The big winners at this year’s Colorado New Play Summit were plays that were introduced at last year’s Colorado New Play Summit.

The Denver Center Theatre Company’s annual weekend in the national theater spotlight brings fans and industry insiders together to get a first peek at four developing scripts that Artistic Director Chris Coleman is now considering to be fully staged as world premieres on an upcoming mainstage season.

On Saturday night, Coleman announced that two plays from the 2024 Summit will be included on his upcoming full 2025-26 season announcement.

The story that stirred the most buzz last year is called “Cowboys and East Indians,” co-written by Nina McConigley and Matthew Spangler. It is an original (in every way) story of how one Indian American family assimilates into the tight-knit fabric of conservative Casper, Wyo.

“I am over the moon,” said McConigley, who was born in Singapore, grew up in Wyoming and now lives in Fort Collins – which qualifies her as the rare Colorado-based playwright to land a mainstage DCTC production. At last year’s Summit, she was ecstasy personified, basking in the adulation of local audiences and looking very much the picture of the future of the American theater.

“This week was one of the most transformative in my life as an artist,” she said at the time.

What makes “Cowboys and East Indians” unprecedented is not only that it presents a family grappling with a culture collision after moving from India to Wyoming. That’s just part of it. When a forgotten family secret resurfaces, that’s when you find out what this play is really about – and because I’m not a monster, I’m not spilling the secret here.

What McConigley can say is this: “Our play is a rare exploration of what it means to be an immigrant in the rural American West. It is about Wyoming. It’s about masculinity, race, identity and how you form identity when you don’t see reflections of your identity around you.”

The second selected play is called “Godspeed,” by Terence Anthony. In that play, it’s 1865, slavery has been abolished in Texas, and a woman named Godspeed has returned to the state with vengeance on her mind – until an unexpected discovery makes her question if the retribution she desires can deliver the justice she’s been seeking.

That’s what happens in the play. But what it is about, Anthony said, is untold history. “I started with this question: ‘What happened after slavery was abolished?” he said. “We’re taught that Black folks dressed up and had a Juneteenth party, but what was really going on during this seismic societal adjustment? At its core, the play is about the illusory nature of freedom and how the chains created by the institution of slavery were only transformed, not destroyed, after emancipation.”

A commonality the two stories share, Coleman told the Denver Gazette, “is that they both reimagine parts of history, or parts of the country, that we think we know – but we get to see it in a new way.”

For the second straight year, a DCTC world premiere play will be mounted in partnership with the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. Just as Jake Brasch’s “The Reservoir” will move directly from Denver to Atlanta after it closes Sunday, “Cowboys and East Indians” will start in Denver and go straight to the Alliance a year from now.

This play will show just how far we have come since the DCTC premiered another Wyoming-based play – ”The Laramie Project” – 25 years ago.

“I do love telling stories from this region, and this is definitely a story that I had never heard of from the West,” he said. “Part of the goal is to shine a light on stories of people who are totally present in the contemporary West, and yet, we don’t think about them as living here. We just tend to think of the West as ‘Yellowstone.’ This is so different.”

Meanwhile, four new scripts were shown last weekend to fully sold-out Summit readings, and no doubt a couple will circle back around accordingly at this time next year.

Last week, I pointed out in this space that stage and screen star Gideon Glick would be appearing in a charming romance called “Bogfriends.” What many of you astute (and clearly younger) readers pointedly pointed out was that another big pop-culture name appearing in Denver was actor Sujata Day, who appeared in the reading of a tense domestic thriller called “Rust on Bone.”

If you don’t know Sujata Day, your cool-kid card is hereby revoked (right alongside mine). Day is known for her starring role as CeCe in Issa Rae’s web series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” she has recurred for four seasons on HBO’s “Insecure.” And she has 40,000 Instagram followers (including, now, me).

Additionally, anyone who saw the Denver Center Theatre Company’s 2024 staging of “The Lehman Trilogy,” which for my money was the best play on any Colorado stage this past year, all three actors were back in action on Summit weekend.

Matthew Boston is appearing in the fully staged world-premiere play “The Suffragette’s Murder,” Tasso Feldman appeared in the reading of a featured Summit play called “If God Were Blue,” and Sasha Roiz (“Chicago Med”) appeared in another called ‘How to Conquer America: A Mostly True Story of Yogurt.”

Concert news

Wilco is coming to Colorado for an Aug. 16 concert at Mission Ballroom, followed the next night at the Ford Amphitheater in Vail (not Colorado Springs). Tickets on sale at noon Friday at wilcoworld.net/shows …

Brad Paisley is coming to Red Rocks on May 24 with Walker Hayes and The Offspring, and Jimmy Eat World is coming to Ball Arena with New Found Glory on Sept. 7. Tickets to both go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday. …

Only the Colorado Symphony is cool enough to have a season announcement as eclectic as Ben Folds, Sutton Foster and Kelli O’Hara. Subscriptions are available now. Single seats on June 9. Read more here …  and, in case you missed it, catch up on the star-packed Denver Botanic Gardens announcement, too.

How to train your dragon – to stay

On November, we told you that Colorado Symphony Resident Conductor Christopher Dragon has been named music director of the Greensboro (N.C.) Symphony. And that wouldn’t have to leave Denver to do it. Now, Dragon has additionally been named music director of the No Name Pops, which is soon to have its name changed to the Philly Pops. And guess what? He does not have to leave Denver to do that, either.

Wait. How many jobs in how many cities can a symphony conductor have at once? Apparently, a lot.

”That might seem like an odd thing, but for conductors it is fairly common these days to have multiple appointments,” said the Colorado Symphony’s Nick Dobreff. “Greensboro is a smaller orchestra, and they’re not doing anywhere near the number of performances we are. Same with Philly at this point. Christopher also guest-conducts all around the world, so he keeps very busy.”

We will see him back in Denver soon conducting a special three-night event with Gregory Alan Isakov on April 17-19 at Boettcher Concert Hall. Tickets at 303-623-7876 or coloradosymphony.org.

“I am truly honored to be named Music Director of The Philly Pops,” said Dragon. “These last 10 seasons with the Colorado Symphony have been instrumental in my development, and I look forward to working with the tremendous musicians and staff in Denver for years to come.”

And finally …

Last month we told you Colorado’s Jenna Bainbridge would be making history when she joins the cast of Broadway’s “Wicked.” And on March 4, she did. That’s when Bainbridge took her first bow as Nessarose, marking the first time the wheelchair-using witch is being played by an authentic wheelchair-using actor on Broadway.