Special Feature: Playwright Mike Broemmel

Spotlight Feature: Mike Broemmel | Curtain Up! | Gina Robertson

At 5,280 feet above sea level, where the air is thin and the theater scene is anything but, Mike Broemmel is quietly reshaping what it means to be a playwright in Denver. With about 30 plays produced and countless others written and kept in a box, Broemmel has a habit of introducing audiences to people they already know and then making them realize they don’t.

“I’m particularly intrigued by writing plays about historical figures who have been unfairly or incompletely chronicled,” Broemmel says. At the top of that list is a play called La Primera Dama about Argentine First Lady Eva Peron. The wildly popular musical Evita largely transformed her actual life story into something it was not. “The same holds true for my play about Anne Boleyn and a play entitled Martha Calling about the Nixon era wife of the U.S. Attorney General, who really was the key person who first revealed the corruption of the Nixon Administration. Indeed, the term ‘gaslighting’ really became a wider known type of conduct because of what was done to Martha.”

L to R: Actress Cathy Washburn as Helen Bonfils, the publisher of the Denver Post for over 30 years, in The Bonfils Girl, and playwright Mike Broemmel | Photo Credit: Seth Holley

He is always writing and always hopeful that theater fans will talk about what they saw after one of his plays. He wants to spark conversations. On paper, the lives of Truman Capote, Divine, and Hedy Lamarr hardly need retelling, but in Broemmel’s hands their stories shrink, soften and somehow become more revealing.

Born and raised in the Denver suburbs, Broemmel left as a young man and lived for a while in Virginia, even working for some time in the White House during the Reagan administration. He worked in the Office of Media Relations and Planning and in the Office of the First Lady. “That was back in the day when there were conservative, moderate, and even liberal Republicans. I fell somewhere between moderate to liberal.”

After living on a farm for a while in the Shenandoah Valley, where he started writing short fiction, Broemmel returned to Denver and found a niche for his writing in short, simple biographical features of lesser known but not obscure historical figures whose lives were interesting and impactful. What makes a person’s story worth telling on stage is a life with contradictory aspects, such as success/failure, good/bad, guilty/innocent.

He was lucky enough to have his first play produced, based on a short story he wrote called The Baptism after it was rejected for being “too controversial.” The story addressed themes of intolerance often found in religious fundamentalism. The success of the play opened the door to writing more plays and having them produced in various local theaters and all over the world.

L to R: Actor Bennett Beasley before a performance Off-Broadway of I’m Harvey Milk with playwright Mike Broemmel | Photo Credit: Colorado TINTS

Sometimes ideas for plays come to him, or more like the subjects of plays come to him and ask for their story to be told. Other times someone will commission a play about a particular subject, such as An Echoing Spring, a play Broemmel wrote about Matthew Shepard, and another that will premier this summer about Dorothy Parker. He will then spend a deal of time “stewing over” the idea, perhaps while taking a walk, before sitting down to write. Sometimes a play is finished in a few weeks’ time, while other plays take years to complete. He cautions, it’s important to know when to stop writing.

Given that his subjects are typically not available to demonstrate how they speak, writing dialogue for them requires Broemmel to do a bit of research. If there are no videos of interviews with the subject, he might find and interview people who knew them. For long-gone historical figures like Anne Boleyn, he imagines how they would have spoken based on things they have written. Anne Boleyn, he says, was a particularly eloquent individual.

Settings for Broemmel’s plays are simple but often stark and memorable. The set for Divinely, Alone, for instance, is Divine’s gravesite, at the foot of her headstone where snapshots from her life are projected and where Divine comes to enjoy a picnic. An Echoing Spring takes place under the haunting spectacle of a split rail fence like the one where Matthew Shepard was killed. The Hours of Anne takes place in a cell within the Tower of London where Anne Boleyn spent her last day.

Playwright Mike Broemmel trying on the costumes from The Hours of Anne | Photo Credit: Seth Holley

Recently, The Wind is Us: The Death that Killed Capote finished up a long run by traveling to Ireland where acclaimed Denver actor Eddie Schumacher brought the famous author of In Cold Blood to life with his distinct voice and mannerisms. Schumacher has won awards, including Best Actor at the Off-Broadway United Solo Theatre Festival for his portrayal of Capote focusing on his descent into addiction and social isolation.

Currently Broemmel’s creative energies are directed toward a four-play residency to run in Las Vegas that should be launching in 2026. Locally, he is expecting several of his plays to be main stage features at the first ever Lavender Hill Cultural District Theatre Festival in Denver. Call it altitude or attitude, either way, this mile high writer is elevating the craft from Denver’s stages to wherever great theater is loved around the globe.

For additional information: https://lavendertheatre.org/