DCPA Off-Center Ends Development of New Immersive Theater

When the Denver Center for the Performing Arts launched Off-Center in 2010, it felt like the city was on the cusp of something new. Conceived as an experimental laboratory for unconventional theater, the program quickly became a national model for immersive work. 

Over the past fifteen years, DCPA Off-Center brought 653,000 people through its doors, staged 70 original productions and generated more than $80 million in economic impact.

“They were providing a whole lot of prestige to the immersive community in Denver,” says Ren Manley, founding artistic director of Denver’s Audacious Immersive. “We are a relatively small city. If you’re talking about immersive theater, you really kind of think of L.A. and New York, but because we had the DCPA, it really added a lot of prestige to our city’s immersive scene.” 

On October 7, however, DCPA leadership announced a dramatic change: The company will no longer invest in developing or producing original immersive theater. Instead, the DCPA says it will focus on presenting existing immersive projects while winding down its in-house development arm. 

“As we look to the future, the DCPA remains committed to innovative programming and will continue to explore opportunities to present established immersive projects,” wrote DCPA CEO Janice Sinden in an open letter to the community. “This difficult decision was made in response to a constellation of factors: budget challenges and economic uncertainty, unpredictable ticket-buying trends, a limited pipeline of immersive content and the lack of partners to share in the risk of producing new immersive work.”

The announcement came with another blow: Charlie Miller, Off-Center’s co-founder, executive director and curator, will leave the organization in March 2026 after seventeen years.

“To Charlie: thank you,” Sinden wrote. “Your vision expanded our imagination and redefined what theatre could be. To our audiences and donors: thank you for believing in Off-Center and for joining us on this extraordinary journey. And to our incredible team: your ingenuity, dedication and spirit have been the heartbeat of Off-Center. You brought stories to life with boldness and care, and your contributions have left an indelible mark on our community and the field of immersive theatre.”

Although Suzanne Yoe, DCPA director of Communications & Content Marketing, said that “we will not be entertaining interviews as the announcement speaks for itself,” she did confirm the future of Off-Center’s space at 407 South Broadway: “We will put out an RFP to sublet the space through the remainder of the lease, which goes through July 2026.”

The timing of the announcement, just two days after the final performance of Sweet & Lucky: Echo, raised eyebrows. The sequel to Off-Center’s 2016 breakout immersive hit was highly anticipated but received mixed to negative reviews, including my own for Westword, in which I described the show as “a repressed, repetitive retread.”

It’s difficult not to connect the production’s underwhelming reception with DCPA’s sudden pivot. If Echo had been the resounding success the organization hoped for, it seems unlikely that this announcement would follow so quickly. Perhaps that’s why the announcement was disappointing but not a surprise for some in the local immersive community. 

“I wasn’t shocked, but it’s a bummer,” says Christine Woods, executive director of Immersive Denver. “Off-Center has been such a leader in the immersive world. We’ve been really lucky in Denver to have major arts organizations support original immersive work. I mean, there is no other organization in the country, to the best of my knowledge, that supports immersive on a scale like that, so to lose that kind of support for original work isn’t great.” 

Woods credits Miller’s leadership with putting Denver on the immersive map. “Sweet & Lucky, the original, was the first immersive I ever saw, and it blew my mind,” she says. “It was a big part of why Denver started growing this scene here, because Charlie had been doing the legwork on it from the get-go. His work is really what set up Denver as an immersive hub.”

Woods emphasizes that Denver’s independent artists, including Audacious Immersive, The Catamounts, Control Group Productions, Elevate Immersive and OddKnock Productions, will keep producing in the area. But without the DCPA’s promotional muscle, the challenge of growing audiences will fall to smaller companies.

 “They have that broad reach, and they have that crossover with traditional theater,” she says. “I think they were the entry point for a lot of people who weren’t seeking out the ultra-weird stuff. Losing that entry point is going to be tough.”

The suddenness of the announcement also rattled local producers. “It seemed like they were heavily invested in immersive,” Manley says. “It’s not a wind-down season or anything — they’re ending it immediately. That’s sad, especially because Off-Center made an effort to hire local actors. One of my first thoughts was, ‘Well, there goes a whole bunch of jobs in Denver.’”

Manley acknowledges the DCPA’s reasoning for ending the program and admits that producing immersive work requires a significant amount of resources. However, she questions the nonprofit’s claim that it lacks funds to create immersive work in the area.

“Our most expensive show ever cost maybe $10,000,” she says. “For them to say they don’t have the budget for immersive theater, it’s kind of frustrating as someone literally here doing it on a low budget. The reality is they probably just weren’t able to take that traditional format and apply it to immersive theater in a way that felt sustainable to them long-term.”

Still, the ecosystem Miller helped build may yet endure. Next year will bring the debut of Denver Immersive Repertory Theater, or DIRT, an ambitious project backed in part by $400,000 from the city’s Downtown Development Authority that’s slated to open in early 2026 in a 10,000-square-foot space at 15th and Blake streets. Co-founder Steve Wargo notes the influence of Off-Center on his own project.

“Off-Center has been a pioneering force in American immersive theater, elevating Denver’s reputation as a hub for innovative performance,” he says. “It’s accurate to say that DIRT wouldn’t be here without Off-Center. Charlie’s leadership has inspired countless artists and helped build an audience hungry for immersive content. As we look towards our opening next year, we hope to continue providing those audiences with the kind of boundary-pushing, immersive experiences they’ve come to love.”

For now, Denver’s immersive future will be in the hands of small, local companies that will keep experimenting on smaller scales even as the city loses its biggest institutional champion. Woods hopes that Off-Center will use this pivot to support other organizations in the area. 

“I would love to see Off-Center invest in some smaller local companies,” she says. “Because what a lot of those smaller companies are doing with a fraction of the budget is incredible. If they had some of the DCPA’s resources, we could make some really awesome original work.” 

Off-Center’s closure as a developmental hub marks the end of a remarkable chapter. From David Byrne’s Theater of the Mind to the beloved Camp Christmas, which is returning to the Stanley Marketplace this year from November 21 to December 24, the program consistently expanded the boundaries of what theater could be in Denver. 

But the experiment that began in 2010 as a bet on younger, more adventurous audiences has finally run into the financial and logistical headwinds that plague immersive producers nationwide.

“The indie artists are going to continue to do the indie artist thing, so it’s not like this is going to kill the scene in Denver at all,” Woods says. “But I don’t know where we’re going to get these established works to tour from if we don’t have big companies taking a risk on it.  I’m curious to see if anyone around the country steps in to kind of fill that gap, but I think it’s probably going to scare people off of it. If the people who did it decided it’s not worth it, I think it’s gonna be harder to convince other major institutions to take that risk, which is just such a bummer.”