2025 DENVER GAZETTE TRUE WEST AWARDS: DAY 4

The founder of Emancipation Theatre ‘is a prophet,’ says Denver blues legend Erica Brown’

I asked “the” Erica Brown how she would introduce formidable independent Denver theater practitioner Jeff Campbell to a stranger.

Brown had stepped away from her busy itinerary as Denver’s Queen of the Blues for part of 2025 to perform in the ensemble of Campbell’s provocatively titled new musical play, “Jedidiah Blackstone: Untold Tales from the Dark Side of the West.”

She replied in four words: “Jeff is a prophet.” Then four more: “I mean, for real.”

“People like Jeff are very rare because he’s just a different kind of animal,” she continued. “I think very much that he is someone who could take over the mantle of a Jeffrey Nickelson in Denver theater – because we need brothers telling the story along with the sisters telling the story.”

That’s saying something. Nickelson started the Shadow Theatre Company in 1997 to tell stories of the African American experience – and create opportunities for artists of all colors. To many, what we think of as the Black theater community in Denver has been largely scattered since Nickelson’s death in 2009 at age 53.

Campbell founded his blunt-force Emancipation Theatre in 2018, vowing to bring a robust Black theater company to a rapidly gentrifying Five Points and surrounding neighborhoods.

“We have many great individual Black theatermakers in Denver,” said Campbell, listing bold-faced names Hugo Jon-Sayles, Jada Dixon, Kenya Mahogany Fashaw and his “Blackstone” director, the intentionally lower-cased donnie l. betts – among others. “But Jeffrey Nickelson’s absence created a huge void in the overall theater landscape of this town. And you don’t know how heavy that cross is until you try to bear it.”

But if anyone can take it, Brown said – it’s Campbell.

“Jeff has a very focused vision for what it is that he’s trying to bring, not only to Denver theater, but to the world in general,” Brown said – “and for the awareness that he’s trying to bring around Black culture and Black theater and Black history.”

“Jedidiah Blackstone,” the character, is Campbell’s newest second self, a traveling cowboy poet with a spirit as vast as the western skies.

“Jedidiah Blackstone,” the musical play, is Campbell’s heartfelt and thoroughly engaging travelin’ poem that unearths and amplifies the largely forgotten stories of those Black frontier pioneers who had a profound impact on the birth and growth of Central City. We’re talking Clara Brown, Jeremiah Lee, Lorenzo Bowman and Ramblin’ Roy. These were real, significant and largely hidden figures in Black history. And Campbell, through his stage alter ego, is here to reclaim their erased legacies.

Campbell calls the resulting theatrical story his own Orpheus-like journey of historical self-discovery. A metaphorical mining expedition. A labor of love. And that “Tales from the Dark Side” subtitle? “Yeah, it’s definitely a double entendre,” he said with a laugh.

Campbell assembled an estimable array of top multidisciplinary talent to give “Jedidiah Blackstone” some extra performance juice for its three-week September run in the gorgeous Clayton Early Learning Center near Park Hill. The story includes four “interludes” performed by Campbell with dancer and warrior DeAndre Carroll, dancer Lino Dupa, neo-soul vocalist Merrian “MJ” Johnson, cultural tastemaker DJ Mu$a and, of course, Brown, winner of the Colorado Blues Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award – and Johnson’s mama.

I asked Brown, who has riffed with B.B. King and Al Green along her way, why she took a break from her own demanding performing schedule to join in on a developing new workshop musical.

“Because I had heard of Clara Brown, but I had not heard all of her history,” she said. “I had not heard of Lorenzo Bowman or Jeremiah Lee at all. So, digging into it, it was like, ‘Oh my, these people are defying gravity. They’re reshaping history.” 

She said the process of working with Campbell “was incredibly educational.”

For his effort and impact, Campbell is today’s fourth recipient of a 2025 Denver Gazette True West Award. These annual awards honor the best people and stories of the Colorado theater year.

From ’Bama to Longmont

Campbell was born in Decatur, Ala., in 1970. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to Longmont, which was effectively another planet. He went from chickens at his aunties’ farm to playing the jester at Skyline High School, he said, “to keep people from calling me (the n-word).”

After graduation, Campbell spent the next decade establishing himself as a fixture on the Denver hip-hop scene, first as the rapper Apostle, then as frontman of the electronic dub group Heavyweight Dub Champion, then as founder of the youth-friendly Colorado Hip-Hop Coalition, which for 19 years offered after-school classes in DJing, emceeing, breakdancing and more. All while constantly navigating the many factions and contradictions of living in a predominantly White city.

After 14 years singularly focused on music, “I found that theater was the next evolutionary step that I needed to take,” he said. “Theater is so powerful to me because all of the elements are there – everything from visual art to dance and choreography to poetry to music. Theater is the progenitor of everything – the music industry, film and television. Theater is where you really get your chops.”

Campbell wrote his first play, “Who Killed Jigaboo Jones,” in 2013, and it changed his life – but not in the good way. The one-man show, also directed by betts, was a satirical murder mystery that explored the exploitation and commodification of hip-hop culture. The play confused and even angered members of the hip-hop community. Frustrated by all of it, Campbell moved to Georgia in 2016, seemingly leaving Colorado behind forever.

But he came back with renewed purpose in 2018, when he founded Emancipation Theatre. He launched with “Honorable Disorder,” about the struggles of a Black veteran returning home to Five Points.

When Campbell announced the arrival of “Jedediah Blackstone,” it had been a minute. No one knew what to expect. But audiences were large, and receptive. One representative woman walked up to Erica Brown with tears in her eyes after watching her play Clara Brown, a woman who now famously walked an estimated 700 miles to the Colorado gold fields in 1859 because she was searching for her daughter.

“This woman came up to me and we hugged for a long time,” Brown said. “She said, ‘I am so overwhelmed by what I’ve seen tonight because I really thought on what Clara Brown actually experienced – the heat, the cold, walking 700 miles to find her daughter, without any money. And she didn’t let anything turn her around from that goal. It almost broke me.’”

That woman, Campbell said, is the reason he came home to Colorado to start Emancipation. Yes, the audience available to him here is overwhelmingly White. “But I have never wanted to be the guy to teach White folks why they need to learn this Black history,” Campbell said. “In fact, I am more interested in us – Black people – knowing our history better than anyone else.”

Now, about that introduction to Campbell: I pressed Brown on the question. “Seriously, how would you introduce Jeff Campbell to somebody who doesn’t know anything about who he is?”

“I would say, ‘Hey, meet my friend, Jeff. He is one of the completest human beings you’ll ever meet in your lifetime,’” Brown said. “‘Do yourself a favor and get to know him. Get to know what makes him tick. He will make a better person of you.”

Note: The Denver Gazette True West Awards, now in their 25th and final year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community throughout December by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.

More True West Awards coverage:

• 2025 True West Awards, Day 1: Matt Zambrano

• Day 2: Rattlebrain is tying up ‘Santa’s Big Red Sack’

• Day 3: Mission Possible: Phamaly alumni make national impact

• Jeff Campbell invites you to join him on the dark side

• Mark Ragan and Jessica Robblee: The 2024 Colorado Theatre People of the Year