Local playwrights delivered the write stuff in 2023 | John Moore

Jake Brasch put the Colorado in the 2023 Colorado New Play Summit in February.

The feel-good story of the 2023 Summit was the Denver-born playwright coming home from New York to tell his own brutally honest addiction-recovery story that, in the end, felt pretty darned good.

The Colorado New Play Summit is the DCPA Theatre Company’s annual new-play festival that elevates developing scripts that often come back as fully staged productions on the company’s mainstage season. Brasch, a graduate of Denver School of the Arts, was one of four selected featured playwrights this year. That's an honor rarely bestowed on any hometown writer. In fact, he is only the fifth in 17 years.

With “The Reservoir,” Brasch fully won audiences over. His play is about a neurotic twentysomething who moves home to get sober and finds unlikely allies in his four unpredictable grandparents. Brasch’s hope was that the audience left with a deeper understanding of addiction. “I want them to see that recovery is difficult, but not impossible,” he said.

Grady Soapes, the company’s artistic producer and director of casting, said “The Reservoir” has many components that are of interest to the Denver Center team.

“‘The Reservoir’ is a play with heart at its core, and it stays with you for a long time — on the page or on the stage,” Soapes said. “Jake being a Colorado-raised artist is exciting. The world he has created and how he chooses to tell it is new and interesting. And rarely do we see plays that feature an older generation of characters who have such grit, humor and emotional dexterity.”

The play covers some tough autobiographical terrain with heart and humor. And Brasch’s real-life mom not only was in attendance for the Denver reading, she was all-in. Watching their story play out was an emotional experience for mother and son.

“Emotional and also very true – because a lot of those things did happen,” said Kate Brasch. “But I was thrilled that he brought out the silly part, because that’s a huge part of our friendship, even though we're mom and kid. I mean, he’s a silly, crazy boy. And the funnest, funnest, funnest son.”

Now 10 months later,  Brasch said “lots of very exciting things are happening with ‘The Reservoir’ … but I can't talk about most of them yet.” We do know the play is a finalist in the Jewish Plays Project's Jewish Playwriting Contest, and also for the 2024 Alliance/Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition.

“It’s surreal to have this one take off,” he said.

Brasch’s triumph was but one victory for Colorado playwrights this year. The state has slowly grown into, if not a hotbed, then at least a cozy futon for developing Colorado playwrights. In fact, Colorado theaters staged at least 20 full-length new plays written by local playwrights in 2023, as well as dozens of “rehearsed development readings.”

That’s remarkable coming out of the pandemic shutdown considering that new plays generally cost about 30 percent more to produce than existing ones, and you start with absolutely no title recognition or marketing mojo. Fresh, homegrown plays by local writers are often some of the most energizing nights at the theater, but it’s hard to get less-adventurous theatergoers to come see them when they haven’t been given the stamp of critical approval – whatever that even means anymore.

Here’s a partial recap of the year in locally written and produced plays in 2023:

Graham and Kristina Macy Fuller’s stage progeny, “In the Trenches: A Parenting Musical Comedy” began the year with a fully staged run at Littleton’s Town Hall Arts Center and finished it with “industry workshop presentations” for potential investors in advance of a planned off-Broadway run in New York. And they weren’t messing around. The New York cast included Kara Lindsay, who originated the role of Katherine in “Newsies,” along with (mostly) Broadway performers and Denver’s Vidushi Goyal.

Boulder’s The Catamounts, who have become known for their wildly varying and (mostly) outdoor theatrical adventures, did something even crazier than typical ‘Catamounts crazy’ this year: The ’Cats presented two shows concurrently:“Pride of the Farm” in partnership with the City of Westminster, and “The Estate Sale” (inside!) the People’s Building in Aurora.

Jeff Neuman’s “Pride of the Farm” explored the life of former Colorado Attorney General John Metzger and around the historic Metzger Farm. Josh Hartwell’s “The Estate Sale” allowed attendees to wander through the elaborate maze of a dead man’s stuff, with clues to his life story hidden in objects, books, papers, a tape recorder and even a TV.

2023 was just the latest big year for Neuman and Hartwell. Neuman’s “The Headliners” for Cherry Creek Theatre told the true story of two forgotten vaudevillian stars who thumbed their noses at gender norms by publicly announcing their engagement – a publicity stunt that backfired, with consequences. Hartwell also wrote “Music of Flight: The Falcon,” a play for young audiences that was performed to live music by the Colorado Chamber Players.

The undisputed collective emperor of original plays in Denver is the enduring ensemble known as Buntport, a group of five Colorado College buddies who have produced more than 50 full-length plays over the past 20 years. The highlight of 2023 was the lovably odd “The Death of Napoleon: A Play in Less Than Three Acts” – which imagined the tiny, contemplative French emperor spending his final years in exile playing solitaire, arguing with insects and refusing to get on his teeter-totter.

An emerging force in the local new-play development chain is Lakewood’s Benchmark Theatre, which is becoming known for tackling confrontational, daring “devised pieces” (meaning self-created by a group) based on history or current events.

