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Since its inception, the Denver Center Theatre Company has included original works in its lineup. And its ten-play 35th-anniversary season includes four world premieres, all selected from the 2013 Colorado New Play Summit, which has helped solidify the DCTC’s position as host of one of the top-tier new-play festivals. “We had such compelling and imaginative writing at this year’s Colorado New Play Summit that could not be overlooked,” says Kent Thompson, producing artistic director. “Our selections this year are wide-ranging and diverse, and I think they will bring excitement to our patrons’ experience at the theater.”
And how: That lineup includes Just Like Us, Karen Zacarías’s adaptation of Helen Thorpe’s best-selling book about four young Latinas — two in the country legally, two illegally — as well as Catherine Trieschmann’s comedy The Most Deserving, Matthew Lopez’s The Legend of Georgia McBride and Marcus Gardley’s adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, black odyssey. Just Like Us debuts tonight at 7:30 p.m. in the Stage Theatre at the Denver Performing Arts Complex, and it’s changed considerably from the version presented at February’s New Play Summit, reports Thorpe, who saw her first reading of the full-blown play just two weeks ago. But then, the book also morphed as Thorpe was writing it. The shooting death of an off-duty Denver police officer at the hands of an illegal immigrant who worked at a restaurant once owned by the author’s husband, then-Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, made it impossible for Thorpe to stay entirely on the sidelines as the narrator. And the character of the journalist is even more prominent in this version. There are other changes, too. About a quarter of the play is in Spanish, making it “more bilingual than the book,” she says, “and they really brought things to life with dancing and music.”
Just Like Us runs through November 3; for tickets, go to denvercenter.org.
Fridays, Saturdays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays, Sundays, 1:30 p.m.; Tuesdays-Thursdays, 6:30 p.m. Starts: Oct. 4. Continues through Nov. 3, 2013
