It’s Bird Day AND the first Tuesday of May, which means it’s time for a new episode of “10 Minutes to Curtain” !

 

This month, Charlie ends the “10 Minutes to Curtain” season on a high note with a rousing look ahead to next season’s productions. Join Artistic Director Kent Thompson, Associate Artistic Director Bruce Sevy, and members of The Denver Center’s acting company and staff for this not-to-be-missed musical finale.

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By Douglas Langworthy, Literary Manager, Denver Center Theatre Company

 

Our production of Karen Zacarias’ play Mariela in the Desert should have been a fairly straightforward mounting of an existing script. Since the play had been produced four times previously at theatres all across the country, our director, Bruce Sevy, had assumed the script was locked in and ready to go…until he called Karen to tell her we were going to do Mariela—and Karen asked if she could do some rewriting.

 

And so instantly, the play became a “new” play again, and the playwright became an integral part of the rehearsal process. Karen has a quote she loves to share: “Plays are never finished, they’re just abandoned.” This was just one of those projects that she had set aside to work on other plays. But she never felt she’d gotten it quite right. So with the theatre’s blessing, she dove right back into a play she had begun some eight years earlier.

 

She admits that, like one of the characters in her play, she had started the play seeing things from the outside, and now it was time to see things from the inside. While the plot remained virtually intact, she made significant adjustments to the characters, making them more human, more complex, more able to love. She deleted the first scene and wove the essential information into the next one. The tone of the play became warmer and more accessible. Up through the first preview actors were having to absorb the latest changes. The excitement that goes along with developing a new play and having the playwright in the room is palpable as this fifth production of Mariela heads toward opening.

 

Is the play finished now? Did Zacarias get it right this time? She says “yes,” this is the version of the play that will live on in future productions and hopefully in published form. Time to finally abandon this one and start the next play and the next.

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Featured this week for “YouTube Tuesday” is Mariela in the Desert, a beautiful story of a family of Mexican Artists living in the desert north of Mexico City, playing now through May 15 in The Ricketson Theatre.  Here are scenes from the play:

In this segment from the latest “10 Minute to Curtain” episode, Playwright Karen Zacarías and director Bruce Sevy talk about the process of revisiting, revising, and “re-premiering” Mariela in the Desert:

Catch more Mariela in the Desert videos on YouTube.

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Continuing its commitment to supporting new American playwriting, the Denver Center Theatre Company has recently commissioned plays from four exciting playwrights: Marcus Gardley, Lisa Loomer, Theresa Rebeck and Octavio Solis. Their projects, which will come to fruition over the next year or two, are all part of Artistic Director Kent Thompson’s keen interest in supporting new playwriting. Since coming to the Denver Center five years ago, Thompson has established a vigorous commissioning program (at least four plays per season) as well as the COLORADO NEW PLAY SUMMIT, a dynamic weekend each February featuring full productions and readings of brand new work.

 

Both Theresa Rebeck and Octavio Solis have received prior DCTC commissions, their plays going on to full productions during the Company’s 2007/08 season. Rebeck’s Our House, a satirical look at reality TV, has had a second production at New York’s Playwrights Horizons. Solis’ Lydia, a dark and haunting family saga set in El Paso, Texas, went on to receive four subsequent productions last year at theatres from coast to coast that included Yale Rep and the Mark Taper Forum.

 

Theresa Rebeck’s past New York productions include The Understudy, Mauritius, The Scene, The Water’s Edge, Bad Dates, The Butterfly Collection, Spike Heels and Omnium Gatherum (co-written, Pulitzer finalist). All of her plays have been published in acting editions by Samuel French. Publications also include Collected Plays Volume I-III and Free Fire Zone with Smith and Kraus. She has won the National Theatre Conference Award, the William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award, Boston’s Elliot Norton and IRNE awards, a Writer’s Guild Award, and Edgar and a Peabody.

 

Octavio Solis’ past productions include Man of the Flesh, Prospect, El Paso Blue, Santos & Santos, La Posada Mágica, El Otro, Dreamlandia, The Seven Visions of Encarnacion, Bethlehem and Gilbralter. His adaptation of Quixote based on the novel by Miguel de Cervantes was recently produced at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He received the 2000/01 National Theatre Artists Residency Grant from TCG and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

 

Lisa Loomer’s play Living Out was produced at the Denver Center in the 2006/07 season. Her recent play, Distracted, played at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York in 2009, had its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, and is currently being produced in regional theatres and in Europe. Her other plays include The Waiting Room, Expecting Isabel, Birds, Accelerando, Bocon! and Broken Hearts. Her awards include the Jane Chambers Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and The Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award.

 

Marcus Gardley recently received a Helen Merrill Award for an Emerging Playwright. His most recent play is Love is a Dream House in Lorin. Other produced plays include dance of the holy ghost, (L)imitations of life, and like sun fallin’ in the mouth. He is the recipient of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Gerbode Emerging Playwright Award, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Award, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Grant and an NEA/TCG Playwriting Participant Residency among others.

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By Chad Henry, Literary Associate, Denver Center Theatre Company

 

I caught up with Bruce Sevy, DCTC Associate Artistic Director and director of THE VOYSEY INHERITANCE a few days ago as he was running to an afternoon rehearsal.  I managed to get a few questions in as he was putting down his briefcase and coffee at his director’s table, ready to take a look at some “bits and pieces” with his actors.

 

Chad:  You’re in previews for VOYSEY now, right?

 

Bruce:  Yes, we had our first preview on Thursday and it went really well!  The sets and costumes are beautiful and I couldn’t ask for a better cast—they’re all brilliant.  The play I think takes a little concentration on the audience’s part—the language is somewhat formal, along the lines  of George Bernard Shaw–but the play barrels along at a fast and very entertaining clip—there are some nice comic moments along with the family drama.  The audience stayed with us all the way, and of course there were the “oohs” and “ahs” of recognition when they got what the story was about—they gave the cast a great standing ovation.  The play’s almost a hundred years old but it might as well have been written yesterday.

 

Chad:  Right, it’s about financial shenanigans among the high and mighty—in Edwardian England.  Isn’t this script an adaptation by David Mamet?

 

Bruce:  Yes, it sure is.  A lot of people know Mamet from contemporary, knuckle-duster  plays like Oleanna, Speed-the-Plow and Glengarry Glen Ross, which DCTC presented last season.  Also, audiences know his  movies–The Verdict, The Spanish Prisoner and RedBelt to name a few. But he’s also written period movies like The Winslow Boy.

 

Chad:  Adapted from a Terrance Rattigan play.  What do you enjoy most about these period plays?

 

Bruce:  Well, the research is great fun—and educational.  I spent a lot of time with set designer Lisa Orzolek looking at period libraries and drawing rooms—those great homes of England were magnificent.   And I didn’t miss an episode of Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes on PBS!  Of course our costumes are gorgeous—Bill Black, our costume designer, not only gets the silhouettes exactly right, but the costumes have incredible detail.

 

Chad:  Have you had challenges with this play or the material?

 

Bruce:  Every cast member is a total pro and a joy to work with– we did some work with accents—getting them right but making them clear and comprehensible for a contemporary U.S. audience.  You want to walk  the fine line between upper class BBC British dialect and communicating the story!

 

Chad:  Thanks, Bruce.  Have a good rehearsal–and a great opening on Thursday!

 

Here’s Edward Voysey, played by Sam Gregory, explaining his dilemna:

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