Director Zoë Golub-Sass works with playwright Christina Pumariega on “Joan Dark.” (Photo by Jamie Kraus)
Playwright Jake Brasch needed to make it clear that he was not—not—sitting within the again row on the staged studying of the reservoir laughing at this personal jokes. His charming squawks had been in response to the gaffes and different insider insights he and director Shelley Butler had been gleaning throughout the first Denver Center’s Colorado New Play Summit studying of his addiction-and-Alzheimer’s dramedy.
Brasch’s play was one among 4 works featured on the seventeenth installment of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts premiere occasion, which ran Feb. 25-26. The others had been Vincent Terrell Durham’s ouchy-then-straight-up-heartbreaking Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie-Fringed Orchids; Christina Pumariega’s well timed religious saga Joan Dark; and Sandy Rustin’s 1800s-set whodunit-and-why romp The Suffragette’s Murder.
Ongoing post-pandemic budgetary constraints pared this annual gathering down from its customary two weekends to 1. In earlier years, the primary weekend readings pulled again the curtain on the play improvement course of for native theatregoers, and the second weekend was a showcase for business guests. Denver Center Theatre Company creative director Chris Coleman and Summit producer Grady Soapes say they hope to return to a two-weekend format and thereby give playwrights extra substantial desk work and rewriting time.
This 12 months’s slimming down could prick anxieties in regards to the dwindling of well-resourced alternatives for new-play improvement—anxieties that gained momentum when Actors Theatre of Louisville introduced final spring it will not produce its Humana Festival of New Plays, a behemoth that in its 45 years of existence had grow to be synonymous with the care and feeding of playwrights and their work.
Yet right here we had been once more, packed into the 2 homes on the Denver Center’s Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex: theatregoers, theatremakers, and business out-of-towners, sitting cheek by jowl earlier than a powerful slate of performs. Early viewers suggestions was trending optimistic for all of the exhibits, in keeping with Soapes, who stated that early tallies discovered 94 % of viewers survey respondents saying they’d advocate the Colorado New Play Summit to others. And the Summit’s 4 playwrights had been the beneficiaries of nonetheless enviable assets: a director, a dramaturg, an ace technical crew, attuned performing expertise, and time to listen to and hone the work in rehearsal earlier than studying from the audiences what landed and what didn’t.
Brasch returned to his hometown of Denver with a reservoir, which follows a personality named Josh returning to his hometown of Denver from New York City, on medical go away from faculty on account of alcoholism. (During the Summit, the playwright celebrated his personal ninth anniversary of sobriety.) Josh will get it in his muddled head that his compromised reminiscence shares similarities with the Alzheimer’s-induced decline his grandparents are going through. If that sounds a bit brainy or brain-science-y, the play was commissioned by Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project, which inspires artists to interact the problems of science and know-how.
The actors who portrayed Josh’s grandparents topped a gifted ensemble. “Beyond being so talented as actors, everyone was such a generous and intelligent advocate for their character in the room,” stated Brasch of his veteran forged, which included Caroline Aaron, Peter Van Wagner, and one-time Denver Center Theatre Company member Lawrence Hecht. “There was a moment during the table work where I felt like, ‘Why are these two things not working next to each other?’ We talked about it for, like, 45 minutes. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure we found the exact thing yet. But from a dramaturgical perspective, I just felt so rigorous in what I was able to accomplish, because everybody was on my team, but also willing to be like, ‘I don’t understand this,’ ‘I don’t know where I’m going,’ ‘I don’t know how to navigate this turn.’”
The playwrights discovered the Denver Center’s labyrinth of spacious rehearsal rooms to be laboratories for insights, changes, and nuance. In Polar Bears, Black Boys and Prairie-Fringed Orchids, a cocktail occasion unravels within the renovated Harlem brownstone of a liberal-leaning white couple after the killing of Black 12-year-old by police. Before their visitors arrive, Molly and Peter tuck their Black toddler son down for the night. Among the invited: the mom of the murdered 12-year-old.
