow their dream – but not many people get to do it.”