2025 DENVER GAZETTE TRUE WEST AWARDS: DAY 26

Could the example of a tiny Colorado mountain town lead America out of its ongoing ideological divide?

As I was watching the remarkable new documentary “Creede U.S.A.” at this year’s Denver Film Festival, I wondered how Thornton Wilder might have opened “Our Town” if he’d set his classic play today in the tiny mountain mining town of Creede:

STAGE MANAGER: “The name of our town is Creede, Colorado, located about 250 miles due southwest of Denver. Latitude 37.8 degrees, longitude 107, tucked into a narrow box canyon at the headwaters of the Rio Grande. The elevation is about 8,900 feet – but you can add 4,100 if you count the majestic peaks that rise up at the end of Main Street – though most of us just call it “Main.” People say they come outta nowhere but, truth is, they come from an ancient supervolcano back there that blew about 27 million years ago. Or, so the scientists say.

“Point is: You’ll want to take it easy your first day or two. Drink plenty of water, or that thin air will catch up with you quick.

“You won’t need a census to tell you that Creede is a small town but, for the record, our population stands at 281 souls, which is up from 257 five years ago. That is what we in Creede call ‘a baby boom.’ But the thing is, Creede has two populations, because in the summertime, that number swells to more than 10,000. That’s the part-timers coming back from Texas and northern New Mexico like the swallows returning to Capistrano.

“And who could blame them? In the wintertime, we get about 15 feet of snow here in Creede, while the city folk down in Denver don’t even get 5. Some folks you have to make a point to check on, because they might not pop their heads out of their houses for months at a time.

It’s true we’re mostly White – about 96%, with about 3.5% Hispanic – and 100% are U.S. citizens. “We’re have five churches, or about one for every 50 people. And it doesn’t much matter what year a presidential election is. Chances are, Mineral County is voting about 56% for the red candidate and 42% for the blue – you can look that up.

“For those who come to visit, you’ll want to start with Main, of course, with its many shops and galleries and cozy eateries. Through all its ups and down, Main has always managed to preserve an authentic, Victorian mining-town kind of feel.

“But it’s the darndest thing: The pride of Main is the Creede Repertory Theatre, which puts on seven or eight professional shows every summer in two different playhouses, drawing folks from all over and supporting about 100 mostly seasonal jobs. And get this: For all their colorful clothes and progressive ideas, that theater company is the largest employer in all of Mineral County. Has been for decades now.

“In fact, this entire town nearly up and blew away during the silver bust of the 1960s. The old guard don’t like to admit this, but our town only survived because a bunch of theater kids from the University of Kansas were foolish enough to say yes when the local Jaycees sent out a desperate invitation to every college within 1,000 miles to please come here and start up a summer theater company. And it worked. Here we are, 61 years later. Still figuring things out as we go along.”

“Some people look at our town and wonder, ‘Well, how do you make it work?’ With all the division and the isolation and the bickering in the world, how do insistently progressive artists and bedrock MAGA Republicans coexist in any kind of harmony when they disagree on just about everything?

“The answer, friends, is simple: We have to. Our town depends on the theater for its economy. The theater depends on our town for there to be an audience for their shows. Working together despite their deep cultural, social and political differences.

“We have no choice but to make it work.”

“Some people say Creede is an ordinary town, much like yours. But really, Creede is something of a miracle. We talk to our neighbors. Eat and shop with our neighbors. Fight and pray with our neighbors. And we work it out with ourf neighbors. That’s what you do when there are only 281 of you. Maybe you should, too.”

End of scene.

Is there a future for doc?

The 2025 Denver Film Festival put Creede in the Colorado spotlight last month. And if we’re all lucky, the national spotlight is next. (Are you listening, Apple?) Our divided nation would be better for the opportunity to see and learn from “Creede U.S.A.” (which is now awaiting a streaming deal).

Director Kahane Corn Cooperman’s film is no ordinary small-town doc. It meaningfully explores with uncanny honesty and vulnerability how a growing community of artists genuinely struggles  to coexist with the surrounding, deeply conservative rural families who have made up the backbone of this rural mining and hunting town for generations. In this organic, compulsory social experiment, could this tiny Colorado town serve as a model to restore American civility?

Read more: Could tiny Creede lead America out of its divide?

Cooperman came here in 2021 to learn how they make it work. And she found her focal point in the remarkable Brittni Shambaugh Addison, a nursing mother of two biracial children and the director of Creede Rep’s year-round education programming – which benefits nearly every kid in Mineral County.

When Addison joined the Creede School District Board of Education, she committed to the hard, lonely task of representing a humanistic point of view that runs in constant conflict with the majority over divisive issues like hiring an armed officer for the town’s only school, and whether the health curriculum should acknowledge the existence of nonbinary students like young Lexy Mead, both a prominent figure in the documentary and a guest (with her parents) at a warmly received Denver Film Festival screening at the MCA Denver’s Holiday Theatre.

