Photos from the welcoming reception for the 11th annual Colorado New Play Summit. Above, the cast of ‘American Mariachi.’ To see our full photo gallery, click the ‘forward’ button on the image above. Photos by John Moore for the DCPA NewsCenter. 

The Denver Center’s 11^th annual Colorado New Play Summit began in earnest today when the four featured playwrights and their creative teams arrived for two weeks of development, rehearsals and public readings.

The four featured playwrights will work through the week in preparation for the first weekend of public readings on Feb. 13-14. They will then take what they learn into another week of intensive development, culminating with a second weekend of readings that will be attended by industry leaders from throughout the country.

(Pictured right: Actors Mehry Eslaminia, ‘Midwinter,’ and Mackenzie Sherburne, Third Rail Project. Photo by John Moore.)

Typically, two or three of the featured readings at each Colorado New Play Summit go on to full productions by the DCPA Theatre Company. The Summit has grown into one of the nation’s premier showcases of new plays. In its first decade, 44 new plays were introduced at the Summit, and more than half have returned as fully staged Theatre Company productions. This year’s The Nest and FADE were featured readings at the 2015 Summit.

At Tuesday’s welcoming breakfast, each of the four 2016 featured playwrights briefly introduced their developing works. Here is what they said, in their own words:

José Cruz González, American Mariachi
“American Mariachi is a piece inspired by women who started forming their own mariachi groups in the 1970s. Of course, they had many challenges trying to play such a male-dominated musical form. We interviewed a number of amazing women who were able to help us enter into that world, and we found an amazing group of artists who will play and sing in the piece.” 

 Lauren Gunderson, The Book of Will
“The Book of Will is a play that tackles the history right after Shakespeare died. His friends and fellow actors were the ones who found and collated and valiantly published – through kind of an amazing odds, actually – the first folio of his works. So our task is to really take this thing that’s so epic and so universal, but make it into a story about friendships and communities and this personal stuff that was really the cause of this world-changing, beautiful poetry that has access to every language.” 

Tira Palmquist, Two Degrees
“Two Degrees is a cheery story about climate change. Actually, it so happens I love science, and I’m really, really inspired by climate change – so my main character is a woman of about 45 years old who is a climate scientist. It’s really a play about grief: Grief for the planet, grief at large, grief on a more personal scale.”

Mat Smart, Midwinter
“I spent three months working in Antarctica as a janitor at the McMurdo Station research center, and I wrote a play about that called The Royal Society. This is sort of a companion piece. One thing that’s interesting about the station is that the people there fall in and out of love and have these epic relationships for, like, two weeks – and it’s very genuine. It’s kind of like a petri dish. And in the wintertime, the big event is the Midwinter Dinner. That got me thinking about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So it’s a little bit of a riff on that.” 

(Note: The McMurdo Station is a research center on the south tip of Ross Island, which is in the New Zealand-claimed Ross Dependency on the shore of McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. It is operated by a branch of the United States’ National Science Foundation. The station is the largest community in Antarctica, capable of supporting up to 1,258 residents. All personnel and cargo going to or coming from Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station first pass through McMurdo.)

The Colorado New Play Summit made for a ‘One Night in Miami’ reunion: Kemp Powers, now a commissioned DCPA Theatre playwright, and actor Jason Delane (Two Degrees’). Photo by John Moore for the DCPA NewsCenter. 

First weekend (Launch Weekend): Saturday, Feb. 13, and Sunday, Feb. 14
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Second weekend (Festival Weekend): Friday, Feb. 19, through Sunday, Feb. 21

Including an additional workshop presentation with Third Rail Projects
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Previous NewsCenter Coverage of 2016 Colorado New Play Summit (to date):
Featured playwrights named for 2016 Summit