Rising past the summit

Playwright Grote's '1001' a rare exception to workshop fare

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 8, 2007 at midnight

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They call it "development hell," the road a new play travels through workshops and readings, never getting a staged production.

But for Jason Grote, it's been a touch of heaven. The playwright's 1001 will be the centerpiece this weekend of the Denver Center Theatre Company's Colorado New Play Summit. Grote's work earned a toehold here when it had its own reading at last year's inaugural summit.

This year's festival also will include readings of new work by Neal Bell, Evangeline Ordaz, Theresa Rebeck and Eric Schmiedl. The latter two, authors of Our House and Plainsong, were commissioned by the Denver Center.

Each year dozens of plays are workshopped and commissioned by theaters around the country, going nowhere in the end. Grote's is the exception, one that went through development routes and ended up with a regional theater production (a second is scheduled for this summer). It also may be a sign of Denver Center's sincerity in its quest for new work.

"We talk about this a lot at new-play conferences, how it can be a dead end," says Associate Artistic Director Bruce Sevy. "One of the things that excites me about (Artistic Director Kent Thompson's) vision for this is that we're really looking at plays that we're interested in producing."

For Grote, the development process was thorough, but fairly speedy. It began when he was invited to join the Writer/Director Lab at Soho Repertory Theatre (he is now co-director of the lab), which pairs writers and directors in development. The result, after months of Grote working with director Liesl Tommy, was a staged reading in early 2005.

"Where (the SoHo process) really tends to pay off is in the staged readings, because staged readings never have enough rehearsal," Grote says. "(At Soho Rep) the directors have already been with it for three months, so when questions come up they already have the answers."

The playwright learned a painful lesson from that reading, though, as he realized he had spent too much time discussing his influences and not enough rehearsing.

"If you've got a week to rehearse, it's not a good idea to burden the actors with the intellectual baggage. We had sort of taken the play apart and spread it all over the floor and hadn't put it back together again."

The result: Soho Rep decided not give the play a full production. "The artistic director said to be prepared to produce it yourself," Grote says.

Grote tried to winnow down the play, then three hours long, but every segment he took out, people wanted back. Still, a half-hour subplot was trimmed to a few minutes.

Last fall, Grote's agent submitted 1001 for the Colorado New Play Summit. "The worst-case scenario is that I get to take a free trip and I get to meet people that otherwise wouldn't know about my work," Grote says.

In rehearsal with director Sharon Ott, he brought the running time down to its current two-hour, intermission-less length. "I didn't cut any individual scenes. It was all internal cuts, and it was pacing. There is the temptation for the actors to slow down, because it's about words."

At the reading in Denver, he found himself focusing not on the actors or the audience, but a fellow playwright.

"I spent a lot of the reading watching Theresa Rebeck to see what her reaction would be," he says. "I got a laugh from her right in the very beginning and that made me very happy."

After the reading, he overheard two older couples discussing the play and explained that one of his goals had been to bring back repeated lines and props "so that the audience feels, somehow, they're in good hands."

One of the women patted his hand and said, "Well, don't make it too easy, dear, that's part of the fun of it!"

That winter, Grote submitted the play for inclusion at the O'Neill's National Playwrights Conference, the most prestigious in the country. In an unusual twist, he was selected for the O'Neill - after Denver Center scheduled the play for its next season, giving Grote the unusual luxury of developing a play already guaranteed a production. Now the play is being performed for literary agents, theaters and academics coming to Denver, where Sevy expects Grote will not be the last playwright kept on.

"We're interested in all four of these plays, actually," Sevy says of the current slate of readings. "I think there's a strong possibility that there will be more than one play in next year's season coming out of the summit this year."

The road to the stage

1001, by Jason Grote, had an extensive, if compressed, development process before it reached a full production at Denver Center Theatre Company. The stops it made:

• Baltimore Center Stage's First Look Series, 2006

• Denver Center Theater's Colorado New Play Summit, 2006

• Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab (N.Y.), 2004-05

• Soho Rep "Phase 2" Workshop (N.Y.), 2005

• Last Frontier Conference (Alaska), 2005

• O'Neill National Playwrights Conference (Conn.), 2006

Colorado New Play Summit

• When and where: Friday and Saturday at Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Speer Boulevard and Arapahoe Street.

• Cost: Tickets are sold out; the free panel discussion is still open.

• Crossing Cultures in the Contemporary World: The panel discussion, moderated by artistic director Kent Thompson, features playwrights Julia Myatt, Thomas Gibbons, Octavio Solis, Evangeline Ordaz and Jason Grote. 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Stage Theatre.

• Information: 303-893-4100

bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101

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