Once upon a time in Durango, a 10-Minute Play Festival started with high hopes and crossed fingers. Now, 16 years later, the short-form phenomenon has shaken off what didn’t work and settled into what does.
If you go
WHAT: 16th Annual 10-Minute Play Festival
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 5 p.m. Sunday
WHERE: Durango Arts Center, 802 East Second Ave.
TICKETS: Adults $20 online, $25 at the door, $15 students. Available at www.durangoarts.org
MORE INFORMATION: Call 259-2606 or visit www.durangoarts.org
This weekend, eight fully-staged short plays will be presented at the Durango Arts Center. Gone is the cumbersome two-tiered system of old – rough readings of 10 semifinalists in late May with a complicated voting structure to select five finalists for fully-staged productions in September.
Two years ago, DAC abandoned that scheme for one evening of eight plays in late May. In the process, DAC also discontinued unpopular playwright entry fees and the idea of a people’s choice award.
“My observation of the process was that there was a huge disconnect between the readings and the actual production in fall,” said Monica DiBiasio, Durango Arts Repertory Theatre artistic and managing director. “The decision to change the format was to make better use of our time and resources, as well as evolve the festival into a celebration of each play.
“We were asking playwrights to pay to submit work,” she said. “Having worked with many new playwrights, I found this to be unfair to the writers. We never ask an actor to pay to audition, so why would we do that to playwrights?”
Since I’ve been covering the festival from its beginning, I can speak to what’s worked and what hasn’t.
In 2011, then DAC board member Rochelle Mann guided the first 10-minute festival. It was an experiment that began the year before when Dinah and Terry Swan moved back to Durango.
The Swans brought the idea of a 10-minute-play festival from Oxford, Mississippi, and pitched it to DAC. Mann, then professor emerita of music at Fort Lewis College, agreed to chair a two-level project. The center sent out a call for scripts. Surprisingly, 92 arrived for teams of volunteer readers. They winnowed 92 down to 10 semifinalists for the late spring reading. After a complicated voting system involving a DAC team and audience participation, five finalists got a September evening of staged performances.
This year, DAC received 200 scripts, and the whole process has been simplified. The eight playwrights include: William Smith, Dave Huber, Brandon Hicks, Mark Maroney, Ken Hauser, Brian Cox, Thalia Cunningham, M.D. and D.L. Siegel.
Two dozen actors will participate, and the directors include: Wendy Ludgewaite, Jason Lythgoe, Tyler Wiseman, Tabatha Bettin and Dibiasio. Three do double duty.
From the beginning, a few well-regarded local performers have participated and will appear again this year. First to mind is the irrepressible comedienne Lisa Zwisler. In 2011, she played a wacky psychic. Two years later, Zwisler convincingly portrayed a ditsy wife opposite the late, wonderful John Porter in “Health Care.”
Other locals who are in the 2026 company have appeared before. In 2014, Dolores Mazurkewicz portrayed the widow Wanda in “The Black Bride of Texas.” This weekend, she will appear as Diane in “Letter to the Editor, 1971.”
2014 was a banner year for the multitalented Ludgewaite. She directed her own comedy, “The Spider in the Room.” It memorably featured Zwisler and Ted Holteen, and marked Holteen’s Durango debut as Sam, a blundering Rent-a-Dude guy. Last year, Holteen appeared in the 2025 festival, and he returns this year as Jimmy opposite Zwisler (together again) in the final festival play, “Cuts.”
Fans of KSUT know Holteen by his resonant radio voice, and he will be joined by a roster of other players – who may be making their Durango
“The 10-minute format is a wonderful, sneaky test of a writer’s economy,” said playwright D.L. Siegel said in her submission. “To treat it as a mere excerpt is to miss the magic; it requires a laser-focused premise and a tight arc delivered with a bit of cheekiness. While I appreciate the depth a full-length play affords, the short format offers a unique freedom to execute a wild, singular idea that captures the room without needing to sustain itself for an entire evening.”
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theatre Critics Association.
