The Playwright

Judy GeBauer got the theatre bug as a child actor in children’s theatre. After earning a degree in theatre from San Francisco State, she went on tour for several years with a company doing Shakespeare.

But she found that her temperament and personality were more suited to writing, so she made the transition from actor to playwright. Four of her plays have been chosen for the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Center, the most prestigious workshop for new plays in America.

Her plays include Reclaimed, Every Secret Thing, The Hidden Ones, Bobby Sands, MP, Magician Reversed, The Nip and the Bite, and Mrs. Plenty Horses. Among the places they’ve been performed are at the Long Wharf Theatre, Philadelphia Festival Theatre, and the Irish Arts Center in New York. She’s received many grants and awards, including the HBO Writing Award, the Beverly Hills Theatre Guild's Julie Harris Playwriting Award and an Innovation Award from the Colorado Federation for the Arts.

“My husband is a dancer-choreographer,” she said, “and so we gypsied around the country a lot. But now we’re pretty much settled in Colorado.”

An earlier version of The Fire-Bringer was commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre to provide the experience of working on an evolving script to acting students in their MFA program.