“To everyone who knew him, Curt Dempster was the Ensemble Studio Theater. On Jan. 19, Dempster, 71, was found dead in the Greenwich Village studio apartment he shared with two dogs”; his death was a suicide. “Dempster left a note asking his superintendent to find a home for the dogs. More uncertain was what the future held for the off-Broadway theater he had founded some 35 years earlier in a condemned Manhattan building and turned into one of the country’s most prodigious developers of theater talent.”