Feature
Dead Man Walking at the Vic
Two runs, an award, and the production the theatre is most often remembered for.
Of everything the Denver Victorian Playhouse staged in its final six years, Dead Man Walking is the production that travelled furthest. It ran twice — eleven days in February and March 2006, then seven weeks in the spring of 2007 — and it brought the theatre an award, an audience it would not otherwise have had, and most of the links that still pointed at the site years after it went dark.
The play
Tim Robbins adapted Dead Man Walking from his own 1995 film, which he had drawn from the non-fiction book by Sister Helen Prejean. It is the story of Prejean’s experience as spiritual adviser to Matt Poncelet, a convicted murderer on death row in Louisiana. There is no doubt of Poncelet’s involvement in the crime for which he is scheduled to die, and that is the point: Prejean faces the moral and spiritual crisis of offering comfort to the most detestable human being she has ever met, and of doing so in front of the victims’ parents, who are seeking justice for an unbearable loss.
The theatre’s own description of it was direct. The play, it wrote, examines from all sides the question of whether the killing of a human being can be justified; the playwright recognises that there are no clear-cut answers and offers a balanced look at the many sub-issues of the argument; and whether you are for or against capital punishment, the play encourages reflection on why you feel the way you do.
How it came to a seventy-five-seat basement
Robbins has restricted the play to colleges and universities, in order to keep productions inside an educational frame and generate discussion of the death penalty in that setting. The Vic staged it under special arrangement with the playwright through the schools theatre project he established, in conjunction with a university death-penalty week at a Denver law school. Consistent with the scheme’s intent, all proceeds from the production were donated as a needs-based scholarship to the next institution producing the play.
The 2006 staging was directed by Angela Stringer Astle, with Terry Ann Watts as Sister Prejean and Michael Richman as Poncelet, and a company of nineteen — by a distance the largest cast in the theatre’s archive, in by a distance its smallest available space.
Best Production Based On Principle
Westword gave the production its Best Production Based On Principle award in the Best of Denver 2006, in the same year it named the theatre itself Best Theatrical Resurrection. The paper’s citation described the men on America’s death rows as something most of us rarely think about but which, like the mad aunt in the attic, is always there haunting the fringes of consciousness; it called the play agitprop in the most thoughtful and honourable tradition, and singled out the two central performances.
The 2007 return
The award brought the production back for a much longer run, from 20 April to 7 June 2007. Eleven days had become seven weeks — the same length the house gave its comedies — which for a play of this weight in a room this size is unusual. A separate page in this archive covers the return engagement, and the 2006 production page carries the full cast.
Why this page exists at all
The original site kept this URL as a standalone feature separate from the show’s archive pages, which is unusual — nothing else the theatre did got its own top-level page. It is also the production that drew the theatre attention from outside the theatre world: among the sites linking to the playhouse in this period were Colorado death-penalty-abolition organisations pointing supporters at the run.
The play remains widely produced in the university setting Robbins intended for it, and Sister Prejean’s book has stayed in print since 1993. The Vic’s two runs of it are a small part of that, but they are the part that happened in a basement in northwest Denver.
See also: the production archive and the history of the theatre.