Sports leagues, scientists and comedians figured it out decades ago: We’re genetically encoded to root, root, root for the home team. Or, as Jerry Seinfeld so hilariously put it: “You aren’t actually rooting for the players. You are rooting for the clothes. You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city.”

The arts are no different. We love to root for our hometown players. But rarely do we get the chance to stomp our feet for a Denver playwright on the largest stage in Colorado.

This is me stomping my feet for Jake Brasch, whose Denver-born, Denver-based play “The Reservoir” will have its world-premiere performance Friday at the Denver Center’s Singleton Theatre. Not only that, this staging is part of a historic three-theater collaboration, meaning that, after it closes in Denver on March 9, Brasch’s love letter to Colorado will quickly transfer to the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, followed by a third run at the Geffen Theatre with a new cast in Los Angeles.

And to think: This is Brasch’s first professionally staged production anywhere.

“I don’t know of another time when a young playwright got his first professional production at a place as big as the Denver Center – and then got that show to be seen right away in two other major cities,” DCPA Theatre Company Artistic Director Chris Coleman said. “I think this is as auspicious a beginning of a playwright’s journey as I’ve seen in my career. I think Jake is going to explode.”

This is all a phenomenal show of faith in the 33-year-old graduate of Denver School of the Arts who barely got out of his 20s alive. “The Reservoir” is a dark but wildly funny comedy that offers a brutally honest look at addiction – based largely on his own.

“I’m so proud of Jake. This success couldn’t have come to anyone more deserving,” said Moss Kaplan, one of Brasch’s theater teachers at Denver School of the Arts. “He’s worked incredibly hard. I mean – he almost didn’t make it, right? To have a kid who’s that smart and that talented crash as hard as he did and then come back in this way, I mean – it’s beautiful.”

It’s hard to overstate how rare it is for the Denver Center to put a play written by a Denver-raised playwright on its mainstage season. That would be like the Broncos starting a quarterback from a Colorado high school. The 32 teams at the highest level of the NFL have their choice among the 32 best quarterbacks in the world, so just imagine the odds.

Similarly, big-time regional performing-arts centers like the Denver Center have their choice among (pretty much) every play written by anyone, anywhere, ever. For one to make the mainstage season cut, it had better be a pretty damn good play.

Coleman thinks “The Reservoir” is a pretty damn good play.

It opens with a college student named Josh (think Jake) who is so wasted when he wakes up on the sandy banks of the Cherry Creek Reservoir, he thinks he’s on a coastal beach. Josh has come home to Denver to get sober, and he finds four unlikely allies in his four Jewish grandparents – some of whom, it turns out, are experiencing some commonalities between the fog of Josh’s addiction and their own encroaching dementia.

“The Reservoir” felt special to Coleman right from the start. He singled it out for major development at the Denver Center’s 2023 Colorado New Play Summit, which convinced him to give the play a spot on the 2024-25 mainstage season. The announcement came one day after Brasch marked his 10th year of sobriety.

“I don’t see that many plays that deal with multi-generations in such a vivid way,” Coleman said. “Usually it’s children having to deal with aging parents in distress. But here, it’s the grandkid who’s in trouble, and the older folks who are helping him out. I also think all of the very local references in the story will be particularly meaningful for us here in Denver. And it’s very funny.”

But, worth saying again: This kind of thing just doesn’t happen. So when it does – attention must be paid.

The DCPA Theatre Company hasn’t presented a mainstage play by a Colorado-raised playwright since the 2013-14 season. That was “Jackie & Me,” a barrier-busting baseball story adapted by Kennedy High School grad Steven Dietz. That was 80 mainstage productions ago.

Coleman has moved the needle a bit since 2018, when he became just the fourth artistic director in the company’s 45-year history. He put all his creative might and money behind the 2022 musical “Rattlesnake Kate,” which featured a concept and original music by Colorado’s Neyla Pekarek, with a book written by San Diego playwright Karen Hartman. During the 2021 pandemic shutdown, the company also toured a new musical called “Wild Fire,” written by Jessica Kahkoska of Black Forest, to mountain towns. But there was no mainstage season that year, thanks to COVID.

Colorado-born playwrights who reach some level of national success – writers like Dietz (“Shooting Star”), Laura Eason (“Sex with Strangers”), Max Posner (“The Treasurer”) and Brasch – tend to necessarily gravitate to Chicago, New York or L.A. (where they can make actual money writing for TV). Brasch himself left the Colorado nest for Juilliard 15 years ago.

The DCPA Theatre Company hasn’t plucked a bonafide hometown playwright for the mainstage treatment since the late Terry Dodd’s “Goodnight, Texas” way back in the 1986-87 season.

Still, the Denver Center’s longstanding commitment to creating new plays for the American theater is both evident and impressive. “The Reservoir” marks the company’s 148th world premiere, a record very few comparable institutions can touch. But in the early days, it was much more possible for a local to break through. Like when the Denver Center took a flyer on a University of Denver grad named Molly Newman and premiered her then-unknown musical about pioneer women. “Quilters” made it all the way to Broadway and has been a staple at theaters around the country ever since.

