Sometimes, you’ve just got to make that (cold) call.

Denver’s Millie Duran made it in 2023 to Rick Smith, owner of The Brodsky Bookshop in Taos, N.M. Duran had heard Smith was best friends with John Nichols, author of the seminal social-justice novel “The Milagro Beanfield War.” Could he maybe get a message to Nichols? she asked.

Duran, founder of a Denver-based nonprofit called Casa Milagro Youth Solutions (inspired in part by Nichols’ novel), wanted the author’s permission to create a student-based stage adaptation of the book with teenaged performers and then tour it for a year as their first significant exposure to the performing arts. The project would also celebrate the novel’s 50th anniversary in 2024.

Nichols sent a hand-written agreement allowing Duran to adapt and perform his book shortly before his death on Nov. 27, 2023, at age 83.

How could he say no?

“Millie is a dynamo – an incredible force of energy,” said Tony Garcia, executive artistic director  of the Su Teatro Performing Arts Center – and Duran’s partner.

Duran developed Casa Milagro Youth Solutions as a positive resource for kids who are impacted by physical, mental, emotional, sexual, verbal and substance abuse or neglect. Youth who are abused or witness to domestic violence are more likely to continue the cycle as adults. Duran tries to use the healing power of theater and role-playing to provide them with tools to confront their issues in a supportive space. Duran has developed performance projects addressing teen dating violence, gang intervention, bullying and gender disrespect.

“What if there were an organization for young people where they could learn to be themselves, where theater and the arts would open up the world for them and help them deal with the trauma of growing up?” said Garcia. “That is the miracle of Casa Milagro Youth Solutions,” which turned 10 this year.

Duran found that many young people in San Luis, located 225 miles south of Denver near the New Mexico border and Colorado’s oldest town – are burdened by domestic violence and other addressed traumas.

“I thought there was an incredible need, and that theater would help,” said Duran, who had been creatively inspired a decade before by a visit to Denver by the legendary Brazilian theater practitioner Augusto Boal, who coined the term Theater of the Oppressed as a way to use art to promote social and political change.

For an intermittent year ending in September, Duran’s teen troubadours took their version of “The Milagro Beanfield War” to schools and community centers in San Luis, Antonito, Saguache, Alamosa, Pueblo and Denver.

Nichols’ fact-based, allegorical novel is based on the very real struggle by Hispanic Americans in northern New Mexico to restore ancestral land grants taken from them by Anglos dating back to the 1850s. In the novel, a patchwork battle is sparked between dirt-poor small farmers and rich New Mexico golf-course developers over access to the town’s main irrigation channel. To many, the conflict symbolized a struggle over access to tens of thousands of acres of mountainous land that has been waged in Southern Colorado for decades.

In early 2023, Duran gave the novel to four San Luis high school students, and together they began to break it down by characters and scenes. Over time, their ensemble grew to 11, even adding two kids from Denver. The students, ages 13-18, developed their own script, parsing out 55 roles among themselves. “This became their lives,” said Duran. And in many ways, it already was.

“Some of these kids are the actual heirs to that (disputed) land,” Duran said.

What they learned from all their study, she added: “So much has not changed.”

Garcia said Duran did more than organize performances in all these various Colorado towns. “She was able to organize community in all of them,” he said.

“She managed to get the youth who had never done a theater production to agree to perform and tour at multiple venues in different towns where the community was able to see their children on a stage, performing in a play that was inspired by communities just like theirs.

The kids called Duran “Ms. Millie.” And Ms. Millie fed them, trained them and inspired them, Garcia said. “She opened windows for them to see themselves and their story as having value.”

She also managed to pay them for their work.

As a one-person crew, Duran motivated volunteers to join as drivers, cooks, technical assistants, costume designers and set designers. “Wherever Ms. Millie showed up, people stepped up,” Garcia said.

The tour culminated in September with performances at Centennial High School in San Luis, where it all began, followed by a final weekend at Su Teatro in Denver.

Garcia said the work that Duran and her team presented “was unique and grounded like few productions are.” He said the performance received standing ovations everywhere it went.

“What Millie presented was a beautiful and inspiring and powerful production that reminded us all that at the core of our art is people, and of the effects that engaging with the arts has on them,” he said. “It is sharing our humanity.”

San Luis School District Superintendent Joe Garcia told the Valley Courier that the opportunity for his students to both see – and perform in – ”The Milagro Beanfield War” will last a lifetime.

“These students had such a privilege to engage in the history of Southern Colorado, particularly something close to home here in the San Luis area that is rich in traditions, culture and history,” he said. “I see these students as leaders. Engaging in the play was a particularly important opportunity for them.”

This very week, Casa Milagro is in Winter Park, where Duran has taken a group of 40 disengaged youth for an expense-paid teen-engagement workshop where they will be exposed to skiing, ice skating, play performance and other activities normally reserved for the wealthy in a safe, fun and collaborative environment. Her intention, she said, is “to stimulate their minds through the gift of engagement without a financial burden.” She calls it the first step toward developing peer leaders.

“This growth doesn’t end with the completion of the workshop,” she said. “It is the beginning. We call it ‘Rehearsing for life.’”

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

Recurring climate catastrophes have made all the more plain the urgent need to reduce our carbon footprint in every way. And if the Colorado theater community is in any way doing its part, it is because of Denver Center for the Performing Arts audio engineer Meagan Holdeman. She is the founder of Greener Theatre Colorado, a nonprofit that exists to mobilize and organize the Colorado performing-arts community toward climate-positive practices through community-building, action-oriented workshops and facilitating systemic change.

“Our vision is to create a united, planet-oriented community of theater conservationists who are excited to find new, innovative and environmentally friendlier ways of doing what we do,” Holdeman said.

Change is incremental but happening. Ryan Holder and Kendall Smith’s “Arts Campus at Willits” opened in Basalt in 2021 as the nation’s first sustainable, all-electric performing-arts facility functioning at near net-zero energy usage – even through those cold Colorado winters. Also: Red Rocks, the Buell Theatre, Ellie Caulkins Opera House and Boettcher Concert Hall now offer recyclable cups. It makes a difference.

“Sustainability is an achievable goal,” Holdeman said. “There are many things companies can do just to get it going – even if they are just small things.”