The Denver Center’s annual Colorado New Play Summit is an opportunity to showcase four promising new scripts, many of which eventually come back as fully produced plays on the DCPA Theatre Company’s mainstage season.
The current production of “Hotter than Egypt,” in fact, began as a featured reading at the 2020 Summit. The acclaimed movie “The Whale,” which now has three Oscar nominations, began as a 2011 Summit stage reading.
By gathering promising plays, the Summit also gathers promising playwrights, and I used that opportunity to ask this year’s featured scribes about a pressing issue in the American theater: With attendance at live cultural events struggling to get back to pre-pandemic levels, and storytelling needing to evolve to accommodate changing consumer tastes, what do you think audiences are looking for in their stories in 2023 that would bring them back inside the theater?
Christina Pumariega, author of “Joan Dark,” was an actor a few years back for the Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit that traveled to New York prisons, women’s shelters, schools and churches. “I’ve never experienced more engaged audiences in my life,” she said. “But when we finally arrived at the Public and performed for subscribers, it felt like someone unplugged all the electricity. Did the folks sitting comfortably in the air conditioning care about our wild play unfolding before them? Did they need it like other folks had needed it?”
At that moment, “something shifted for me as a theater maker,” she said. Pumariega doesn’t pretend to know what audiences want – every theater in every town is so different. “But I do think it’s our responsibility as makers to evolve,” she said. “The pandemic has changed theatergoing because it’s changed us all. Now we get to use this ancient art form, not to repeat what once worked, but to build something new in its place. Something revolutionary.”
Her new play, “Joan Dark,” she said, asks why the Catholic Church is what it is – and where it’s going. “How will it choose to operate in these polarizing times,” she said, “and beyond that – to grow?”
A scene from a reading at the 2022 Colorado New Play Summit, which returns this weekend to the Denver Performing Arts Complex.
Denver native Jake Brasch, a graduate of Denver School of the Arts, is equally mystified by what the masses want from their stories. “I'm always surprised to see which pieces of theater get attention and which don't,” he said. But since the pandemic, Brasch, 31, finds he is a more sensitive audience member than before.
“These days, I have trouble stomaching plays that are a barrel of laughs without anything deeper to offer,” he said. “Conversely, I'm quick to shut down when stories are relentlessly bleak. I often have to laugh before I'm willing to cry. It's strange, funny, and terrifying to be alive right now. I want plays that reckon with all of that at once.”
Brasch believes events like the Colorado New Play Summit are part of the solution because they bring the community into the process earlier in their development. People love being involved,” he said.
Brasch is the author of “The Reservoir,” a play about a college student who’s come home to Denver and, in his struggle to stay sober, he finds allies in his four comic grandparents. Brasch hopes the audience leaves with a deeper understanding of addiction. “I want them to see that recovery is difficult, but not impossible,” he said. “I want people to believe in reimagination, and to understand that there's a lighter, easier, kinder world out there if you work for it.”
Yes, and: “I want people to leave and go hug their grandparents and other aging loved ones.”
Sandy Rustin, whose play is called “The Suffragette’s Murder,” says it turns out that “The best time to be a comedy writer is immediately following a global pandemic.” Audiences, she believes, are ready to laugh. “The past three years have been a collective, societal struggle,” she said. “People are looking for moments of relief and release; the theater is designed to provide that. Now, more than ever, that goal feels like a worthy pursuit. Nothing feels better than a theater filled with laughter from people who really needed a laugh.”
Her comic murder mystery takes place at the intersection of the budding women's movement and the birth of the civil rights movement in 1857 New York. “While not necessarily grounds for a comedy at first glance, I found that in embracing the farcical comedic tone and style of the mid-19th century, I was better able to dig into some of the truth surrounding the launch of these two giant shifts in the American landscape,” she said.
The fourth featured play is called “Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids,” by Vincent Terrell Durham, who wasn’t available for this report.
Since 2006, the Summit has developed 64 new plays, about half of which were later fully produced. But because of the slow pandemic recovery, the 2023 Summit has been scaled back from two weeks to one. That means playwrights no longer have the opportunity to learn from a first weekend of public readings, go back and rewrite, rehearse again and then come back and read them for a second time in front of a live audience.
This year's readings will all take place Friday and Saturday (Feb. 25-26) at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Tickets (just $10 per reading) are available at denvercenter.org.