If he weren’t a playwright, Marcus Gardley told folks at the Denver Center Theatre Company, he would be a lawyer. “That’s the only other profession,” Gardley reasoned, “where you get paid to stretch the truth.”
There was plenty of evidence of truth-stretching for dramatic and comedic effect at the seventh annual Colorado New Play Summit in February, which attracted a growing number of theatre lovers and industry professionals, who arrived to hear new works by a mix of young writers (Michael Mitnick, Lauren Feldman) and their more experienced colleagues (Richard Dresser, Lisa Loomer). DCTC’s festival, driven by the company’s eagerness to find new plays to premiere in future seasons, has become popular with Denver audiences, who fill just about every seat at the readings, knowing they’re getting the first look at possible contenders for productions that will headline next year’s schedule.
“We hope we’re becoming a center for new work,” says Bruce K. Sevy, the theatre’s associate artistic director and director of new-play development. “We are doing new work, not just readings—but the readings are leading to actual productions, which is what the playwrights need. It really has invigorated our seasons.”
And playwrights take that commitment seriously because of the concerted effort the theatre puts into festival rehearsals and casting. For a reading of their new musical Sense & Sensibility, based on the Jane Austen novel, writer Jeffrey Haddow and composer Neal Hampton enjoyed two weeks of rehearsals with director Marcia Milgrom Dodge and a cast of leading performers with vast musical theatre experience, including Lisa O’Hare and Mary Testa.
“You’re not going to get that just anywhere. That’s unbelievably helpful, especially for a musical, to get all that rehearsal time,” Haddow enthuses.
Dresser, whose latest play The Hand of God was featured in a staged reading, said he “made huge strides” during the roughly 15 hours of rehearsal his play received. “This theatre really does commit to new work. Look at the percentage of new plays they do in their season—and we’re at a time when fewer theatres are taking that risk.” At least three of the plays in DCTC’s current season are world premieres that originated at past festivals.
Other theatres are taking note, as well. Among those attending this year’s summit were representatives from Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, California’s La Jolla Playhouse, Dallas Theater Center, New York City’s Soho Rep and Primary Stages, even South Coast Repertory of Costa Mesa, Calif., which conducts a major new-play festival of its own.
The readings at the Colorado New Play Summit are performed by actors primarily drawn from other productions currently running at DCTC and presented over the course of a festive winter weekend, where guests can mingle and compare notes at one of several meals, or at the lively Playwrights’ Slam, where Gardley and nine other writers shared scenes from their latest works while audience members munched popcorn and sipped beer or wine.
One of those writers, Samuel D. Hunter, nursed a head cold at the slam but got a true sense of healing from the warm audience and critical response to the full-scale premiere of his play The Whale, the highlight of the 2012 summit (after it was introduced in a staged reading at the 2011 festival). Hunter, 30, said he is in a state of disbelief at the path of his career in the last year, when he won an Obie for his 2010 play A Bright New Boise. He is likely a future contender for similar awards after The Whale makes its New York debut next season at Playwrights Horizons, an announcement made just days after the summit’s end.
Such success has given him the courage, Hunter said, to finally give up his day job teaching to focus full time on his writing. He has been teaching expository writing, the same subject that Charlie, the morbidly obese main character in The Whale, instructs online from the discomfort of his couch, where he is eating himself to death as a psychological reaction to the starvation of his longtime lover.
In his moving and funny play, Hunter reveals a keen sense of observation and a knack for revealing just enough without telling the audience too much. As he tries to understand just what happened to his lover, Charlie is also trying to reconnect with the teenage daughter he hasn’t seen in 15 years, while contending with a surprisingly helpful out-of-sync Mormon missionary who knocks on his door one day. After the success of The Book of Mormon, another young missionary could be considered something of a comical stereotype, but Hunter treats Elder Thomas with enough respect that his interaction with Charlie brings fascinating insights to the story.
By contrast, the other fully staged script at this year’s festival, Lisa Loomer’s Two Things You Don’t Talk About at Dinner, goes almost too far in dealing with its subject, the human perspective in a seemingly impossible-to-solve debate on the future of the Middle East. Loomer sets her story not just at any dinner, but a Passover seder, which may be a familiar trope to anyone who grew up at such potentially heated gatherings. She puts a kitchen sink of issues on her seder plate and fills the table with a United Nations–
like guest list of nationalities, religious and political views that distract from the heart of her story.
The happily married hostess, Myriam, has an African-American daughter; one couple has an adopted Chinese daughter (who barely factors into the situation and doesn’t even stick around long enough to ask the traditional Four Questions); a male friend is married to a Japanese woman, and one of Myriam’s work colleagues is a Christian who brings along her stoner teenage son, who happens to be a burgeoning Buddhist. And then there’s Sam, Myriam’s high school friend and one-time boyfriend, an Arab-American who finally ends his decades of silence and opens up about his disagreements with Myriam about the future of Israel and Palestine.
The young Buddhist tells them there will never be peace if people are unwilling or unable to forget the centuries of killings and distrust in order to look to the future. Loomer is going for something more—an exploration of how we can separate the personal from the broader political issues—but by throwing in so many other elements, she loses focus.
Loomer was also around to see the staged readings of her next play, Homefree, a still-developing story about homeless youths finding ways to survive on the streets in the Pacific Northwest while enjoying their first taste of freedom, no matter the challenges. The play is based on her interviews with actual young people about their experiences and attitudes.
Though musicals can struggle in staged readings, audiences clearly responded to Sense & Sensibility, a fairly faithful adaptation that features a good sense of humor, touching moments and a score that simultaneously sounds period and contemporary. Milgrom Dodge had the cast moving far more than is usual in a typical staged reading, giving audiences throughout the in-the-round Space Theatre ample opportunities to feel close to the action. And the audience’s reaction, including a standing ovation, suggests this show might have a good chance of making it onto the Center’s regular season schedule.
Sevy said that Michael Mitnick had been commissioned to write a play that would involve a multimedia presentation, and the result is Ed, Downloaded, which deals with futuristic (or maybe not-so-futuristic) technology in which our favorite memories can be saved and stored by technicians in a “forevertery,” to be relived on a loop by our souls even as our bodies depart the Earth. It’s an alternately fascinating and chilling thought, particularly as Mitnick depicts the dangers of playing around with the technology; the memories, as seen in video replays, are altered slightly each time we see them. The reading was staged by Sam Buntrock, who directed the acclaimed London and Broadway revivals of Sunday in the Park with
George, with multimedia design by Charlie I. Miller.
Among the summit’s other readings: Lauren Feldman creates a kind of poetry out of the metaphorical Grace, or the art of Climbing, a play she has been developing for several years, including at the Yale School of Drama’s Carlotta Festival of New Plays and in a full production at Philadelphia’s Nice People Theatre. It’s a look at life through the eyes of a young woman named Grace who has trouble making emotional connections. She finds some sense of meaning in nature by rock climbing. Even without real walls to climb and rope lines (as required in a full production), the reading provided a sense of how the sport’s rush of adrenaline changes Grace’s perspective.
And Richard Dresser, the author of such plays as Rounding Third, Gun-shy, and numerous film and television projects, provides a thought-provoking and cautionary tale about how far reality television is willing to go to make news and build ratings. His The Hand of God deals with our primal need to tell and share stories, even if they tend to blind us to the reality of the world that’s right in front of us.
Of course, that’s what each of these plays aims to do in its own way—to provide a literary poke in the eye, or the ribs, that will make us all pay better attention to the complex world we live in.
Jay Handelman is the theatre critic and arts writer for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and chairman of the American Theatre Critics Association.
