The Colorado New Play Summit turns 20 years old today. The annual event is considered one of local theater’s premier weekends.

Audiences at the Denver Center for Performing Arts will get the chance to see staged readings of four new works as well as two original productions from plays featured in previous summits. “Godspeed” by Terence Anthony and “Cowboys and East Indians” by Nina McConigley and Matthew Spangler both debuted as new works two years ago.

Now they take the main stage. 

• “Influent” Playwright Isaac Gómez.
• “Lemuria” Playwright Bonnie Antosh.
• “You Should Be So Lucky” Playwright Alyssa Haddad-Chin.

This year’s new plays include: 

• “Lemuria” by Bonnie Antosh
  • This modern King Lear Jane revolves around a Jane Goodall-like professor who runs her research lab as a strict matriarchy. But it might be time to retire.
• “Influent” by Isaac Gómez, whose play “Wally World” was featured at the 2019 summit.
  • A story about two influencers who are born on the internet together but take different trajectories.
• “You Should Be So Lucky” by Alyssa Haddad-Chin 
  • Set in a Chinatown apartment, it’s an intergenerational story of food and family.
• “The Myth of the Two Marcos” by Tony Meneses, whose play “twenty50” was featured in the 2019 summit and produced on the main stage in 2020. 
  • It’s a story of two unlikely friends, both named Marco, with parallel lives and opposite outlooks. 

A scene from “Lemuria” by Bonnie Antosh

Courtesy DCPA/Amanda TiptonJacob Meyerson (left) and Scout Backus (center) in rehearsals with Director Melissa Crespo for “Lemuria.”

The summit is two days of tears, laughter, and introspection. Along with avid local theater fans, representatives from theaters across the country visit Denver to see if they can find the latest masterpiece — like “The Book of Will” by Lauren Gunderson or “The Reservoir” by local playwright Jake Brasch.

For the playwrights, the summit provides days of intense rehearsals with actors, directors, and dramaturgs as well as a weekend of staged readings in front of live audiences — all in the hope of providing creative energy and feedback for the scribes. 

Today, as part of our series highlighting local theater, we “Raise the Curtain” on the renowned Colorado New Play Summit. We went to the halls of the Robert and Judy Newman Center for Theater Education, where the actors prepare before taking the formal stages across the street at the Denver Center. We visited rehearsals and spoke with two-time New Play Summit alum Tony Meneses.

The festival runs through Sunday night.

Kevin J. Beaty/DenveritePlaywright Tony Meneses stands in a rehearsal studio at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts complex in downtown Denver. Feb. 11, 2026.

The following are highlights from our conversation. Moments have been edited for clarity on the page.

Alejandro Alonso Galva: What’s it like to be back at the New Play Summit?

Tony Meneses: I feel like I’ve grown as a writer. 

I was very proud of that play (“twenty50”), and I am proud of this play too (“The Myth of the Two Marcos”). It was kind of one of the first times as a writer I was really reconciling and identifying my growth. Hopefully what I showed had promise when I was here. 

I feel more maturity, to be honest, in terms of not just my attitude towards my career but also the writing itself — which is nice to kind of feel a little bit more seasoned, a little bit more confident about the things that you’re doing.

Alonso Galva: If you could speak to yourself in 2020 going through this the first time, what would you tell that Tony? 

Meneses: I wouldn’t put pressure on him. 

That play had subsequent productions. It’s been relevant, and people are discoursing with it in other ways outside of the play container. Just having that conversation about our relationship to identity and how things are evolving or not — or regressing perhaps. 

So that feels good. But then for me it’s just a journey of writing play after play. Not everyone, not every play is going to go to the Denver Summit, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a worthwhile experience. 

When you get to have a triumphant moment, like my last summit, it lives in your body, and you remember. I feel more confident, and I don’t think I could have written this play without the confidence that I gained here. 

Alonso Galva: The green lights that came with that.

Meneses: Yeah. I had been produced at Two River Theater in New Jersey. They had done a couple productions, but I was starting to wonder, is any other theater going to do my work? So Denver Center was the first one outside of Two River to do my work.

So just that, again, it just changes your chemistry.

Kevin J. Beaty/DenveritePlaywright Tony Meneses stands in a rehearsal studio at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ complex in downtown Denver. Feb. 11, 2026.

That boon of just like, “All right, I think I’m doing something here,” allowed me to just keep writing and keep trying things. 

Particularly to this play, because it’s a personal play and it looks at some history of my own. 

