REVIVING A LEGEND:
RATTLESNAKE KATE
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It’s been three years since Colorado New Play Summit audiences got a sneak peek at Rattlesnake Kate, which back then wasn’t much more than a promising idea in the imagination of Neyla Pekarek. Simply put: “The Rattlesnake Kate world premiere musical that you will see today is dramatically different from the concert version you may have seen in 2019,” DCPA Theatre Company Artistic Director Chris Coleman said. There are at least a dozen new songs, Pekarek said, and only one that remains unchanged. The cast has been expanded from six actors to 14. There is now a fully developed script and a score that’s been expanded threefold. “It’s a completely different show,” said Pekarek. The Aurora native, cellist and composer began developing the largely unknown story of Colorado frontierswoman Kate Slaughterback into a concept album back in 2015. The hook: Back in 1925, the self-reliant single mother came upon a migration of rattlesnakes near her farm in Hudson while on horseback with her 3-year-old adopted son. So, naturally, she proceeded to wipe out all 140 of them. “At first she killed them with her rifle, but she ran out of bullets,” Pekarek said. “So then she plucked a ‘No Hunting’ sign from the ground and just started bludgeoning those snakes to death.” Pekarek had recently left the Grammy-nominated band The Lumineers and was pursuing her own artistic identity
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when she discovered a kindred spirit in Slaughterback. Born near Longmont in 1894, she was a nurse during World War II who held a variety of jobs, including taxidermist, midwife and bootlegger. She was divorced six times and made her way farming her own land. Pekarek wove Slaughterback’s biography into a 2018 concept album called Rattlesnake. Coleman then commissioned Pekarek, with the help of Brooklyn playwright Karen Hartman, to transform the album into a fully fleshed stage musical. Hartman, playing big-time catch-up, came to the Summit with 40 pages of script in hand – “and we immediately threw 30 of them away,” she said with a laugh. But Coleman was so taken by the songs and the theatrical potential of this uniquely Colorado story that he immediately slated Rattlesnake Kate for a full production in January 2021. Then came COVID. “The delay gave us time to expand the story and integrate some of the deeper conversations that we are having about America right now,” Hartman said. The story is now framed as a group of contemporary storytellers who come in all shapes, genders, ages, colors and clothes, inviting us to gather around a campfire to hear a story of the past. “The very first line of the show is Neyla singing: ‘This is a tale about the West,’ ” Hartman said. And
APPLAUSE • FEB – MAR 2022 • 303.893.4100 • DENVERCENTER.ORG
