Dee Covington sure knows how to make an exit.
Covington and co-founder Chip Walton announced in May that this will be their final season after leading the Curious Theatre Company for 25 years. And No. 25 will go down as one of Covington’s best.
Covington is an actor, director and Curious’ education director. Her 2022 roll started with directing the world-premiere staging of “Refuge,” an urgently original play that used music, puppetry and magical realism to tackle the immigration crisis through a deeply personal lens.
In the fall, Boulder’s Local Theater Company asked Covington to accompany GerRee Hinshaw, who was also among her actors in “Refuge,” through the world-premiere staging of Hinshaw’s own powerful bio-musical “Raised on Ronstadt,” which played to extended, sold-out houses at eTown Hall in Boulder.
“I feel like in those two productions, I saw a convergence of all her powers,” Hinshaw said of Covington. “When you are making any new work, by its nature, everyone involved becomes a co-collaborator. And when Dee sits in that director’s chair with a co-collaborator’s heart — magical things happen.”
Covington finished the year directing Curious’ just-finished run of “Franklinland,” a story that focuses on the fractious relationship between the domineering Ben Franklin and his over-compensating real-life son, William.
Covington’s sentimental Curious swan song will come in May, when she stars in the season-ending, one-woman play “On the Exhale,” directed by her husband.
While Covington has won oodles of awards for her acting and directing, her greatest impact has been on aspiring playwrights. There are youth writing programs, and then there is Covington’s 19-year-old Curious New Voices, which pairs writers ages 15 to 22 with a rotating team of nationally regarded playwrights, including Pulitzer Prize winners Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel and Quiara Alegría Hudes.
A reading from Dee Covington's Curious New Voices teen playwriting program.
“I’ve dedicated my career to nurturing our future through young playwrights and to ensuring our company provided cultural communion for our artists and audiences alike," said Covington. Because of her, hundreds of student playwrights have been given limitless avenues to find the plays inside them.
The alumni roster is impressive, starting with Jake Brasch, who will be one of four featured playwrights at the Denver Center’s upcoming Colorado New Play Summit.
In 2009, I interviewed Bailey Williams, then 19, while in the throes of her summer intensive at Curious.
"I became irrevocably committed to becoming a playwright the night I saw my first play performed at Curious," she told me. "I became completely addicted to the process of creating a play.”
Her new play "Events" is playing right now at The Brick in Brooklyn, and “Coach Coach” will be presented next month by Clubbed Thumb in Greenwich Village.
“I cannot describe the value in giving a teenager the opportunity and the trust to do the work of a professional playwright," she said.
Curious Theatre co-founders and married couple Dee Covington and Chip Walton in 2015.
And then there is Max Posner, whose plays have been staged around the country and is now working on film and TV projects, as well as a commissioned play for New York’s Lincoln Center Theatre. It was his time under Covington’s tutelage that set him on that path.
Covington’s intelligence, Posner said, "is total." She gives young writers space to be raw, cathartic, fearless — and that inevitably makes for some pretty thrilling theatergoing.
“How lucky were we to be teenagers sniffing the world for the first time with her as our shepherd?” Posner said.
Because of Covington, Vogel added, "a 16-year-old at Curious is an artist. Not a 16-year-old artist. An artist. You can see in them a maturity, a seriousness of purpose, a love of the form and a playfulness. When you've put all of that together, attention must be paid."
Just as attention must be paid to Covington’s impact on so many lives.
Note: The True West Awards, now in their 22nd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 of the best stories from the past year without categories or nominations.