(Press release)

Boulder, Colorado: The Catamounts are pleased to announce the first event in our 13th Season, FEED: Plant, which will run August 19-27, 2023 at Lone Hawk Farms in Longmont, Colorado. Plant will be the first of four original, Colorado-authored, immersive, interdisciplinary, site-specific theatre experiences featured in our 2023-24 season.

Plant marks The Catamounts’ fourth theatrical event in 2023 that features the work of local writers. This year already, The Catamounts have commissioned writers Jessica Augsten, Sam Gilstrap, Josh Hartwell, Felice Locker, Jeffrey Neuman, and Peter Trinh to create original works to be featured in full production by the company.

FEED: Plant: will explore the question: how do we connect to the natural world in a way meaningful enough to save it?

Plant’s menu will be plant-based, created by Bob Sargent of Savory Cuisines. Colorado writer and actor Peter Trinh has been commissioned to create and perform one of the four performance pieces, and will be joined by director Amanda Berg Wilson and company member Sam Gilstrap to form Plant’s ensemble. All four courses will work in collaboration to explore this central question, and the live music of Colorado chanteuse Nika Garcia and musicians Bill Kopper and Dave Corbus will weave the night together.

Next in Season 13, The Catamounts will present FEED: Dry: (January 25-February 11, 2024) at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder. Inspired by the popular “Dry January” movement. Dry will ask: how do we balance our hedonistic side with our need for discipline and temperance? Two of the event’s pieces will be commissioned by local Colorado authors.

The late spring will give way to Impossible Things (May 24-June 16, 2024), created in collaboration with visual artist Lonnie Hanzon.

A building, reminiscent of an English curio shop, is being built into the hillside at Marjorie Park located next to Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre. It will contain a new permanent exhibit, created by its original designer, Lonnie Hanzon–The Cabinet of Curiosities & Impossibilities. The Catamounts are collaborating with Hanzon to create an immersive theatre experience in and around the newly expanded exhibit. Impossible Things will be written by Colorado playwright Jessica Austgen.

Impossible Things begins at a coming-of-age ceremony. Audience are cast as young people on the cusp of adulthood. But what happens when the ceremony is disrupted by haunts from the new adults’ childhoods, there to lead them back once more into a space not of responsibility but of imagination and impossibility?

Late in the summer of 2024 will be the world-premiere of After the End (August 5, 2024–September 14, 2024), created in partnership with Anythink Huron, an Adams County-based library. After the End asks: what happens to fictional characters once the story ends? When their last reader no longer remembers them, where do they go? If their author is gone, are they? After The End is a journey through the bardo-esque landscape of wayward storybook characters who are fighting for survival in a world intent on forgetting them. We think of reading a story as entering a portal into a new world, but in this immersive theatre experience, the portal comes after the story ends. After the End will be written by Colorado playwright Luke Sorge.

Find more information about the upcoming FEED: Plant event here.