The play is hardly a comedy, however there are prickly laughs, and calibrating the humor-to-heaviness ratio proved important. “During one of our rehearsals, the director Jamil Jude had a very simple line change request,” Durham recounted. “At a point in the play, he wanted the character to say ‘BLM’ rather than ‘Black Lives Matter.’ You wouldn’t think such a small change would accomplish much. But as soon as the actress changed the wording, the entire room erupted in laughter. It was a perfect suggestion. That’s the magic of being in a rehearsal room with other creatives. Your play is given the opportunity to grow beyond your own voice.”
A couple of days earlier than arriving in Denver, Joan Dark playwright Christina Pumariega stated in an electronic mail that the summit could be the primary time she’d be seeing her phrases carried out in a theatre. Yet she’d nearly forgotten that a part of the trip throughout the rehearsal room work on her play, which follows its title character as she enters a pilot program for potential feminine clergymen. Joan Dark displays the playwright’s religious journey in addition to her struggles with Catholicism, an exploration inspired by director and champion Zoë Golub-Sass.
“After working throughout the week, rewriting the play over and over and over again with such incredible people, I think that I discounted, or had forgotten somehow, that eventually it was going to be for an audience, for people,” Pumariega confessed after the Summit’s finish. “I had forgotten the power of a larger space. Even though ours was a 200-seat house, I just felt so held by the audience, by Denverites, by our colleagues and our friends. I feel like I got smacked in the face and in the heart by the time we got to the audience. And that was the final, most essential part of the equation. What is this piece out loud in a space?”
Rustin’s The Suffragette’s Murder was as larkily good as Joan Dark was contemplative. “I tend to write really physical comedies. That’s what I love,” the playwright shared on a name two days after the summit, throughout a break from a rehearsal of the City Center Encores! staging of Dear World, for which she’s doing a live performance adaptation. “There’s only so much you can really learn from hearing [the work] out loud. You have to get into physical space and be working with actors who are willing to play. And that’s really what we got. We got this incredible group of actors, fantastic director, space and time, just to try out some of those ideas and see, Is this going to work? Can we imagine this? If the set was like this, would we be able to do this? And we were able to kind of approximate and play a little bit.”
The Suffragette’s Murder, set in a Nineteenth-century boarding home that could be a hive of underground ladies’s rights exercise, unspools like a whodunit—a style the playwright is aware of effectively, as her adaptation of Clue is the third most-produced play within the 2022-23 season. For the studying, Rustin, director Don Stephenson, and the ensemble leaned into the play’s physicality. “We just decided right from the get-go, we can’t stand at music stands—we’ve got to move around or this thing’s going to fall flat,” Rustin recalled. “And everybody was game. The bulk of the work I was able to do in the rehearsal room, and then it was like, confirming my suspicions with the audience. What needs to happen for this play next is a production.”
Among the boons of the Colorado New Play Summit is that it additionally options two full productions with runs that stretch into business weekend. This 12 months’s performs had been the world premiere of Alexis Scheer’s Laughs in Spanish and the regional premiere of Yussef El Guindi’s Hotter Than Egypt, which was workshopped throughout the 2020 Summit. At the pageant dinner, the Denver Center’s Coleman introduced subsequent 12 months’s full productions, each world premieres: Leonard Madrid’s Cebollas, with Jerry Ruiz directing, and Kirsten Potter’s Rubicon, which Coleman will direct. Both writers are Summit alum, and their performs had been workshopped eventually 12 months’s Summit.
Committing area, providing assets, and creating time—arguably an artist’s scarcest useful resource—for playwrights to ask questions of their work and seek for solutions in entrance of audiences stay the core propositions of the Colorado New Play Summit, even on this 12 months’s abridged model.
At the closing evening occasion, actor Kevin Pariseau bent towards the Denver Center’s Soapes to be heard above the din of the evening’s deejay. The New York-based actor, who appeared in The Suffragette’s Murder, was chopping out early however needed to acknowledge the time spent, saying he hadn’t earlier than encountered the devoted assets and care at every other regional theatre. Leaning in opposition to one of many bars within the ballroom of the theatre advanced, Soapes grinned. He had loads of purpose to.
Lisa Kennedy lives in Denver. She writes on movie, theatre, and tradition for quite a few publications and teaches nonfiction writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop.
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