{"id":2453580,"date":"2020-01-22T23:05:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-23T06:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=319477"},"modified":"2020-01-22T23:05:00","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T06:05:00","slug":"new-plays-new-format-for-theater-masters-take-ten-in-aspen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/new-plays-new-format-for-theater-masters-take-ten-in-aspen\/","title":{"rendered":"New plays, new format for Theater Masters\u2019 \u2018Take Ten\u2019 in Aspen"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Theater Masters is raising the curtain on a new version of its wintertime Aspen festival this weekend.<\/p>\n

The local nonprofit has rebranded its long-running \u201cTake Ten\u201d festival as the \u201cTake Ten First Look Festival,\u201d a three-day event that will present 10-minute plays by local high school students in Theater Masters\u2019 Aspiring Playwrights program along with a staged reading of a full-length play by Theater Masters Visionary Playwright Carolyn Kras.<\/p>\n

The festival runs Thursday through Saturday at the Black Box Theatre. The programing shuffle is a break from the long-established format of presenting short plays by graduate students.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to shake things up a little bit,\u201d said Theater Masters executive director Daisy Walker, noting that Theater Masters has showcased its high school program and MFA program in Aspen but not its Visionary Playwright commissions of new works by rising writers. \u201cWe\u2019ve been getting more and more interested in the third part, the Visionary Playwrights. We\u2019ve been thinking about how to utilize them more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 2002, the Aspen festival had, in varied formats, produced short plays (running 10 minutes each) by playwrights in MFA programs around the U.S. After a mid-winter production in Aspen \u2014 where the playwrights and guest directors would workshop the plays with local actors \u2014 they mounted a springtime production in New York.<\/p>\n

The MFA plays are no longer a part of the Aspen shows, though the nonprofit\u2019s selected MFA playwrights\u2019 work will still be onstage in the May showcase in Manhattan. Instead of the short grad student pieces, Theater Masters is showcasing a work by one of its Visionary Playwright awardees. For this weekend\u2019s shows, it is \u201cMine & Yours,\u201d by Kras, who was the organization\u2019s 2012 Visionary Playwright. The award sent her to the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival, where she gathered material for this dark comedy about the U.S. housing crisis.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s student plays are all by students from Glenwood Spring High School: Ashlan Stolley, a collaboration between Bridget Carrington and Paige Flentge, and Annika Bucchin. They\u2019ll be performed, along with \u201cMine & Yours,\u201d by a cast of 16 Aspen area actors.<\/p>\n

Theater Masters has been awarding the Visionary Playwrights prize since 2008, but has never established a forum for the plays created by the commission. The prize has led to full-mounted productions elsewhere, including the 2012 Obie Award-winning \u201cMilk Like Sugar\u201d by Kristen Greenridge, which ran at the La Jolla Playhouse and the 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist \u201cMarjorie Prime,\u201d by Jordan Harrison, which ran at Playwrights Horizons.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d thought about, \u2018What if we did longer plays? What if we did one-acts? What if we did full length?\u2019\u201d Walker said. \u201cAnd then we said, \u2018We\u2019re sitting on all these great Visionary Playwright plays!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

There is no strict timeline for the Visionary Playwrights to complete their commissioned works. They attend Ideas Fest as part of the prize \u2014 and this year a winner also will attend Aspen Brain Lab \u2014 but the works have often spent years in development as the playwrights tackle other projects and plays. Visionary Playwright Michael Mitnick, for instance, was pulled away from his Theater Masters work as he was mired in more than a decade of battles with Harvey Weinstein and his production company over Mitnick\u2019s script for the film \u201cThe Current War,\u201d which finally made it into theaters in 2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes they don\u2019t turn them around right away because they are doing other things,\u201d said Theater Masters creative director Vicky Hansen.<\/p>\n

Doing the Visionary Playwrights reading in Aspen, Walker and Hansen reasoned, has the potential to be more impactful on the work and the audience than it might in New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo do a staged reading in New York will only go so far,\u201d Walker said. \u201cIt\u2019s so saturated already. So it\u2019s a more vibrant environment to do it in Aspen.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Theater Masters is raising the curtain on a new version of its wintertime Aspen festival this weekend. The local nonprofit has rebranded its long-running \u201cTake Ten\u201d festival as the \u201cTake Ten First Look Festival,\u201d a three-day event that will present 10-minute plays by local high school students in Theater Masters\u2019 Aspiring Playwrights program along with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2453580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 19:31:32","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2453580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2453580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2453580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2453580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}