The Denver Center’s upcoming annual celebration of developing new American plays always puts the focus squarely on the often invisible playwright. But this year’s 19th Colorado New Play Summit will also have an added infusion of acting star power.

Gideon Glick, who originated the role of Ernst in the Broadway production of “Spring Awakening” as a teenager, will be in Denver this weekend as a featured actor in the intentionally lower-cased play “bogfriends,” written by the intentionally lower-cased playwright jose sebastian alberdi. It’s the story of three couples from across time connected by a single Irish bog.

You might know Glick from “The Marvelous Maisel” or for playing Bradley Cooper’s lover in “Bernstein.” In Denver, he will perform opposite Nicholas L. Ashe, perhaps best known for the Oprah-produced film “Queen Sugar.”

The playwright is a Mexican-Basque-American writer (with TV aspirations, he says) originally from San Diego. The play has been described as “a theatrical exploration of power dynamics, love and preserving dead things.”

That’s one of four promising stories the Denver Center Theatre Company selected for a week of intense development culminating in public readings Saturday and Sunday at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. One or two of the four scripts almost certainly will then be chosen by Artistic Director Chris Coleman for the full, world-premiere treatment on a future DCTC mainstage theater season. 

“How to Conquer America: A Mostly True History of Yogurt” will be of particular interest to anyone who attended the Local Theater production of “237 Virginia Avenue” last year in Boulder and Denver. Both are written by David Myers, who here chronicles how an ambitious research assistant in 1975 created the ad campaign that transformed yogurt from a weird foreign laxative into a lucrative American phenomenon. Coleman calls the yogurt craze “one of the great marketing triumphs of the 20th century.”

Carey Perloff has been a big deal in the American theater since she was named artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco back in 1992. At the time, she became the youngest person ever chosen to lead one of the nation’s 80 top professional theaters (called LORT). She’s also a playwright and longtime elbow-rubber with Tom Stoppard. Her latest, titled “If God Were Blue,” explores “the endlessly messy and mysterious process by which art gets made” in the cutthroat Church context of Renaissance Rome.

(How connected is Perloff? She’s got both Michelangelo and Raphael in her new play.)

And finally: “Rust on Bone” is a white-knuckle thriller written by Bianca Sams, who has the distinction of being the first triple-major to graduate from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (for acting, dramatic writing and Africana studies). It’s about a psychologist who becomes trapped by a stranger in her office, and she must use all her professional training to maneuver her way to safety.

Since its founding in 2006, the Summit has introduced 70 new plays, more than half of which eventually returned as full DCTC productions. Among the notable Summit future world premieres have been Samuel D. Hunter’s ”The Whale,” Lauren Gunderson’s ”The Book of Will” and Matthew Lopez’s ”The Legend of Georgia McBride,” which has been produced across the country by at least 58 professional theater companies since 2014.

2025 festival visitors will also take in fully staged world-premiere productions of two plays featured at the 2023 Colorado New Play Summit: “The Reservoir” by Denver-born Jake Brasch and “The Suffragette’s Murder” by Sandy Rustin.

The Summit also features a student playwriting competition that this year will spotlight short works written by high-schoolers Nicole Siegler from Denver School of the Arts, Hannah Harr of Jefferson County Open School and Penelope Letter of Peak to Peak Charter School.