As I say on the former Twitter: “My opinions belong to me … but you can have them, too!”

And I have an opinion on how to solve all of Curious Theatre’s problems. (Except for that $250,000 shortfall. I can’t cover that.) It’s simple, really:

Curious ’n Cleo.

It’s good, right? Just rolls right off the tongue.

Curious is the most significant homegrown theater company to emerge in Denver over the past 30 years, followed by the nearby Buntport Theater. Since 1998, Curious has engaged and enraged, challenged and comforted, educated and elucidated audiences on most every major issue of our times.

Arts organizations come and go. But even the possibility of a Denver without Curious should serve as a call to action for everyone who cares about Denver’s cultural ecology.

The first play I ever reviewed for The Denver Post was a 2001 Curious Theatre production called “Coyote on a Fence.” The play shows a conflicted journalist’s jailhouse interviews with a decidedly not conflicted death-row Aryan inmate who has unapologetically firebombed a Black church, killing 37. And the drama hardly ended with the curtain call. A spirited panel conversation followed, and I distinctly remember prominent Denver defense attorney David Lane drawing a standing ovation for saying he would not even favor death for Osama bin Laden.

This was three days after 9/11. Two years after Columbine.

It was a thrilling evening. If this was what covering the Colorado theater community was going to be like, I was all in. I gave that production the maximum four stars, even though it was my first show, and I had nothing to compare it to. I remember asking my boss, “But what if all local theater productions turn out to be that good?” (That did not turn out to be an issue.)

“Curious Theatre Company’s production of ‘Coyote on a Fence’ represents the best of what live theater can be,” I wrote then. “It is an important, timely production that demands your intellectual participation and will contribute to a wounded community’s understanding of the death penalty, and of evil itself.”

Twenty-three years later, Curious Theatre is facing down two imminent, existential challenges: The first is financial; the second is residential. And solving the first problem actually exacerbates the second.

The house is for sale

Curious is in the process of selling the deteriorating, 129-year-old building it owns at 1080 Acoma St. Its sale for an estimated $2.3 million would more than solve all of the company’s immediate financial problems. And all it will cost it is its soul – meaning, the former church that has been its forever home since the company was born in 1997.

Where is Curious to go?

Wide-eyed supporters wonder whether there is a buyer out there who might simply keep the building operating as a theater. The answer: Yes. In the same sense that, yes, it is possible Jill Stein will be the next president of the United States.

Here’s the more nuanced question: “Is Curious Theatre more than its building?” Could it take its coming cash-grab and its now deeply embedded social-justice identity on the road, presenting its singular brand of stories as an itinerant troupe, performing on whatever neighboring stage has available dates?

That answer is an emphatic no. If Curious turns into a traveling show, its core, central Denver audience base will not follow. In that case, Curious is dead in two years, tops.

The only way Curious survives the sale of the sacred space that is so intrinsically tied to its identity would be to find a permanent new home in a sacred space just like it – but as a tenant, freed from the financial yoke of ownership.

And that just might be the soon-to-be new and improved Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Theatre at the historic Shorter AME Church at 119 Park Avenue West. That’s not even 2 miles northwest of Curious’ present home in the Golden Triangle neighborhood.

A year ago, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance broke ground on the addition of a new, 25,000 square foot, four-level wing that will ensure the company’s presence in Denver’s Five Points for decades to come. Those $20 million plans include a new 240-seat performance venue in addition to updates to the antiquated, 240-seat mainstage theater that is currently home to more than 30 area nonprofit performing groups. Completion is scheduled for next March.

Could Curious then become an anchor residential theater company performing forevermore on the same sanctified stage where for six decades Cleo Parker Robinson has used dance as a tool for community-building and unifying people?

“I think it’s a brilliant idea – and one that I wholeheartedly support,” said Malik Robinson, president and CEO of Cleo Parker Robinson Dance (and Cleo’s son). The company’s expansion, he said, “literally doubles our ability to fulfill our mission. We are looking for resident companies and have already approached a number of (small) and independent organizations. “We – as in Denver – need Curious Theatre to be vibrant, and we would love for them to consider our theater as a home as they explore where they plan to be.”

Think about the synergy of it all: Curious would be leaving one historic church and moving into another. Only this one would be modernized, doubled in space and poised to remain an epicenter of Denver’s cultural life for decades to come.

The Acoma Center was built in 1895 as the Swedish Evangelical Free Church, later becoming the home of The Upper Room United Pentecostal Church through 1995.

The Shorter AME Church opened in 1889 and was home to the first and largest Black congregation in Denver (including future “Gone with the Wind” Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel) before it was burned by the Ku Klux Klan in 1925 – and rebuilt less than two years later.

Cleo Parker Robinson founded her dance company in 1974 and moved into the Shorter building in the 1980s. “Our home here in the Historic Shorter AME facility symbolizes our journey of strength, struggle, rebuilding and resilience,” she said in a previous interview.

No matter what god you believe in, every theater is, in its way, a church.

Now think about the women in charge of both organizations, both daughters of legendary figures in Denver history. Jonathan Parker rose from janitor at the posh Bonfils Theatre (now the Tattered Cover Book Store) to leading actor on its stage. Cleo has built a dance company of international repute and earned a Kennedy Center Medal of Honor along the way.

Curious Artistic Director Jada Suzanne Dixon is the daughter of former Denver Deputy Mayor Bill Roberts, just the second Black man elected to the Denver City Council. Dixon has been making history all along her way as an actor, director and administrator. When she was named Curious’ second artistic director in January 2023, she became the first Black woman hired to run an existing Colorado theater company that she did not found.

Slim pickings

We should all hope that a possible Curious ‘n Cleo partnership works out – because beyond that, the pickings become slim. And the conversation for another day becomes the much larger issue of the quickly dwindling availability of affordable and equitable performing spaces for smaller companies.

Curious is sure to take a look at the MCA Denver at the Holiday, a century-old, 400-seat storefront theater now serving as a cross-cultural local arts hub at 32nd Avenue and Clay Street in Denver’s Northside. That’s far too big for Curious’ needs, and it lacks the essential kind of intimacy it has at the Acoma Center for maximum audience and artistic impact.

And it will no doubt explore the city’s long-term plans to reopen the $40 million May Bonfils Stanton Theater on the former Loretto Heights College campus, but both timing and size are working against it. Tariana Navas-Nieves, Deputy Director of Denver Arts & Venues, says the new theater will seat 700, and it won’t open until 2027.

The bottom line is that Curious needs a smaller theater space, not a (much) larger one.

Like all performing-arts organizations, Curious has been struggling to get audiences to come back at pre-pandemic levels. Moving to a state-of-the-art Cleo Parker Robinson Dance facility is the one option on the table that is most likely to bring along its core audience intact.

Regardless of when the Acoma Center is sold, Curious is committed to producing its 27th season there. As the new owners of BDT Stage discovered in Boulder, permitting is hard, and demolitions rarely happen quickly. That means Curious should be able to enjoy one farewell season in the Acoma Center that would end … right when the new Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Theatre should be opening.

Almost like it was meant to be.

Curious ’n Cleo.