STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, COLO.: The Colorado New Play Festival has announced their full lineup of theatre, plays, and playwrights for the 2021 festival. The festival brings creative teams together each summer to work with a major nonprofit theatre to create new work for the American stage.

The 2021 festival will be held June 7-20 in Steamboat Springs, with public presentations to limited audiences June 18-19. Full casts for the readings will be announced at a later date.

The first work in the festival will be Gamal Abdel Chasten’s The Black Mann Act The Trial Of Jack Johnson A Vaudeville Show, presented by City Theatre Company of Pittsburgh. The vaudeville-styled show places the life of African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson on trial, as was done in the 20th century, when he was falsely accused of violating the Mann Act, or the White-Slave Traffic Act, for dating a white woman. Monteze Freeland will direct.

Next up will be Max Posner’s The Pool, presented by Curious Theatre Company of Denver.  The play follows a woman managing an illness with random, rampant, invisible symptoms for which there is no cure. Ken Rus Schmoll will direct.

The festival will also include Karen Hartman’s The New Golden Age, presented by Primary Stages of New York. The play follows two sisters in a Big Tech dystopia, as one, Professor Lin, defends the Right to the Dark while the other, Polly, attempts a perilous maneuver with Sunlight. The production is supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and features dramaturgy by Erin Daley.

The final play in the festival will be #HereToo by Barbara Pitts McAdams and Jimmy Maize, presented by the Tectonic Theater Project of New York. #HereToo explores new theatrical forms for interview-based plays, weaving together stories of youth activists and survivorship in response to America’s gun violence epidemic.

A limited number of tickets to the festival will be available for vaccinated guests.

The Colorado New Play Festival brings theatre professionals together in the Rocky Mountains to develop exciting new work for the American stage. It is presented under executive producers Jim and Lori Steinberg and artistic director Andrew Leynse, with sponsorship from the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust.