Tag Archive for: Colorado New Play Summit

Q&A with 2026 Student Playwrighting Winners, Finalists

Six winners have been announced for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ 14th annual Middle School & High School Playwriting Competition, three in each age group. This year, the DCPA’s Education & Community Engagement team received 288 submissions from students across Colorado. The top three plays by each age group will be included in […]

All the World’s Our Stage

Impact of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s New Play Development In its inaugural season, the DCPA’s Theatre Company offered a five-play season including its first-ever world premiere, Passing Game by Steve Tesich. By season five, the Company’s commitment to new play development was formalized with a festival of public readings lasting 15 seasons. In 2005/06, […]

Playwright Terence Anthony discusses Godspeed

Playwright Terence Anthony spoke with the DCPA when his play, Godspeed, was featured in the 2024 Colorado New Play Summit. Now, it comes to the stage in a fully produced world premiere running January 30-February 22, 2026 in the Kilstrom Theatre. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. View the original interview on […]

Winners Announced for DCPA’s 2026 Student Playwriting Competition

Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA) Education and Community Engagement is happy to announce the winners of the 14th annual Middle School and High School Playwriting Competition.  The Playwriting Competition is grounded in workshops hosted by DCPA Education Teaching Artists. These in-school workshops introduce students to the fundamentals of playwriting, bolster creative writing skills, and […]

The Risks and Rewards of New Play Development

By Chris Coleman, Denver Center Theatre Company Artistic Director    Whether it’s Hamilton or Hamlet, every play started as a new work. Someone was excited by a story and brought together a group of collaborators to carve out a path toward opening night. It’s always a risky venture. Ask anyone in our industry and you’ll find that […]

Playwrights Nina McConigley and Matthew Spangler Discuss Cowboys and East Indians

Now receiving its world premiere at the Denver Center Theatre Company, Cowboys and East Indians was developed in the DCPA’s Colorado New Play Summit. Co-adapters Nina McConigley and Matthew Spangler spoke about their play with the DCPA before their Summit reading in 2024. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. View the original […]

2026: New Plays for the New Year

Plays like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Angels in America don’t go from obscurity to Pulitzer Prize winner overnight. Instead, new plays and musicals take time, effort, investment, and dedication. Sure, there are some stories that practically “write themselves,” but that is generally more fiction than fact. Instead, a playwright goes through drafts and […]

Godspeed: A Western Rewritten

“I always loved westerns as a kid — the showdowns, the gunfights, all that,” playwright Terence Anthony said during a video conversation. His own contribution to the genre, Godspeed — a rousing saga about a formerly enslaved woman on a mission in post-Civil War Texas — is having its world premiere at the Denver Center […]

Finding Yourself in Cowboys and East Indians

    When her play, Cowboys and East Indians, has its world premiere, playwright Nina McConigley thinks it’s going to be mind-blowing for her mother, who was born in India and lives in Wyoming, to see actors wearing saris onstage at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Growing up in Casper, as “the other […]