Of all the hundreds of powerful lines spoken from the Acoma Center stage on the night of June 26, the most audacious came right at the top, in the welcoming speech from Curious Theatre Company Artistic Director Jada Suzanne Dixon.

“Welcome to the first annual 24-Hour Plays Festival,” said Dixon, pausing a bit before the word “annual” for dramatic effect, and pausing again after for wild applause from the audience.

(Sidebar for you grammar psychos out there: No, there is no such thing as a first annual anything. A first doesn’t become “annual” until it’s happened twice, yada, yada. We’re already losing track of what’s important here: It was a moment – and a good one!)

This was Dixon’s way of stating emphatically and even defiantly that Curious Theatre Company will somehow be here in the summer of 2025 for the second, yes, annual festival.

And as things sit six months later … so far, so good.

It’s been a year at Curious, which is arguably the most significant homegrown Denver theater company of the past 30 years. In March, Curious announced it was in a financial fight for its life and launched a $250,000 emergency fundraising campaign. In June, its board of directors put the company’s longtime home in the Golden Triangle up for sale. (Not much has changed since.)

But this night would bring together dozens of people from the Colorado creative community to play … by making plays. The idea was simple, founder Mark Armstrong said: “If you bring together extraordinary artists and give them both a theater space and a (very) little bit of time, you have everything you need to create an extraordinary evening of theater.”

Curious Artistic Producer Christy Montour-Larson, working in partnership with Armstrong’s New York-based 24-Hour Plays Project, invited a who’s-who of Denver-area playwrights, directors, stage managers and actors to gather at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night. They split them into six teams and then sent (most of) them to bed while the six guest playwrights/vampires banged out completely original 10-minute plays by 6 a.m.

I was one of those guest playwright vampires. Not to suggest that I was overmatched, but at  midnight of that sweaty summer Denver night, I was typing alongside five professional playwrights who have published 127 plays between them. I have one. I said yes, as everyone else had, because it was a fundraiser for Curious – and it would also be a fun storytelling opportunity for this newspaper.

I titled my play, which I called “No One Gets Me” only because that’s also the working title of my memoir, at 5:45 a.m. And then it was home to bed. The actors and directors were to report back at 8 a.m. to get to work developing their characters, memorizing their lines and blocking their movements for a public performance that would begin in just, gulp, 11½ hours.

To distill the next 12 hours into one telling moment, consider that when I rolled myself awake at just past 9 a.m., a photo was waiting for me on the cell phone I had dropped next to my ear three hours before. It showed a head of gorgeous blonde hair dotted with a big blotch of red. One of my actors had been hit on the head by the hatchback of a van, and yes, that was blood.  Actors being actors, she refused treatment and was soldiering on – over my objection. I later found out another of my actors had undergone major abdominal surgery just a week before and was now on several painkillers, and another had surgery scheduled for the following Monday to have two lumpectomies. We were a theatrical M*A*S*H unit. Cue the abject terror.

It really is astonishing what actors will endure for art – especially my bad art. More correctly, for Curious Theatre Company.

But for me, at least, the hard part was over. I spent the rest of the day, notebook and camera in hand, bopping between the six rehearsal spaces, all donated by kindly neighboring arts companies, and just taking it all in.

“That thing was such a blast,” Dixon said. “There was such a buzz in the air that was so present and so alive. Seeing all these playwrights and actors and directors connecting – it just made me giggle. I felt so much joy that I couldn’t contain it. It was mind-blowing.”

Wednesday night played out not as an ordinary evening of theater but more like a walk on the creative high wire. Audiences could tangibly see and appreciate the creative process in a new light. There was a kind of infectious energy among the creators, actors and crew that transferred directly to the audience at the 7:30 curtain.

Watching words I had written only a few hours before now coming out of actors’ months in performance is kind of an out-of-body experience. This whole experiment was a welcome reminder to a journalist whose full professional life has been invested in chronicling various forms of art just how gutsy and difficult the making of that art is – even under far less stressful circumstances.