“Stonewall,” collectively written by Neil Truglio with Samwell Rose, Frankie Lee and the largest ensemble of actors in the company’s history, revisited the riots that sparked the queer civil-rights movement. Later, Benchmark offered local playwright Tami Canady’s “Jeremiah,” which personalized the gun issue as it impacts four teenagers. And, now through Dec. 23, Benchmark is presenting “FoMo” (or “Formerly Mormon”). That’s Frankie Lee’s coming-of-age story as a queer man raised in the Mormon church. The play had its first life at the 2023 Denver Fringe Festival, which affords dozens of memoirists of varying experience the opportunity to perform their developing monologues.

One of the most distinctive and delightful traditions of every summer is “The Play Crawl,” which leads audiences along a path of 10 original, site-specific playlets written by local, women-identifying playwrights – none more than 3 minutes long. It’s all a fun fundraiser for And Toto Too, Denver’s only theater company dedicated exclusively to women-playwrights. After nine years on what is now a sadly gentrified Tennyson Street, Artistic Director Susan Lyles moved her signature event in 2023 to shops in and around Olde Town Arvada. Her featured playwrights were Linda Berry, Rebecca Gorman O'Neill, Melissa Lucero McCarl, Edith Weiss, Ellen K. Graham, Christie Brenner Winn, Leslie C. Lewis, Nina Alice Miller, Nicolette Vajtay and Lisa Wagner Erickson.

In addition, Lyles staged a full run of two paired, hellish one-act plays by Gorman O’Neill. “One Last Thing Before I Forget” visits two women in hell, one of whom wants to stay while the other is eager to go. In “Gertrude & Ophelia in Hell,” the famous Shakespearean characters feel they have been wrongfully accused.

That’s territory Local Theater Company also compellingly mined in its collaboratively conceived original play “Undone: The Lady M Project.” The play, written by Hadley Kamminga-Peck, Anne Penner and Mare Trevathan, grants the widely scorned Lady M the trial (and first name) Shakespeare never gave her in life. And it does so from a decidedly 2023 sensibility. The play isn’t so much occupied with her guilt or innocence (c’mon, she’s dead to rights) as it is with exploring an urgent contemporary social question: “Why are men so afraid of decisive, powerful women?”

In Boulder, Emily K. Harrison’s intentionally lower-cased square product theater staged “Things We Will Miss,” a deeply personal collection of vignettes, songs and images that explore our relationship to the climate crisis, fear and grief – with live music from iconic local songwriter Janet Feder.

Control Group Productions is finishing up a busy year with a dance in the wild called “Bitter Moon,” which is, yes, a nighttime winter walk outside the Majestic View Nature Center in Arvada (closing Dec. 17). It’s an evocative and unabashedly strange exploration of various midwinter traditions across the globe where we witness an altered environmental ecology after the reintroduction of wolves. (Hint: It doesn’t end well for the deer.) It’s a collaboration with Alpine Artist Collective of Fort Collins. In September, Control Group co-produced a play called “Cuauhtémoczin,” written by Diego Florez-Arroyo, the first graduate of Control Group’s Emerging BIPOC Playwrights Project. It’s about one man’s literal and spiritual journey through the prison system.

A sentimental and highly experimental highlight of the year was Grapefruit Lab’s staging of “Strange Bird, Queer Bird” at Buntport Theater. It was based on the true, nonbinary pandemic love story of Julie Rada and Lars Reid, who had their first date just days before the 2020 global shutdown. They spent the first five months of their burgeoning relationship falling for one another from a distance. The script was created verbatim from written exchanges during the couple’s initial courtship, complemented by evocative multimedia and live music by local indie band Teacup Gorilla.

Theatre Artibus continued to produce all-original works like "The Pâstisserie,” its fanciful look at the inherent dangers of nostalgia, and the group also helped the Japanese Arts Network to reimagine its original creation, "Zotto," an immersive supernatural Japanese folktale at Sakura Square. 

Emancipation Theatre presented Jeff Campbell's "In the Pocket: The Ballad of Bobby Trombone," both at The Savoy Denver.

In Colorado Springs, the Springs Ensemble Theatre gave a huge lift to Quinn Smola by fully mounting the first-time playwright’s “Midge and the Butcher,” a horror-comedy about a trans teen who summons a demon to ward off a high-school bully.

The aforementioned wild 'Cats of The Catamounts also continued their ongoing "Feed" series, offering original short plays by Jessica Austgen, Sam Gilstrap, Felice Locker and Peter Trinh while audiences, yes ... fed. 

Looking ahead to 2024: 

Already on the books for the coming year: Melissa Lucero McCarl’s “The Heartbeat of the Sun” is a sweet look at the long-term friendship shared by two octogenarian actors now adjusting to senior living. It will be staged by Cherry Creek Theatre from May 3-19 at the Mizel Arts and Culture Center.

Neuman was set to have an unprecedented (by anyone) trifecta of new plays staged in 2023. But Benchmark postponed his next work, “The Road to Lethe,” from 2022 to next April 26-March 18. That’s a retelling of the Greek myth of the golden apple that lit the spark for the Trojan War.

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 23rd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.