Chip Walton, who has built Curious Theatre from nothing into Colorado’s most accomplished and socially relevant homegrown theater company of the past quarter century, has announced both his resignation and the historic appointment of longtime company member Jada Suzanne Dixon as the company’s new Artistic Director.

Walton put Curious on the national theater map with its spectacular rise from a grassroots start-up in 1997 into the nationally regarded, boundary-breaking Off-Broadway-scale company it is today. He may well go down as the most significant figure in Colorado theater over the past 25 years.

As a mid-sized professional company, Curious has no peers in the Colorado theater ecology – although several other newer, rising companies, no doubt inspired by Curious’ success, are well on their way. Walton’s programming mantra was offering stories that were new to Denver. Under Walton, Curious has produced 21 world premieres and 82 regional premieres.

“Chip has produced a legacy that will be hard to match in Colorado theater both in terms of the number of productions and certainly in the quality of work,” said Jim Steinberg, President of the company’s board of directors.

The changes take full effect after a transition year that will celebrate the company’s 25 years in Denver, though Dixon will assume her new title this August. Walton will serve as an artistic and business consultant for the company and will direct the final show of the 2022-23 season, “On the Exhale,” a one-woman play starring his wife, Dee Covington.

Leaving with Walton next year will be Covington, also a founding Curious company member and its Education Director. She’s an actor, director and creator of Curious’ nationally renowned Curious New Voices, a development program for playwrights age 15-22.

“It’s been an amazing gift to have had the opportunity, along with Dee and so many other amazing Curious artists and supporters, to conjure, to create, and to cultivate Curious Theatre Company,” Walton said in a statement. “And now, it is time to celebrate.”

Dixon is currently both starring in Curious’ new production of “Fireflies” and directing the Arvada Center’s family drama “Stick Fly,” which made her the first Black female director in that theater company’s 46-year history.

“I’m looking forward to leading Curious into the next quarter-century of bold theatrical work,” Dixon said in a statement. She promised a 25th anniversary season “filled with amazing plays, celebrations of our accomplishments and vision for the future.”

Her appointment makes her not only the first person of color in a full-time leadership position at Curious, but also the first woman of color to serve as Artistic Director of a Denver metro theater company she did not found. Talking with the Denver Gazette in March, Dixon said: “This is the time for the Colorado theater community to be looking inward and not only asking the tough questions, but to answer them – and then act accordingly.”

Lynne Collins, who hired Dixon to direct “Stick Fly” at the Arvada Center and who was just named Artistic Director of Theatre there, called Dixon’s selection “an excellent handoff.”

“I think Jada is a fabulous theatermaker and a real collaborator – both in the creation of art and in trying to steer through those tricky areas related to equity and diversity,” said Collins, who will be absorbing the duties of longtime Arvada Center artistic leader Rod Lansberry. “She’s not agenda-driven; she’s solution-driven. It’s just a fabulous choice. Yay to the ladies.”

Steinberg called Dixon “a wonderful choice” because she is a 10-year company member and knows both the organization and its audience. “It makes perfect sense for the company, but I also personally think it’s great for the community because she has such deep roots here. This is a win-win for Curious and for Denver.”

When the “We See You, White American Theatre” movement put companies across the country on notice following the 2020 George Floyd police murder, Curious already was way ahead of the curve. From the beginning, Walton had created Curious as a home for fearless political and progressive new works focused on social justice and equality.

Cases in point: The Civil War drama “The Whipping Man,” which won a record seven Henry Awards in 2014 and, two years later, “White Guy on the Bus,” starring Dixon. In 2019, Curious staged “Pass Over,” a modern, Black variation on “Waiting for Godot,” two years before the celebrated play became the toast of Broadway. Walton committed to staging entire trilogies by playwrights of color Tarell Alvin McCraney and Quiara Alegría Hudes, each of which employed multiple BIPOC actors.

Over the past 10 years, 75 percent of Curious’ plays have been written by playwrights of color, LGBTQIA+ playwrights, or female playwrights, according to data provided by Business Manager Jeannene Bragg.

