Woolly Mammoth Joins Telluride Playwrights Festival, 7/24 – 26

15 Jul Woolly Mammoth Joins Telluride Playwrights Festival, 7/24 – 26

Become a member of the Telluride Playwright’s Festival now.

Passes here.

This year, the Telluride Playwrights Festival invited acting, directing, and playwright members of the innovative Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company to town. Company members will use the Sheridan Opera House as a theatrical testing ground for edgy new work. And Telluride gets a unique chance to peek into the workings of one of America’s most successful and respected theatre companies. The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company has been surprising and shocking Washington D.C. audiences for 35 years with their award-winning productions of daring and provocative plays.

New plays premiered at Woolly Mammoth are regularly produced from New York to London to Helsinki, staged in more than 200 theatres in 39 states and 12 countries. Woolly plays have gone on to extended runs Off-Broadway and productions at a wide variety of regional theaters too.

SPARKy Productions has been producing the Telluride Playwrights Festival since 2006. The festival focuses on new plays that are work-shopped during the week, then presented to an audience in the form of dynamic stage readings. After the readings, the audience gets to participate by offering feedback to the playwright.

Plays incubated and ‘SPARKed’ in Telluride go on to be produced in larger cities. In prior years, plays first read at the festival have been produced in New York, Detroit, Denver, Bloomington, and Chicago, all under the banner “Made in Telluride.”

This year’s plays are two Woolly Mammoth choices. Yury Urnov, award-winning Woolly Mammoth director, will be directing “Stupid F**king Bird” by Aaron Posner. For Telluride audiences, this is a chance to hear the best of current American theatre in an irreverent, contemporary, and very funny remix of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Posner wages a timeless battle between young and old, past and present, in search of the true meaning of it all. All the characters from the original play are in this version, but reincarnated in the form of an aging Hollywood star and her famous writer/lover.

The second play, “RIP,” is by playwright Michael Garces.

“If Quentin Tarantino wrote a play, it would be this one. We’re going out of the box with this one. It is very different from anything we have work-shopped in the past. It’s going to be very exciting to see what Garces will do with ‘RIP’ during the week and what Telluride audiences will think of it,” said Jennie Franks, artistic director, Telluride Playwright Festival.

And here’s what Woolly Mammoth artistic director has to say on the subject:

“Playwright Michael Garces and director Yury Urnov, members of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC, will be exploring and refining the text and theatrical vocabulary of RIP during their residency at Telluride. RIP creates a highly imaginative world unto itself, taking the audience down a rabbit hole where unpredictable things happen in rapid succession. In addition to its pure theatrical excitement, the play asks us to think about the dangers lurking behind the Internet — a worldwide system so complex that no one can actually fathom how it operates. Who controls the ‘virtual’ reality of our lives, and what powers does that give them over us?”

By turns harrowing and hilarious, “RIP” is an edge-of-your-seat thriller that invents its own strange language of the future — a future when controlling The Code is key to power

Besides acting members of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, this year’s Company members also include Second City founder, actor, writer and teacher Jeff Michalski and homegrown Telluride upcoming star, Lily Sullivan.

Lily Sullivan

The Telluride Playwrights Festival has steadily been gaining a national reputation as a theatrical event dedicated to incubating important American plays far from the critical glare of a large city, a place new creative work can flourish in seclusion of the Rocky Mountains.

Though Saturday and Sundays readings contain adult content.

Friday night is pure fun, family night. It is a TPF tradition, an hilarious evening, when the audience gets to see the best of professional improvisers; and the audience and kids are also invited to jump on stage and test their improv skills with the Company.

This year young people from a Telluride Academy program will be performing onstage too.

Schedule of events (at Sheridan Opera House. Doors 7:30 p.m.; show 8 p.m., unless otherwise indicated):

FRIDAY 24^th July FAMILY FUN IMPROV NIGHT, 8 p.m. (All ages)

SATURDAY MORNING 25^th, 11 a.m. A FREE talk, NEW FORMS FOR NEW THEATRE, featuring artistic directors from Woolly Mammoth Theatre and the Denver Center for Performing Arts,

SATURDAY 25^th  8 p.m. STUPID F**KING BIRD. (Adult content)

SUNDAY 26^th  8 p.m. RIP (Adult content)

For festival passes, information on volunteering and workshop opportunities go here.

Or email info@playwrightsfestival.org

For a preview of what’s in store, watch this video featuring homegirl Lilly Sullivan.

Note: Woolly Mammoth Theatre production of Marie Antoinette to be directed by Yury Urnov.