I think I would’ve been too shy or not ready to write this kind of ‘guts on the page’ work. 

So I think it’s meaningful to have had that first summit experience and then to come back and to showcase this play in this way. 

I mean, we haven’t done it yet. But we’ll see how it goes this weekend. People might say I like “twenty50” better, which is fine. 

But I think for myself, these plays are good examples of my best.

Courtesy DCPA/Amanda Tipton(From left) “Lemuria” Dramaturg Janice Paran, Playwright Bonnie Antosh, and Director Melissa Crespo.

Alonso Galva: Let’s talk about “twenty50.” One of the themes in that play was this idea that Latinos would eventually sway towards one party — and not the party that they’re typically associated with. Then came the 2024 election, and we see the numbers come out of Latinos swaying towards that party as you predicted. Did you feel a little Nostradamus moment?

Meneses: I did. That’s why I wrote the play. 

I mean, that was in the DNA then. I could already see it start to take shape. So, I did write it as kind of a cautionary tale. 

It’s set in the future, so it’s not like a technology dystopia, but it’s kind of like a culture dystopia. What happens when we sort of lose sight of history and culture and ourselves in a lot of ways?

So trust me, it’s not a fun “I told you so.” But it is affirming that the play was actually in discourse with something that felt very important to speak to and still feels as urgent now.

Alonso Galva: Did you have a moment after the 2020 election thinking maybe you got it wrong?

Meneses: I mean, my dream would be no one ever would want to do that show ever again because we solved the problems of the play. But, as we have seen, it’s not just about electorates or political parties; it’s actually about one of the threads of the play: immigration. 

As long as I’ve been an immigrant and my family’s been immigrants in this country, that’s been a constant political touchpoint — immigration is bad. 

That “immigration is bad” point of view was very alive in the 2020 election and very alive in the next four years — which is what led to the results of this last one, without getting too in the weeds. 

It always feels relevant, this discourse around immigrants and their value and their place in this country. 

Alonso Galva: One thing I really appreciate about your work is that so often folks try to talk about these sticky issues — immigration, elections. Often it ends up being preachy. Your work tends to just make folks reflect and think. How, as a writer, do you thread that needle? How do you make it human and not preachy?

Meneses: That’s the key word, the human part, right? 

I think that’s the universality of what we all do in our practice. You want someone to sit down and still be able to connect to that human being on the stage and be challenged by them and to earn that. So, it’s not patting the audience in the back and saying everything’s okay, regardless of whatever the play is about — political or not. 

They buy the ticket to the ride, and they want to stay on the ride. That’s important to me because the second that they feel preached at or they feel like the playwright’s talking to them versus the characters. 

So grounding it in the human experience, grounding it in the character’s human experience. 

In the play “twenty50,” we had generational points of view, we had immigration status — points of view that they’re able to connect with in some way even if they feel, on paper, very foreign to their experiences in their own lives. In a lot of ways, that’s like a family drama. Everyone knows a family drama. We all come from families. We’ve seen family dramas our whole lives. 

So start there, and then start to weave in sort of the larger discourse of what I was trying to interrogate and not tell people what to think either. 

That’s the poison about those kinds of plays. It’s like “feel this or think that or change this.” 

(Instead), What if we could think differently and feel differently? 

Courtesy DCPA/Amanda TiptonLuan Taveras in rehearsals for The Myth of the Two Marcos.

Alonso Galva: Let’s jump to “The Myth of the Two Marcos.” Tell us a little bit about how this one came about.

Meneses: The personal story is inspired by a little bit of biography and a lot of creative license too, because it’s a play; it’s not a documentary. 

It’s just trying to champion growing up as an immigrant or growing up as an insert-the-blank outsider experience. 

Anyone who loves arts at some point, I bet you, has felt like an outsider. 

So I think it’s speaking to that ethos of what it’s like to feel like you don’t belong or trying to find spaces and people that you can connect with. So that was the germ. It’s a story about that.

A scene from “The Myth of the Two Marcos”

Alonso Galva: Talk to us about the inclusion of not just Spanish but an indigenous language in this play. 

Meneses: So the language is called Nahuatl; it’s still a living language. The Indigenous communities in Mexico still speak it, and if they immigrate here, they carry it with them. So I definitely know it exists here in the States as well. 

Thematically, it just puts us in those shoes when we don’t understand another person and how we translate. My goal is that even if we didn’t get the translation, we still would understand that character. So it’s work; it’s labor. 