Playwright Eric Coble, a national bigshot who has had three full-length plays fully produced at Curious Theatre likened the whole thing to a kid making up stories in his bedroom.

 “This exercise forced us into a mode of childlike creativity,” he said. “We had to go with our first instinct and just run, and then see where it took us. And I think there can be great power in doing that.”

Montour-Larson directed Coble’s playful creation, which he called “The Very Angsty Dinosaur.” It was inspired by a little plastic T-Rex he found on a pile of props that were meant to jog the writers’ creativity. It made Coble wonder whether T-Rexes, with their unusually short arms, ever experienced anxiety or other mental-health issues. And that led to a pretty funny 10-minute scene. Me, on the other hand, panicked thinking this audience would surely be expecting some pretty high drama. (Mistake.)

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“I’ll never forget (actor) Michael McNeil as the angsty dinosaur,” Montour-Larson said. “That was a pretty special, special moment I think everybody loved. Eric just let us all go on a ride.”

Then, like a mother trying to make all her children feel valued, she added by way of my consolation: “I think that it’s good that we had variety in these little plays, because I think of the 24-Hour Plays as like a cocktail party. When waiters pass around all these wonderful hors d’oeuvres, you don’t want all sweet all the time, do you? Sometimes you need something that’s wrapped in bacon.”     

For Montour-Larson, “The magical thing about The 24-Hour Plays was that we gathered so much beautiful talent together – people who really care about Curious and who believe the Denver metro area needs a theater like Curious. Everybody was very scared in the beginning, but there was such talent, such good will and so much laughter that we were all just in awe afterward about how we were able to pull it off.”

As for the state of the company, Dixon said Curious is closing 2024 solid after another year of uncompromising theater that remains ever-willing to address tough contemporary issues at a time when other companies are just not going there. She believes that vision has been validated by a resurgence in audience support both in attendance and in giving.

Curious set a $25,000 goal for the recent Colorado Gives Day, which it beat by $11,000. And as of today, its ongoing Fund the Future campaign as of today has reached 87.5% of its $25,000 goal, or about $218,000.Combined with the community’s response to The 24-Hour Plays, she said, “that all tells us that people care, and that they are showing up for Curious. And for that, I am deeply grateful.

“Curious is going very well, and we are excited for the future.”

The 24-Hour Plays: The lineup

Playwrights: Benjamin Benne, Eric Coble, Josh Hartwell, John Moore, Jeffrey Neuman and Edith Weiss

Directors: Jada Dixon, Marisa D. Hebert, GerRee Hinshaw, Jessica Jackson, Christy Montour-Larsonn and Kent Thompson

Actors: Anatasha Blakely, Laura Chavez, Kim Egan, Kenya Fashaw, Brian Landis Folkins, Kristina Fountaine, Abner Genece, Ilasiea Gray, Kathryn Gray, Lisa Hori-Garcia, Jim Hunt, Candace Joice, Brian Kusic, Eden Lane, Iliana Lucero Barron, Billie McBride, Michael McNeill, Carlos Martin, Emma Messenger, Anne Oberbroeckling, Andrea Rutherford, Simone St. John, Jacob Sorling and Hillary Wheelock

Stage managers: Natalie Ach, Steph House, Johnny Hultzapple, Zach Madison, Lara Marez and Drake Susuras

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 24th year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.

Unsung hero of the day

Bernie Richards (they/them) is the resident scenic painter at Vintage Theatre, “and their work is incredible,” says Marketing Director K. Woodzick.

Richards is hard at work on Vintage’s upcoming production of “She Kills Monsters” (opening Jan. 17) after having just separately designed, constructed and painted a backstage cabinet to safely hold flammable scenic painting supplies. 

Richards is also a stage manager who shepherded legendary local actor Deb Persoff through her 2024 run of the solo play “Eleanor.” And they are also the lighting and sound technician for One Night Stand Theater Company, which stages original productions for, yes, one night only.