STEAMBOAT SPRINGS — In the culture capital of the world, artists make art in a noisy concrete jungle where they must first dodge traffic, crowds and mounds of trashbags. Ah, New York.
In Steamboat Springs, artists make art in pastoral, open-air cabins where the sound of their own music harmonizes with a symphony of chirping birds and reedy, wind-blown grass. Where dancers, actors, singers and students intermingle on a mountain where snow still rests in June.
This weekend’s 11th Perry-Mansfield New Works Festival draws more than 40 international artists to this idyllic retreat where, in 1913, two ladies from Smith College persuaded the rough and uncultured men from the nearby town to build for them what is today the oldest performing arts camp in the country. It is a 95-year-old cultural oasis where founders Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield danced freely through the forest in ways that could have had their Massachusetts forebears bringing them up on charges of witchery.
Not here at this Colorado retreat 150 miles northwest of Denver where Dustin Hoffman once taught — and Julie Harris was taught.
“I could get used to this landscape,” said an ebullient Victor Maog of New York, one of the nation’s leading young Asian- American directors. Maog accepted Perry-Mansfield’s seasonal title of theater faculty chair sight unseen.
He got his first sight on Monday, but still can’t quite believe what he’s seen since: five rustic performance cabins where companies from around the country are hard at work all this week developing new projects they will put before the public today through Sunday.
In one is Randal Myler, best known for the Denver Center- born “It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues” and “Hank Williams’ Lost Highway.” He’s discussing with actor Mary Bacon how 1970s films like “Convoy” and “Smokey and the Bandit” perpetuated damaging trucker stereotypes. Bacon reads a monologue from Myler’s new “Mama Hated Diesels” about a wife saying goodbye to her trucker husband. It’s underscored by Danny Wheetman singing “White Line Fever.”
“That tore me up,” he tells Bacon. “So did you,” she says back.
In the next cabin, a plethora of big-name Denver Center Theatre Company actors, including Sam Gregory, Randy Moore and Romi Dias, circle with New York playwright Rogelio Martinez and Philadelphia director Terrence Nolan.
As a deer bounds by not 30 feet away, they discuss the uneasy bond between the American and Russian astronauts who were thrown together to build the International Space Station in 1998. In a scene from Martinez’s “When Tang Met Laika,” Dias tells her orbiting astronaut husband, “I drank three glasses of Tang so I would dream of you.”
Down the gravel road, a team from the Actors Theatre of Louisville is hard at work musicalizing a poem by Wendell Berry called “Wild Blessings.” This is the company that mounts the Humana Festival, the premiere new-play event in the country. But as his cast goes about inventing harmonies for a song lyric, artistic director Marc Masterson explains the value in leaving Kentucky behind for 10 days in the Colorado mountains.
“It’s the setting; that’s why you come to a place like this,” Masterson said. “Look at the show we are working on right now. Wendell Berry is a poet who wrote about the sublime aspect of wild beauty. So being here in Steamboat is particularly helpful in getting us the perspective we need. I mean . . . we’re in it.
“And while it’s true we do a lot of new work back home, to have a week of uninterrupted rehearsal time, and the chance to show it to an audience that’s pretty smart, is a great thing.”
The New Works Festival also differs from other national new-play initiatives because it invites institutions, rather than individuals. It’s hoped the material these visiting companies bring here to work on will one day be performed on their stages back home.
Last summer, Adam Bock’s acclaimed “The Receptionist” went straight from Perry- Mansfield to off-Broadway, and “Lydia” went on to a widely hailed production at the Denver Center.
Executive director June Lindenmayer believes the week “Lydia” spent in the mountains “absolutely catapulted that piece” seven months before its world premiere. “We gave them the incubation time they needed to get that piece to the place it needed to be.”
Like “Lydia,” “Tang” was commissioned by Denver Center artistic director Kent Thompson. The hope is that this week of work will launch the play to a spot on the DCTC’s next Colorado New Play Summit lineup in February.
Nurturing new talent
But this fest is just one small part of Perry-Mansfield’s programming, which offers camps geared for ages 8 and up. Starting today, a select group of 40 elite high school and college students arrive for six weeks of intensive, pre-professional courses in dance, theater, musical theater, dramatic writing, art and equestrian activities. The student-to-faculty ratio is just 2-to-1, and guest faculty will include the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Joan Holden and Public Theatre chief Oskar Eustis.
After 95 years, the camp remains fixed on its founding principle of nurturing new works and new talent for eventual stage careers. Talent like Bacon, who attended Perry-Mansfield at ages 15 and 16.
She arrived having no idea that people can actually make their living as professional stage actors. Last year, the Denver East grad appeared on Broadway in Tom Stoppard’s Tony-nominated “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” then delivered a starring performance in “Eccentricities of a Nightingale” that was singled out for praise by the New York Times — twice.
Several years ago, Bacon was invited back to teach. She told her East Coast husband all about Perry-Mansfield and “he thought I was lying,” said Bacon. “He didn’t think it sounded real.”
Bacon is married to Andrew Leynse, artistic director of New York’s Primary Stages, which has two plays going to Broadway next season. He’s also now in his second year as artistic director of Perry- Mansfield’s New Works Festival, “which I think is hilarious,” Bacon said.
What lured Leynse, like Bacon before him and Jim Steinberg before her, is the setting: “The creative forces of almost 100 years here are palpable,” said Steinberg, a DCTC trustee who serves as the festival’s co-chair with his wife, Karolynn Lestrud. “This is just an incredibly inspiring place to create art.”
Bacon remains “a Colorado girl,” she said, “and the mountains are indescribably spiritual for me. They are just in my blood, and to have us connected here with artists from New York is overwhelming to me.”
For the public, this weekend affords the opportunity not only to access that beauty, but the even more rare experience of seeing how new work gets made.
“It’s the gift of the process,” said Lindenmayer. “It’s the first glimpse of a dream, really.”
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
2008 Perry-Mansfield New Works Festival public performances:
8 p.m. Friday, June 20: “Mama Hated Diesels: Songs and Stories of the American Truck Driver,” by Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman. Local actors: John Hutton and Charles Weldon. Based on interviews with truck drivers and their families; with traditional trucker tunes
1 p.m. Saturday: “When Tang Met Laika,” by Rogelio Martinez. Local actors: Mary Bacon, Romi Dias, Sam Gregory, Randy Moore, Josh Robinson, Erik Sandvold, and Richard Thieriot. A Denver Center Theatre Company new-play commission about the International Space Station.
8 p.m. Saturday: Original dance concert choreographed by Peter Chu, featuring his dance company with seven Perry-Mansfield students. Chu says his original piece will explore the weight that can come from “suffocating in doubt.”
1 p.m. Sunday: “Wild Blessings: A Celebration of Wendell Berry.” Created by Marc Masterson and Adrien-Alice Hansel, Actors Theatre of Louisville.
4 p.m. Sunday: “What’s That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling.” Absurd musical-theater satire exploring an artist of questionable gifts — presented in a cable talk-show format. Written by and starring Tony nominee David Pittu (“Lovemusik”).
Information: 40755 Routt County Road 36, Steamboat Springs. Single tickets $15 or $65 weekend pass. 800-430-2787, 970-879-7125 or perry-mansfield.org.