More recently, the Denver Center has seen the value in presenting Colorado-based stories such as “The Plainsong Trilogy,” “Great Wall Story,” “Just Like Us” and last year’s “Cebollas” – but none of them were written by Colorado playwrights. Coleman is certainly open to exploring that conundrum.

“One of the things that’s really cool about running a regional theater is when you are able to tell a story that has a particular or personal connection to that community,” he said. “And I’ve seen over and over through the years how that can create an upswell of interest and resonance and enthusiasm in our audiences.”

That’s just what he expects to happen when Denver gets to know Brasch – and his compelling new play – over the next few months. Brasch’s breakthrough is a triumphant hometown story of the highest order. Or perhaps, smallest.

Brasch was just a wee 11 and already well on his way to becoming his own colorful, quirky self when he was cast as “The Turkey Boy” in the Denver Center’s 2003 seasonal production of “A Christmas Carol.” He told the Denver Center’s NewsCenter: “When Scrooge asked me, ‘What day is it, little boy?’ I delivered the line, ‘Why it’s Christmas day!’ with the subtext: ‘What day is it? How stupid can you be, bro?!’”

Brasch credits now retired DCPA Education Program Manager Claudia Carson, who taught him in fifth-grade theater classes, “for believing in me from the jump, and helping me transition from a musical-theater-obsessed, Bernadette Peters-loving, 40-year-old gay man trapped in a 10-year-old’s body to an actual theatermaker.” Also: Curious Theatre co-founder Dee Covington, who helped Brasch find his voice as a playwright as part of the Curious New Voices training program. And his primary teachers at Denver School of the Arts, Kaplan and Shawn Hann.

Brasch, to put it simply, is a clown, says Kaplan. No, really. He works as a birthday party clown in the tri-state area and is developing a TV series pitch based on his clowning career.

“Jake was mostly an actor at that time, but he was always a quirky, energetic, fun kind of guy right out of the box,” Kaplan told The Denver Gazette. “He’s still kind of that same kid. He’s got all that same energy. For me as a teacher, seeing these kids grow up and figure out that the arts are still at the core of their lives is pretty amazing.”

As a teacher largely focused on creative writing, Kaplan can see Brasch’s training as an actor shine through in “The Reservoir.”

“I think he just has an intuitive understanding of how plays work and how to bring his voice and his own quirky sense of humor to his writing,” he said.

That Brasch now joins a very short list of playwrights who come from a ZIP code beginning with 8 makes him downright giddy. He hopes people see his selection as an affirmation of the entire Colorado theater community.

“Colorado artists are on the verge of taking over the world!” he burst back when news of his play’s selection first broke. That prompted his brother, award-winning Colorado Public Radio climate reporter Sam Brash, to Tweet: “The Brasch Boy takeover of  the Denver cultural scene is going better than I ever could have imagined…”

But for reals, Jake Brasch understands the moment he is in, and he’s receiving it with gratitude.

“Being able to share this story with Colorado audiences feels like, on some level, a way to express gratitude and pay it forward,” he said. “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. Proud that I can find a way to make this improbable and strange profession work.

“It feels surreal and affirming to now bring my writing to a theater that meant so much to me growing up. This play is a love letter to the community that has held me up through the good, the bad and the ugly. I can’t think of a better place to share this story. My heart is full.”

Colorado-connected DCPA Theatre Company plays since 2000:

• Jan. 24-March 9: “The Reservoir,” a play by Denver School of the Arts alum Jake Brasch
• 2021-22: “Rattlesnake Kate,” concept and music by Overland High School and University of Northern Colorado grad Neyla Pekarek; book by Karen Hartman of San Diego
• 2021-22: “Wild Fire,” concept musical written by Jessica Kahkoska of Black Forest
• 2013-14: “Just Like Us,” by Washington DC playwright Karen Zacarías based on the book by Denver resident Helen Thorpe
• 2013-14: “Jackie & Me,” adapted by Kennedy High School and UNC grad Steven Dietz
• 2011-12: “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” adapted by Cherry Creek High School graduate Laura Eason
• 2008-15: “The Plainsong Trilogy,” three plays by Eric Schmiedl of Cleveland, based on the books by Kent Haruf of Salida
• 2010: “Mama Hated Diesels,” developed by former Denver Center casting director Randal Myler (with Dan Wheetman)
• 2009: “Quilters,” book by University of Denver grad Molly Newman (the Denver Center also staged the world premiere in 1982)
• 2004-05: “Fire on the Mountain,” a musical by Randal Myler (with Dan Wheetman)
• 2002-03: “Bernice/Butterfly: A Two-Part Invention,” by 20-year company member Nagle Jackson
• 2000-01: “Inna Beginning,” by longtime company members Gary Leon Hill, Jamie Horton and Lee Stametz
• 2000-01: “1933,” Adapted by Randal Myler and Brockman Seawell from the novel by John Fante