In the fifth grade, Lexy (now a high-school junior) came out as the first openly nonbinary resident in Creede. It was a moment for every single person in the town to take stock. Or put another way: Take a side.

The question the school board here (as well as school boards across the country) now faced was whether to stipulate that there are only two genders, period, or to do, as Addison asks – which would be to acknowledge that nonbinary students like Lexy Mead exist.

These are consequential decisions affecting a district-wide enrollment of … 92 students. (They did not follow Addison’s lead.)

Nothing in this film is expectable. Certainly not the residents who are brought to fair and full-blooded life in a complicated documentary that challenges your presumptions at every turn. It’s a film that turns out to be a shockingly hopeful piece of cinema, and a love letter to every endlessly surprising resident of Creede. Particularly Lexy’s quintessential cowboy dad, Dan Mead, who clearly loves his child fully, and exactly as they are.

“No matter what color, what make and model anybody is, just give them respect,” Dan Mead said after the film screening in Denver. “That should be an easy thing for people to give. Just respect one another, no matter where they come from or what they are. We’re all human.”

And Greg Pearson, Addison’s primary adversary on the school board. He’s a Texan who moved to Creede to work as a wrangler at a guest ranch and just stayed. He and Addison ideologically spar like prize fighters, but always with an unfailing mutual respect. And when he shares a surprising detail about his own family background, you are reminded that when you think you fully know a person, there’s a fair chance you don’t.

It all builds to this simple lovely ending that circles back to Lexy Mead and her best friend since birth, Waverly Pearson. Yes, Pearson, as in Greg’s daughter.

“We really love Greg and (his wife),” Lexy’s mom, Kristeen Lopez, said after the screening. “We don’t agree on things, but at the end of the day, we still love each other. We still respect each other. And I don’t think Lexy can have a better best friend than Waverly.”

Except for college, both plan to live their whole lives in Creede. Waverly as a rancher, Lexy as a (hopefully) lifelong actor with the Creede Repertory Theatre like her idol, 50-year company veteran Christy Brandt. 

Spoiler alert (if there can be such a thing for a documentary): The most powerful words uttered in “Creede U.S.A.” are the final four. When Lexy declares: “I really do love living in Creede.” Roll credits. That said so much.

Lexy found the end to be “really powerful,” they said. “I’ve gone through some really hard things in Creede, but everyone being there to support me and help me go through it just makes me want to be there for the rest of my life. And yeah, people are going to disagree on stuff, but at the end of the day, everyone’s there for each other. I really do love living here.”

When Corn Cooperman heard this pioneering kid, who could have so easily been run out of another town, say that, she knew this was how she wanted her film to end: With Lexy and Waverly showing how very different people with very different beliefs, values and life experiences can still be best friends.

“We end on a young girl from a conservative family who’s going to run the family ranch someday, and her friend, a nonbinary kid who wants to be an actor. And that’s the future of Creede. They are always going to have these fundamental differences, but they know each other as human beings. And I think it is hopeful for our future that they both want to stay in Creede.”

STAGE MANAGER: “Well, that’s enough for now. Smoke is starting to rise from chimneys and the sun is beginning to show some streaks of orange in the setting sky. So … another night has begun in Creede. A place with joys and sorrows, same as anywhere. But up here, with these cliffs watching over us and the river singing day and night, folks tend to notice the big things a little clearer: the stars on a clear night, the turning of the aspens come September, and the way a good story on a stage can remind you what it means to be alive.”

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

• Day 4: Jeff Campbell invites you to join him on the dark side

• Day 5: Cleo Parker Robinson is flying high at 77

• Day 6: Mirror images: Leslie O’Carroll and Olivia Wilson

• Day 7: Philip Sneed will exit Arvada Center on a high

• Day 8: Ed Reinhardt’s magic stage run ends after 27 years

• Day 9: Costume Designer Nikki Harrison

• Day 10: DU’s tech interns getting the job done

• Day 11: Husbands, wives keep home fire burning

• Day 12: Denver School of the Arts’ Drama Dash

• Day 13: Theater as a powerful response to violence

• Day 14: Elitch Theatre no longer a ghost town

• Day 15: A double play for playwright Luke Sorge

• Day 16: ‘Legally Blonde’ at the Air Force Academy? Elle, yes!

• Day 17: Kelly Van Oosbree is the cat in the hats

• Day 18: Phamaly presents a ‘Pericles’ for the neurodivergent

• Day 19: Justine Lupe and Coloradans on the national stage

• Day 20: Immersive Theatre after the end of Off-Center

• Day 21: Matt Radcliffe and theater as therapy for trauma

• Day 22: Pure ‘Follies’ at Vintage Theatre

• Day 23: The play is the everything

• Day 24: ‘Assassins,’ Frozen’ lead list of impact musicals

• Day 25: Unsung heroes of the invisible arts