Jake Brasch has a message for the military:

“Colorado artists are on the verge of taking over the world!”

(If only that were not hyperbole.)

Brasch is a Denver-born playwright and floating on Cloud 99 this week with the announcement that the homegrown Denver Center Theatre Company will produce his play “The Reservoir” as part of its 2024-25 mainstage season. And, in an historic first, the play will be launched in partnership with L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse and Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre.

That means Brasch’s play will have three different, successive stagings by three of the nation’s most prestigious theater companies, starting with its world-premiere production here in Denver from Jan. 17-March 9, 2025.

Brasch, 32, is a graduate of Denver School of the Arts and began writing plays in high school as part of Curious Theatre’s acclaimed Curious New Voices youth playwriting program. “The Reservoir” is a semi-autobiographical dramedy about the year Brasch moved home to Colorado to get sober “and everybody who held me up throughout that whole process,” he said. Notably: The unlikely recovery allies he finds in his four aging grandparents.  

The announcement came Saturday at the Denver Center’s 2024 Colorado New Play Summit – one day after Brasch marked his 10th year of sobriety. It was very much a full-circle moment.

“Being able to share this story with Colorado audiences feels like, on some level, a way to express gratitude and pay it forward,” said Brasch. “It also just makes me proud. Proud of Colorado. Proud of Dee Covington and Curious New Voices. Proud of Denver School of the Arts. Proud of everybody who told me very early on that I can do this. That I can find a way to make this improbable and strange profession work.”

It cannot be overstated how unlikely all of this is. The Denver Center hasn’t presented a mainstage play by a Colorado-born playwright since the 2011-12 season. That was “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” adapted by Laura Eason, who left Colorado after graduating from Cherry Creek High School in the 1980s.

That was 94 mainstage productions ago.

(Side note: The 2022 musical “Rattlesnake Kate” featured original music by Colorado’s Neyla Pekarek and a book by San Diego’s Karen Hartman. During the 2021 pandemic shutdown, the company toured a musical called “Wild Fire,” written by Jessica Kahkoska of Black Forest, to mountain towns. It wasn’t part of that otherwise canceled COVID season.)

“The Reservoir” is a brutally honest look at addiction that plays out like a Neil Simon comedy – but without a trace of Simon’s trademark meanness. It’s called “The Reservoir” because “Josh” opens the play waking up from a blackout on the shore of the Cherry Creek Reservoir.

Like the Denver Center’s current mainstage offering of “Cebollas,” “The Reservoir” is necessarily packed with fun Denver references. (Another key character, though it goes unnamed, is the Tattered Cover Book Store.) But the play was surely of interest to those powerhouse partnering theaters in Los Angeles and Atlanta because there isn’t a household in America that hasn’t been (or will be) touched by addiction and dementia.

“I think folks often don’t speak about addiction in their own families – and when they do, there are a lot of big feelings that are difficult to process and articulate,” Brasch said. “I think the play shows that it’s a hoot having folks on the other side of the chaos of addiction. I think it makes for the best theater in the whole wide world.

“Obviously, saving folks’ lives is the No. 1 priority. But I also hope that the play is an invitation to experience something that is joyous and fun and funny and weird.”

And as for the hilarious subject of dementia, Brasch said: “I hope what I’m offering is the idea that by engaging with our loved ones, and with this horrible disease that they might encounter near the end of their lives, that there’s still joy to be mined there.”

In the land of playwriting, getting one fully staged production of a new script is a gift for any playwright. Getting a second staging somewhere else is finding the writing quill in the haystack. But having three guaranteed stagings right from the start is like winning Powerball.

“The biggest win is that it means three times the number of people are going to see my play next year, which is huge for me in every measurable way,” Brasch said. “It’s almost inarticulable how huge it is because it’s huge beyond my wildest dreams.”

‘Suffragette’ also chosen for 2024-25

The Denver Center Theatre Company also announced that it will present the world premiere of “The Suffragette’s Murder” next Feb. 7-March 9. Both that and “The Reservoir” were featured development readings at the 2023 Colorado New Play Summit.

“The Suffragette’s Murder” is written by Sandy Rustin, whose “The Cottage” just played on Broadway. It’s an unusual comic murder mystery that takes place at the intersection of the budding women’s movement and the birth of the civil rights movement in 1850s New York.

Audiences, Rustin believes, are ready to laugh.

“The past four years have been a collective societal struggle,” she said. “Nothing feels better than a theater filled with laughter from people who really needed a laugh. Now, more than ever, that goal feels like a worthy pursuit.”

The full 2024-25 Denver Center Theatre Company season will be announced in early April. Meanwhile, the company’s current world premieres of “Cebollas” and “Rubicon” continue through March 17. Info at denvercenter.org.