The Colorado New Play Festival will take place June 12-17, 2023
May 10-June 15: Drama Drinks. The Colorado New Play Festival & Rex’s Family of Restaurants bring you Drama Drinks, a fun way to contemplate the theatre while whetting your whistle. Visit each of Rex’s restaurants: Laundry, Creekside, Big House Burgers, Salt & Lime and Mazzolas and order their signature Drama Drink. Get your card punched at all five restaurants, then redeem your card for a commemorative wine glass by contacting Dagny McKinley at 970-846-6768 or dagny@cnpfsteamboat.org
June 12-15: Open rehearsals at Colorado Mountain College. The public is invited to sit in on rehearsals as the play develops and takes shape during the week. The CNPF is the only place to observe this process. Contact dagny@cnpfsteamboat.org for a rehearsal schedule.
June 15 at 7:00pm: Playwrights and Prosecco at Steamboat Art Museum. Have you ever wondered how playwrights find the inspiration for new stories? How do they turn that idea into a story that inspires, chills, amuses or opens up new conversations? Find out at the coolest event in town, Playwrights and Prosecco. Be one of the few to be part of an intimate conversation with playwrights from across the country. Buy Tickets
June 16 & 17: Colorado New Play Festival at Strings Music Pavilion. Join us as new plays from across the US are read on stage for the first time. See below for a full schedule. Tickets for the 25th annual Colorado New Play Festival are on sale!
2023 Colorado New Play Festival Lineup
FRIDAY, JUNE 16
4:00pm: BIG DATA. Kate Attwell –American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco, CA
Sam loves Timmy, and Lucy loves Max, but the pressures of modern life leave them anxious, lonely, and susceptible to the siren song of tech. Do our devices—tantalizingly incarnate in this funny, sexy, uncanny world premiere—really know us best? Are our digital footprints predictive of our future choices, or are they choosing for us? When Sam and Lucy’s parents make a shocking announcement, the family is forced to confront what’s distracted them from each other—and the legacy they’ll leave behind. A.C.T.’s Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon and playwright Kate Attwell reunite to realize this revolutionary piece, inspired by Attwell’s experience touring Mozilla’s “Glass Room” pop-up interactive exhibit in San Francisco. Come explore questions of attention, connection, nourishment, and the dizzying possibilities of AI.
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7:30pm: SUICIDE ON TELEGRAPH. Richard J Montoya –Berkeley Rep., Berkeley, California.
Memory. Madness. Yearning for more artistically pure times if they existed. Mental and physical challenges that follow the sudden shutdown of entire artistic communities and the ensuing struggles of maintaining community, artistic identity and relevance in pandemic times.
In this dynamic multiple character performance work, Montoya (of Culture Clash) writes a love/anti-love elegy to Berkeley and the Bay Area. Montoya plays with temporality, embracing his own challenges with the crushing competition of large academic institutions versus the romanticism of his father’s generation and the seminal Chicano poets/artists there. Audiences will witness the jazzy vibrancy of Telegraph Avenue, the serene Sierra Nevada mountains, Chinatown, pre-revolutionary Oakland and the world of Chicano poetry and the Beat generation.
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SATURDAY, JUNE 17
1:30pm: A THOUSAND MAIDS. Tony Meneses –Two River Theatre. Red Bank, New Jersey
Cordelia’s stuck. Cordelia needs to design a maid’s costume, but she can’t stop thinking about The Help and Maid in Manhattan and Gone with the Wind and As Good As It Gets and… and… and… How can she find a way to show these women for who they really are? And though a woman of color herself, she must also face her blind spots and biases. A world premiere by Tony Meneses (The Hombres, The Women of Padilla, Guadalupe in the Guest Room).
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3:30pm: INDIGO DREAMS. Melis Aker – Signature Theatre. New York, New York
In the hills of central Turkey, three carpet-weaving women are caught between wanting to salvage their dying industry, and an offer to modernize that could have both profitable and dangerous consequences. Across the globe, a “Westernised” Turk working in corporate divestment straddles the gap between uplifting carpet-weavers’ rights, considering company interests, and confronting her own cultural hypocrisies. INDIGO DREAMS is about the fetishisation of tradition and locality in the face of globalisation, following two colliding worlds that grapple with preservation vs. progress, the complicity of good intentions, and the rituals that keep them alive.
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7:30pm: THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE. Veronika Duerr – Florida Studio Theatre. Sarasota, Florida
The Adventure of Life uses humor and curiosity to challenge the narrative surrounding infertility, creating a blueprint to better understand the highs and lows of fertility issues. With legislation being passed daily, now is the time to explore the science behind how we actually came to exist in the first place. Part theatrical exploration, part obstacle course, part conversation with the audience, all one woman show.
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