New Play Summit: A cool glance behind the curtain
Want to maintain a fondness for laws or sausages? Don’t ask how either gets made. Or so the saying goes.
Thankfully, the process of playmaking is far from stomachturning, at least for those who get to witness it. (For playwrights, it’s likely another matter.) Each year, the Colorado New Play Summit (Feb. 14-16 and 21-23) proves the work can be thrilling, bold, even delectable in its most bare-bones, process-intense form: actors onstage, scripts resting on music stands in front of them. Begin.
Next weekend, theater folk from around the country will travel to the Denver Center’s well-regarded annual event of workshops of staged readings. Although it’s dubbed Industry Weekend because of that influx, the summit offers local theater-lovers a rich, behind-the-curtain experience. This year’s showcased playwrights have been in town since Tuesday, tweaking this line of dialog, rewriting that scene, ash-canning another. Yes, darlings will be killed and new truths revealed as the written word gets spoken by actors.
The rehearsal rooms in Denver’s Tramway building — where once the city’s streetcars were housed — have been busy with the playwrights, directors, dramaturgs and actors turning around this installment’s five plays: “Alma” by Benjamin Benne; “Another Kind of Silence” by LM Feldman; “Reclaiming One Star,” a Denver Center commission by Suzan Shown Harjo and Mary Kathryn Nagle; “Hotter Than Egypt” by Yussef El Guindi; and “In Her Bones” by Colorado native Jessica Kahkoska.
The world premieres of “Twenty50” and “You Lost Me”
— plays workshopped during last year’s installment — are running concurrently with the weekends of readings. Full productions are a way for the Denver Center Theatre Company to assert its long-haul commitment to new-play development and to strut its wares in front of other regional theaters looking for works to mount in upcoming seasons. Plays that spring-boarded out of the summit include Lauren Yee’s “The Great Leap”; José Cruz González’s “American Mariachi”; Matthew Lopez’s “The Legend of Georgia McBride”; Lauren Gunderson’s “The Book of Will”; Marcus Gardley’s “Black Odyssey”; and Samuel D. Hunter’s “The Whale.”
The Readings. The Playwrights.
“Alma.” Winner of the Arizona Theatre Company’s 2019 Latinx Playwright Award, Benjamin Benne arrives at the summit with “Alma.” Undocumented single mother Alma and her 17-year-old daughter Angel are prepping for important tests: one for citizenship, the other for the SATs. Playful but also rending, “Alma” deals with what the tests might portend for the women and their places in the United States. “I love that it’s a mother-daughter story,” says Chris Coleman, artistic director of the Denver Center Theatre Company. “There’s politics but it’s woven into the tapestry. It’s about a mother and daughter trying to find their way,” says Coleman, who admits it was hard to ignore the buzz surrounding the playwright.
“Another Kind of Silence.” In 2013, LM Feldman’s “Grace, or the Art of Climbing” was a summit world premiere offering. Feldman returns to the Denver Center with a drama set in Greece about art, intimacy and friendship. Fully bilingual (English and American Sign Language), “Another Kind of Silence” follows composer Peter and writer Evan, artist Chap and café owner Ana — as well as their “shadow souls” — as affection, desire and the understanding of themselves shift.
“Hotter than Egypt.” Yussef El Guindi’s play also explores the warp and woof of long-term relationships. A married American couple travels to Cairo and becomes entangled with an Egyptian couple, to combustible effect. The reading reunites El Guindi and Coleman, who directed the world premiere of Guindi’s dark comedy “Threesome” at Portland Center Stage in 2015.
“Reclaiming One Star.” Consider Suzan Shown Harjo and Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play an act of restorative justice. “Reclaiming One Star” finds Tony One Star trying to get to the truth of his granduncle’s life. In doing so, he exposes the white man who appropriated James One Star’s Sioux identity for his own ends. More vitally, it begins to uncover and share the actual story of the real man whose stolen identity has been used by the owners, as well as fans, of the NFL’s Washington Redskins to justify keeping that racist name.
The playwrights know well the terrain of this detective story/courtroom drama. Nagles is a lawyer as well as a playwright. Medal of Freedom recipient Harjo, a poet, curator and lecturer, is a prominent advocate for American Indian rights. Together they wrote the play “My Father’s Bones” about the fight over Olympic legend Jim Thorpe’s remains.
“One reason I’m so happy to be focused on this subject is it’s really about the human beings around these issues,” says Harjo on the phone from Washington, D.C. “It’s not the story of the scoundrel at the center; it’s about the people who are trying to grapple with what happened long ago to ancestors.” A bonus for attendees: Recent Oscar recipient Wes Studi is in the cast.
“In Her Bones.” When Jessica Kahkoska’s piece about a young woman’s reckoning with her family’s past and the cultural history of crypto-Judaism — set in Colorado’s San Luis Valley — received the 2019 Powered by Off-Center Residency at the DCPA, there wasn’t a plan for it to become one of the showcased works in this year’s summit. Indeed, it wasn’t clear what form the work would ultimately take.
“This was a surprise to us,” admits Coleman. “I love that it’s a Colorado story. I’m particularly interested in stories that come out of this region. I think there’s something very poetic and magical about the voice.”
Off-Center continues to support Kahkoska’s process, she says. “I’ve never had a team that was so supportive of the fact that most of my work ended up re-examining the process, because the topic of crypto Judaism in southern Colorado is very complex and very sensitive. They just got behind and amplified a lot of questions I asked about how the play on this topic should be created.”
The Premieres.
Last February, Bonnie Metzger sat in a vast rehearsal room, listening intently as one of the actors for “You Lost Me” posed a series of questions about motivation, context, even the history of the famous 1828 shipwreck that the show references. In a nearby rehearsal room, Tony Meneses and director Henry Godinez were doing a similar kind of deep listening to the actors of “Twenty50.”
Now, Metzger’s haunting tale of two women each named Ann Harvey — kin separated by nearly two centuries but linked by
Newfoundland’s thrashing sea, ghosts and more — is getting a beautifully performed production, elegantly directed by Margot Bordelon. And Meneses’ thought-provoking, speculative drama about the Latino identity, “Twenty50” (reviewed this week), is in the Space Theatre’s in-theround stage through March 1.
“It’s been kind of the best-case scenario for the journey a playwright takes,” Meneses says about the process of going from a commission to a full production. “Once the actors are literally embodying your words and movement, you learn so much about the kinesthetics of your storytelling. Especially this play — there’s suspense, it’s a little bit of a thriller. How do we calibrate that physically? How do we express silence and physicality so we don’t let the play get too relaxed, too casual?”
“I find good actors to be such smart, dramaturgical, insightful bodies. Because they’re living the truth of that character, so they come in with really wonderful questions that perhaps you as a writer hadn’t thought about.”
Meneses was in Denver for his play’s opening night and will return for the summit’s industry weekend.
The Slam.
It’s hard to overstate the unexpected joys that the Summit’s Playwright Slam has delivered over the years. From tender (Lauren Gunderson strumming a uke as she sang of her grandfather’s fight with Alzheimer’s) to fierce (Regina Taylor riffing on Butterfly McQueen and “Gone With the Wind”) to delightfully deranged (Beaufield Berry acting out scenes for a musical adaptation of “The Baby-Sitters Club”).
The Slam encourages current summit playwrights as well as Denver Center-commissioned authors to let their hair down. They tease the gathered with shards of language, gems of ideas, a searing scene or early-draft monologue. They also provide sweet glimpses into the surprising humility of many dramatists. Even the playwrights who have tried to wriggle out of performing come through. I can’t wait to see what this year’s cohort has in store for the not-to-be-missed gathering.