The young playwrights received a list of ingredients for their challenge:

• a hair beautification procedure;

• an addiction;

• a broken bone;

• a racist line of dialogue from an American movie;

• the act of seeing something you're not supposed to see.

The list was for young playwrights who work with Dee Covington, education director for Curious Theatre Company. She works separately with two groups: writers who participate in Curious New Voices at the theater and students from Colorado Academy. Both groups received the same assignment: Write a 10-minute play about race corresponding to a single decade of the 20th century.

The plays would be a nod to late playwright August Wilson, whose 10-play cycle addressed black history in the 20th century, and additional programming for A House With No Walls, the Thomas Gibbons play about black history that's now onstage at Curious. "New Decade Plays," 10 of the student plays performed by professional actors, will be Monday evening.

The students found the historical aspects as daunting as the minefield of ethnicity.

"I think it's as hard to write about race as it is to talk about it," says Max Posner, a senior at Denver School of the Arts. "For me as a Caucasian writer, there's sort of a complex that Suzan-Lori Parks or August Wilson is supposed to write about race. As soon as you start writing, you realize it's pretty ingrained in everybody's story."

Posner took the 1970s and fictionalized a part of his family history. In his play, Twirl On to Me, an older Jewish woman takes inner-city black children to Nantucket.

Shaleec Thomas, 20, works as a community researcher with Making Connections/Denver and is beginning the musical theater program at Red Rocks Community College this summer. She took on the first decade of the 20th century, writing about a black woman who falls in love with the son of the man who owned her family. For her, the challenge was accessing such a long-ago period, particularly the style of speech.

"I made her from California because I figured she would be more educated, but I don't know," Thomas says.

All the young playwrights faced the challenge of writing outside their own racial backgrounds. For Luke Slattery, a sophomore at Colorado Academy, his 1970s story dealt with a black and a white college student protesting apartheid. Having the students speak for him was freeing.

"As you get going, you realize it's not you that's saying it, it's the characters that are saying it," he says.

"Your black character can speak out about the complexities of a white person protesting apartheid," Covington adds.

As with more experienced writers, the young Curious playwrights find themselves in different positions on issues of race in art. For Thomas, there's a benefit to black writers telling their stories.

"A lot of the stuff I've seen is stereotypical; they think that all black people live in the 'hood," Thomas says. "Black writers write positive roles. It depends, you can only write from your own experiences."

For Posner, though, the stretch felt good. "I think it's really interesting to write about things that aren't necessarily close to you. I don't believe that there's a black story, a Jewish story, a white story."

"I think it's fair as long as you try to tell the entire story of a character," adds Slattery. If you're fair to all aspects of who the person is, then it's all right."

More than race, Covington found gender to be an issue - very few of the playwrights wrote stories about women. "I think there are a lot of ways where we still need to bust open and push the envelope," she says.

Covington is working to encourage young women to speak for themselves. "Let's make sure that as you sit as a woman in this room," she tells them. "You bring your female voice to the play."

The playwrights are still trying to figure out what their voices are.

"I guess I don't want to write historical plays or plays about the ghetto," says Thomas.

Posner, who plans to study playwriting at Brown University, is trying on different styles.

"My guess is that Edward Albee is still working it out," he says.

New Decade Plays

• When and where: 7 p.m. Monday, Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma St.

• Cost: Free

• The playwrights: Shaleec Thomas, Hannah Rae Montgomery, Mario Gonzales, Caitlin Tomlinson, Noah Hunt, Mike Thompson, Erica Fox, Max Posner, Joey M., Aubrey Ellen Shomo

• Information: 303-623-0524

A House With No Walls

• When and where: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays (through April 21), Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma St.

• Cost: $14 to $28

• Information: 303-623-0524

Lisa Bornstein is the theater critic. bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101

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