Edward Payson Call: Denver Center Theatre Company's first artistic leader dies at 94

Edward Payson Call, a major figure in the American regional theater movement and the first official Artistic Director of the Denver Center Theatre Company, died Feb. 1 at his home in Seattle. He was 94. 

“His vision established our foundation, his artistry fueled our passion and his contributions to theater were felt throughout the American theater community,” the company said in a statement.

Call launched the DCTC on New Year’s Eve 1979 amid a downtown spectacle that was as big as anything that could ever be put on a stage. His inaugural, 40-member acting company included Tyne Daly, Tandy Cronyn and Delroy Lindo, who were joined in coming seasons by Mercedes Ruehl and other future stars. But by the third of his five seasons in Denver, more than half of Call's acting company were performers from Denver.

"I sought out the indigenous talent because that's what regional theater should be about," Call told me in a 2003 interview. "Without it, that's how theaters become homogenized."

The three-day opening celebration in 1979 culminated in a gala for Denver’s history books, with celebrities in attendance ranging from Lucille Ball to Denver native Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to Jimmy Stewart to Leonard Nimoy to Henry Fonda, who received the American National Theatre and Academy’s prestigious National Artists’ Award as part of the opening festivities.

They saw the DCTC open three plays on three successive nights, christening the new (and now newly remodeled) $13 million Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex. Even the press corps harbored its own rising star: Molly Ivins of The New York Times, who described the atmosphere as “healthily frantic” and said the creation of the DCTC and its four stages signaled Denver’s entrance into the theatrical big leagues.

The DCTC was a true repertory company back then, meaning all 40 inaugural actors appeared in Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” and were then divided up for alternating performances of Orson Welles’ “Moby Dick Rehearsed” or Molière’s “The Learned Ladies.”

Call had auditioned Daly at an open casting call in Los Angeles and hired her to play the lead role in “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” and a supporting role in “Moby Dick Rehearsed.”

The future “Cagney and Lacy” star was already a highly sought TV actor at the time, but she wanted the five-month Denver contract because Call already was a director of international repute – “and I was always a theater animal,” she told me in a 2018 interview. And Call, she said, handed her an enormously appealing slate of roles: “For the opportunity to stretch from playing a Russian peasant girl in ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ to an 18^th-century actress who plays the role of Pip in ‘Moby Dick Rehearsed’ felt to me like I was finally being accredited as an actress with some scope.”

Daly freely admits that her work with Call neither began nor ended well. Call had previously directed a seminal production of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” starring Zoe Caldwell at the esteemed Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and he was hoping to recreate that magic in Denver with Daly.

“Ed was an ideal of mine. He was a terrific director who knew that play backward and forward,” Daly said. “Zoe Caldwell was another ideal of mine. But I felt like I had her ghost to deal with the whole time. We stumbled a little bit in the beginning, and after four weeks of rehearsal, I asked Ed if we could have coffee. I said to him, ‘Ed, I have tried all this time to give you my very, very best Zoe Caldwell. But I’m not Zoe Caldwell. Now, can I be in the play?’ And so we found that middle ground between my complete innocence of the play and his deep knowledge of it. And we made it a success.”

Call was born Aug. 10, 1928, and made his Broadway debut in 1963 as a stage manager in a play called “The Golden Age.” That same year, he was named to the founding artistic staff of the Guthrie Theater working with famed director Dr. Tyrone Guthrie. Call later directed two plays on Broadway: “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” in 1968 and “Little Black Sheep” in 1975.

Although DCPA founder Donald R. Seawell hired Call as the DCTC's first official artistic director, much of the planning already had been done by Gordon Davidson, who left the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to start the DCTC but bowed out of the Denver gig, Call said, "when the local community turned against him.”

"I think there was a community paranoia about being exploited by outsiders coming in and carpet-bagging," Call said in that 2003 interview. "They felt he was going to do these plays here just to move them to Los Angeles. Gordon was earnest about his intentions here, but he felt the groundswell against him was so strong that he just wanted to get out.”

Call was directing at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, Calif., when Seawell offered him the job in Denver. The next five years were full of tumult and turnover.

"It was my mission to make the community accept this theater as an important institution and to turn the bad feelings they had about Don (Seawell) around,” Call said. “He was taking a lot of heat. People had warned me he would make me miserable, but he turned out to be an absolutely ideal boss. I mean here was this cathedral of art that I was just given, with enough money to run it well."

Call resigned in 1983 when Seawell offered the Denver Center as a home for the National Theatre Conservatory, a graduate program that had been chartered by Congress in 1941 but never funded because of World War II. Call had no interest in starting a college program, so Seawell called Donovan Marley, who founded the PCPA and had guest-directed a play for Call in the previous Denver season. After an interim season, Marley was officially hired for what turned out to be a 23-year run.

“Ed Call is one of the rocks in the foundation of the regional theater movement in America,” Marley said today. “I am so lucky that our lives and careers meshed. I am grateful for every shared experience.”

Call settled in Seattle in the 1990s but continued to direct and teach across the country. His passion, his friends say, was introducing young people to Shakespeare, which led him to start the Young Shakespeare Workshop in 1992.

Dozens of those who performed for Call around the country have taken to Facebook to try to put proper context around a paradoxical director some say could be simultaneously inspiring, scornful and even terrifying. But one with exactingly high standards who ultimately changed innumerable lives for the better and made them stronger artists.

Family say he spent the afternoon of his passing sharing Shakespeare’s sonnets.

A memorial will be held in Seattle on Feb. 11.