“I don’t want to do shows that have already been done in the area, or that don’t fulfill our mission-driven goal that it must stimulate conversation,” Walton said in a previous interview. Today, he added:  “We’ve all created a remarkable body of artistic work together, through our shared vision, commitment to mission and exceptional ensemble of artists.”

At its best, Curious’ programming under Walton has been provocative, risk-taking, infuriating, harrowing and groundbreaking. From its earliest days, Curious was known for grabbing provocative titles the larger and more risk-averse DCPA Theatre Company regularly passed on, including a string of four straight Tony-winning Best Plays like “Proof,” “The Goat” and “I Am My Own Wife.” Curious was first to stage “Take Me Out,” which imagined the violent fallout should a baseball superstar ever come out as gay, as well as “Frozen,” an up-close look inside the mindset of a child-killer.

When the pandemic hit, Curious was already preparing to stage Joshua Harmon’s “Admissions,” a no-holds-barred look at White privilege, and Lisa Loomer’s “Roe,” a revealing portrait of the two women behind the Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion in 1973.

Curious drew media attention from all over the world in 2006 when it created “The War Anthology” –  a collection of short plays each based on a single war photograph. Not all of the playwrights played true to that concept, but with contributions from Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel and Suzan-Lori Parks, the effort was hailed as the first theater collaboration anywhere to include contributions from three Pulitzer Prize winners.

For all its work for social justice over the years, though, Curious has been essentially an allied White theater company – a notion that fundamentally changes with Dixon now taking the helm.

Dixon, a winner of three True West Awards for her acting, broke into directing with “Fairfield” at Miners Alley Playhouse in 2019. Last year, she both directed and starred in Curious’ “American Son,” playing the mother of a biracial teen killed by police.

Dixon grew up with performing in her bones. She was raised in Park Hill just north of the old Stapleton Airport. Her father was Deputy Mayor Bill Roberts, just the second African American elected to Denver City Council and considered a visionary for pushing for the construction of Denver International Airport. He also has a school named after him.

Dixon performed children’s theater at the famed Bonfils Theatre (starring in “The Incredible Jungle Journey of Fenda Maria” at age 12). She wanted most to be a dancer, studying with legends Cleo Parker Robinson and Mattie Springfield. In high school she performed in musicals including “West Side Story” and “Bye Bye Birdie” for a citywide youth theater company called The Original Scene. She graduated from Machebeuf Catholic High School and went on to earn her undergraduate degree from New York University and a graduate degree from Harvard. She returned in Colorado in 2003 to play a bone-chilling Lady Macbeth for Denver’s late Shadow Theatre Company. 

Curious’ roots trace to a triumphant production of “Angels in America” that Walton directed for a company called Hunger Artists in 1997.

“The genesis was this group of artists wanting to continue working together, armed with the belief that we should be able to make some portion of our living doing what we do as artists,” Walton said. “That was not often the case in those days if you were not at the Denver Center or a few other places.”

Officially, the Curious name was chosen in the hope that selected plays would make people curious. Unofficially, it was chosen because Walton’s mother was an elementary school teacher, “and I was a huge ‘Curious George’ fan,” he said.

Walton has since grown Curious into a company with as many as seven full-time employees, a $1.25 million annual budget and ownership of the former church it performs in at 1080 Acoma St.

And the pandemic put it all at risk.

“The past few months have been a nightmare of a roller coaster,” Walton said in the summer of 2020. Unlike smaller companies that rent their facilities, Curious had a full-time staff to pay, a mortgage and a building to maintain. “On the worst days,” he said then, “I’m literally crushed with the weight of all the uncertainty in every direction.”

Since reopening, Curious has been laser-pointed on its creative mission, with an original immigration musical and, currently, “Fireflies,” about a shaky marriage between an unfaithful Black minister and his conflicted wife in the 1963 Jim Crow South.

“As this country continues to spiral away from justice and unity, and toward division, hatred and ignorance, the artistic space that Curious has carved out seems more important than ever,” Walton said during the pandemic.

Curious’ singular place in the theater ecology is something that has been noted by its most produced playwright, Paula Vogel.

“I don’t know how many theaters I’ve been in, but you can feel the energy in this one,” Vogel told me in 2004. “In every town, I figure there are at least one or two places that are on the side of the angels. This is one of them.”