07 Sep You may ask yourself, how did I get here?
Theatre Aspen’s 7th annual Solo Flights festival returns to the Hurst Theatre this week, starting Tuesday.
Solo Flights is an annual weeklong developmental festival of one-person shows that are presented in the nascent stages of their making. It was launched in 2019.
“The event was created to fill a void,” producing director of Theatre Aspen Jed Bernstein told the Aspen Daily News. “There were no major festivals focused on the development of one-person shows — a part of the theater genre that has been growing very rapidly. Any theater worth its salt needs to be a contributor to the development of new work and we think that Theatre Aspen can make a big contribution to the art form by concentrating in this area.”
Solo Flights has a unique format in which the audience is invited into the creative process. After each play is performed, a talk-back session is held between the attendees and the creators, who then assimilate the feedback and work it into a second performance days later.
The six works in this year’s festival include: “Ruthless” by Liza Powel O’Brien, “Crusades” by Jason Gray Platt, “This is Not an Immigrant Story” by Reza Salazar, “Nash” by Hannah Benitez and Kevin Cloud, “Destroying David” by Jason Odell Williams and “The Day I Accidentally Went to War” by Bill Posley.