But I think that’s what we can do with theater audiences. You’re not going to have everything kind of handed to you very easily. You should lean in and want to know what’s actually happening. I’m constantly toggling that tension because there are also audience members, if you go too far, if they don’t know it, they get frustrated, they get angry. 

But also if you translate everything, then we’re catering. 

So I live in that tension of how much and where can that exist so that we still are connected and we still care, even if we’re being challenged.

I think it’s just an important thing as a human global community that there are just things that we’re not going to understand. And that doesn’t have to make us angry; that doesn’t have to frustrate us. Just to be with it and stay in it is, I hope, a translatable human skill that we need a lot more of in the world, in the country right now. 

So it’s a little bit of magic that I hope can come through the power of theater; that’s the gesture of theater. 

You can only really do that in a play. You can’t do that in a movie because you would just subtitle it. But in a play, you’re in that seat. Your brain is actively thinking, “What is it? What’s going on?” 

So I just find that’s something that we can do only in this medium. 

Alonso Galva: I can’t help but connect this to another cultural moment. We just had the Bad Bunny concert. It was completely in Spanish, and people still had fun; people still danced. Do you take inspiration from that? I see a smile on your face. 

Meneses: Of course. Yeah. It’s funny because it doesn’t always have to be about you or for you, and yet you still can feel included. You can still be in it and with it and present. It’s a good skill to remember that. 

I find that sometimes we sit at a play, and we’re like, “What does this have to do with me? How is this about me?” I think my play has tried to decenter that or destabilize that a little bit to just remind us that it’s not always about us. Even if you do identify as Latino or a non-native English speaker. You could come as a Spanish speaker and think, “Oh, it’s a Tony play. I’m going to get Spanish.” And then you hear Nahuatl, and it’s like, “Well, now I’m not included. How do I feel about it?” 

So I’m kind of destabilizing my own model. 

Alonso Galva: You just mentioned trying to see how the audience leans in. What is that process like as the playwright? What do you look for?

Meneses: It’s almost kind of mechanical, to be honest. There are two very key things. 

The fun one is just the humor. Is it landing? Are people laughing? If they’re not listening, then they’re not going to laugh. So I’ve lost them somewhere in the ride; something happened. 

And the other is just the opposite. It’s the silence. You see and you feel that people are not moving in their seats. They’re not fidgeting, and they’re not reaching for their bags or their plastic candy wrappers. I love those moments, not just my plays, but anyone’s play. When you can hear a pin drop with just that anticipation of where it’s going. 

So those are often telling signs that they’re in; they’re in it and they’re listening, and hopefully it’s working some kind of magic internally on them. 

Alonso Galva: Do you sit in the back and watch and see if folks are leaning forward? 

Meneses: I mean, you can’t help but sort of observe that. But I try to actually just be with the actors. You spend so much time with them. And so I really try to center my experience of them and hearing the play and their own artistry and virtuosity. 

But yeah, I definitely am neurotic, but I’m not that neurotic where I’m just studying the audience. 

Here’s a fun one: when someone falls asleep. You’re like, “Oh no.” But also, you are kind to yourself. I think this person was going to fall asleep no matter where they were going to be in time and space. They just happen to be at my play right now. So I try to remove my own sense of shame. Just something happens because theaters are dark and they’re warm. So it’s like, I get it. It’s a cozy environment. 

Alonso Galva: How does the rewriting process go? Do you just rush to the hotel room and just start scrambling, or what does that look like for us?

Meneses: Yeah, it’s very fun. It’s kind of the behind-the-scenes stuff that people don’t often talk about. 

You’re in a collaborative room; everyone gets to kind of go home, maybe unwind, maybe do other kinds of work. But I’m still onthe clock. You have such a short turnaround from day to day. I was using my evening time, morning time and just trying to get rewrites in as quickly as possible. And a lot of it is with older Tony — not 2020 Tony — I just sort of feel more carefree about it. Just try to take risks and not be like, ‘This has to be a masterful version. ‘It’s just like, no, this is just an impulse; it’s a choice. Let me try. And if we don’t like it, we can toss it out. So I think I used to be more self-conscious about showing drafts, if it’s going to work or not, and if I’m going to expose myself for not being a good writer the way everyone else is. 

What’s great is when people ask questions; that’s another kind of telling sign. And not just an audience, but your collaborators. The fact that they’re asking questions shows that they care and that they’re interrogating the script with you. My play is not on trial. It’s more like, all right, they’re in it now. Let’s make it the best version that we can. And then my role is the words. So let me just do it.