Kismet’s a thing — especially in theater. The first immersive performance that local playwright Jeffrey Neuman ever attended was “Wild Party” in 2016. The slinky, fun retrofitting of the Broadway musical set in the Jazz Age was produced by the Denver Center’s Off-Center and was directed by Amanda Berg Wilson, the artistic director of Boulder’s inventive company, the Catamounts.
This past weekend, “The Last Night of Red Barker” — Neuman’s third immersive storytelling collaboration with Wilson and the Catamounts — opened at (and around) Westminster Grange Hall. The 1913 white clapboard structure was for a spell the town’s social-political hub; in 2003, it became the city’s first historic landmark.
“I’d always loved Amanda’s work. Not only with the Catamounts, but ‘Wild Party’ was one of the most exciting things I’d seen on stage for a long time,” Neuman said over tea at Crema on Larimer Street a couple of weeks before the show went up. When he began developing a new play as part of the Denver Center’s short-lived local playwright initiative, he sought Wilson out for “The Headliners” about two vaudevillians. (It later had a 2023 run at the Cherry Creek Theatre.)
“The Last Night of Red Barker,” playwright Jeffrey Neuman. (Michael Ensminger, provided by Catamounts)
“When she was coming up with the idea for ‘The Land of Milk and Honey,’ she knew there was going to be a very heavy thread of Judaism, Jewish culture, and she knew that I come from Hebrew stock,” he said with a laugh. Wilson asked if he’d partner with her on the project.
“I jumped at it even though I had never done anything like that before,” he said. “And we just have a really perfect relationship. We operate and think very differently and just complemented each other really well.”
For “The Land of Milk and Honey,” audiences tromped around Westminster’s historic Shoenberg Farm, watching as performers immersed themselves in the history of the dairy, which was built by Louis D. Shoenberg to honor his dead son and came to provide food for the patients of National Jewish Hospital when tuberculosis sent many people West.
Although the play had been in development before 2020, the milling about the grounds and mulling about illness and responses to it by the theatergoers became especially evocative, because the play took place in the summer of 2021, when the lessons and mercurial nature of the COVID pandemic were still a heightened concern.
Neuman, Wilson and “the Cats” collaborated next on last summer’s “Pride of the Farm,” which was set on the hobby farm of one-time Colorado State Attorney General John Metzger. The land and its homestead are now part of Westminster’s Metzger Farm Open Space.
If you’re gleaning a theme, you’d be on to something. The city of Westminster has become a guiding partner in these storytelling adventures, rooted in local history and lore. It was the city that approached the team with the idea.
“The person in charge of the parks [recreation and libraries] for Westminster said to Amanda, ‘How do you feel about a gangster story?’” recounts Neuman. “We were like, ‘We’re totally good with gangster!’” he smiled. “This is the first time where I think it wasn’t necessarily a place but the story that came to Amanda first,” Neuman said.
La Catrina (Nika Garcia) serenades Red and his entourage toward his fate in “The Last Night of Red Barker.” (Michael Ensminger, provided by The Catamounts)
A few days after Neuman and I spoke, I was sitting on a couch beside Red Barker, who is played by Catamounts company member Jason Maxwell. Wilson was nearby, offering suggestions for Maxwell and Emma Messenger, who portrays Ma Barker. I was enveloped in the scene much the way theatergoers will be during the play’s run (through Nov. 2). As is the point, rehearsal gets a little Groundhog Day-ish as Maxwell returns to a line again and again to find its emotional truths. When I see the actual play, the repetition paid off handsomely, achingly.
The play is set in 1949. Gangster history buffs will recognize the oddity in Kate “Ma” Barker being in the same space with her second son, Lloyd William “Red” Barker — or “Big Pal,” as she calls him.
Ma and Red’s brother, Frank, were shot and killed by the FBI in Florida in 1935. Herman committed suicide in 1927. Arthur “Doc” Barker was killed as he tried to escape Alcatraz in 1939. Top G-man J. Edgar Hoover called the Depression Era’s Barker-Karpis Gang “the toughest gang of hoodlums the FBI has ever been called upon to eliminate,” according to the copper historic marker embedded on 73rd Avenue, east of Bradburn.
No wonder Red (as portrayed by Maxwell) seems perplexed when he lands in a space with the scent of Ma’s ace (and they are ace) orange drop cookies wafting and his mother inviting him to finish a jigsaw puzzle.
In a sense, Red turned out to be the black sheep of an infamously violent clan — “the one who didn’t murder anyone,” his character quips. He tried to make a new life for himself once he was released from Leavenworth, where he had served a 25-year sentence for holding up a mail truck. He enlisted in the army and worked at a POW camp in Michigan.
Honorably discharged, he headed to Colorado. (In the play, Red’s a guard at Amache Internment Camp in Granada.) There, he worked at a bar called the Denargo Grill. He married in 1947 and, two years later, was killed by his wife, Jennie. She was sent to an insane asylum.
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As the play opens in the little outdoor tavern near the Westminster Grange, Red (Maxwell) and Denargo owner Charlie Klein (Sam Gilstrap) are bantering with each other and with the customers (the audience). They are mostly talking about why Red has left the phone off the hook, a no-no for a business. Turns out it had been ringing incessantly with calls from Red’s wife.
There’s unease in the air. Red seems worried. The affable, good-time Charlie tries to soothe Red’s fretting with a shot or two of whiskey. But this being the Halloween season, hauntings are in order. So don’t be surprised when the Day of the Dead’s La Calavera Catrina (an entrancing Nika Garcia) arrives singing haunting verses that suggest a fate Red can’t escape. The title is its own spoiler alert.
“The Last Night of Red Barker” is surprisingly poignant. As the audience accompanies Red through memories and into ghostly encounters, his dead-man-walking ruminations speak of melancholy and legacy.
When he arrives at the door to his home with Jennie, he takes his leave. Standing toward the back of the audience, I got to see Cedar, the teenager who’d been sipping soda at a table with his mom when I took a seat at the Denargo with them. When three bangs sounded, he flinched and did a double take at his mom. His sweet face registered an end.
Did I mention that this work by the Catamounts and Neuman is, in addition to making an argument for the intimacy of a certain kind of low-tech immersive theater, unexpectedly touching?
It is. And I don’t mind telling you that watching Cedar’s youthful reaction made Red’s departure a teary one for a few of these new friends of Barker.
Lisa Kennedy is a Denver-area freelance writer specializing in theater and film.
IF YOU GO
“The Last Night of Red Barker”: Conceived by Amanda Berg Wilson and Jeffrey Neuman. Written by Neuman. Directed by Wilson. Featuring Jason Maxwell, Emma Messenger, Nika Garcia, Sam Gilstrap, John Hauser, Don Randle and Min Kyung (Cecillia) Kim. At the Westminster Grange Hall, 3935 W. 73rd Ave., Westminster. Through Nov. 2, For tickets and info: thecatamounts.org