The Denver Center Theatre Company wants to be nationally known for making new plays. Even if it means attracting a new audience at the possible expense of the current one.
Seven of the 11 offerings on the company’s 2010-11 season have never been staged before in Denver. Two are world premieres; three are recent or current Broadway hits.
The new offerings will be offset a bit by classics like “Dracula,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the perennial “A Christmas Carol.” But the scales are definitely tilting from old to new.
On stage — and in the audience.
“I think we will be more and more successful at attracting audiences to those new works,” artistic director Kent Thompson said. “And I think they are probably a different audience than perhaps our current, mainstream audience.”
But new plays are often the most expensive to produce, least memorable and most difficult to sell, Thompson admits.
That last part is especially true at the Denver Center, which recently announced it will discontinue its Master of Fine Arts conservatory program as a cost-cutting move.
But Thompson believes that by aggressively building up his new-play program over the past five years, he has whetted local theatergoers’ appetites for topical plays with populist appeal and an urgent relevancy to our times.
Despite the inherent challenges, he said: “I think it’s our responsibility to build an audience that will come to new plays. Because I truly believe if the shows that we produce don’t matter to people, in addition to entertain them — I’m not sure we have a future.”
Next year’s Denver Center world premieres will be Ken Weitzman’s “The Catch,” about a man’s obsession with catching — and then selling — a Barry Bonds-like baseball star’s record-breaking home run; and Michele Lowe’s “Map of Heaven,” about a New York artist whose radiologist husband’s negligence causes a death that threatens her rise in the art world.
The season includes just the second English-language staging of Caridad Svich’s “The House of the Spirits,” based on Isabel Allende’s best-selling political novel about four generations of Latin American women amid the political upheaval of an unnamed country that looks a lot like Chile.
Those three all emerged from the company’s latest Colorado New Play Summit.
Joining them in getting full productions next season are Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps,” a quirky British comedy in which four actors play more than 150 roles; Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer-winning “Ruined,” about a brothel owner who prospers in civil-war Congo; and “Superior Donuts,” Tracy Letts’ follow-up to his celebrated “August: Osage County.”
A visiting French-Canadian company called The 7 Fingers will present “Traces,” seven street kids telling their life stories through words and gravity-defying, Cirque du Soleil-like acrobatics.
“Dracula” will be staged in direct competition with the Colorado Ballet’s annual staging.
“I think it’s an exciting blend of material that will bring vastly different issues and writing styles to our stages,” Thompson said.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
