Creative powerhouse
Transplanted NYC playwright wants to shake up local scene

For this week’s “Between the Beats,” I sat down with esteemed playwright and local creative rabble rouser Haleh Roshan. Roshan spent her formative years pursuing theater graduate work at NYU and working her way up the ranks to editorial director with the famed Dramatist Play Service in New York City. During the pandemic, Roshan returned to her family home in Durango with a newfound appreciation for the mountains and a vision of Durango’s future as a creative powerhouse in the Four Corners. Enjoy a snippet of our conversion.

SS: How would you describe yourself?

HR: I used to describe myself as a writer, and I feel like that’s still true, but now I feel like I’m a writer and an interdisciplinary creative collaborator.

SS: How did you come to live in Durango?

HR: My whole family has lived here for five generations or so. This is home. I essentially moved to Durango because I was living in New York City working in the performing arts, and then the pandemic happened. I couldn’t pay my mortgage anymore and there was a house in Durango that I loved. I had always wanted to live here, but prior to the pandemic, I was convinced that there was no artistic career in Durango. Like, it’s a great place to go to the hot springs, but if you want to be a working artist, that’s not where you want to be. And the pandemic totally shifted my mindset. And now I think it’s maybe one of the few places to be a working artist.

SS: Tell us the story of you finding a home in the performing arts.

HR: My entire life I was like, “Oh, I’m going to be a novelist. I’m going to be a fiction writer.” But, at the same time, I’ve always had this compulsion toward something in performance. I got an internship at Eyeball Records my freshman year of college. I did my academic career alongside unpaid jobs in the music industry. But, the music industry is not a good place for women, in general, and especially not for women between the ages of 18 - 22. It was just a bad scene. I decided to quit and go back to writing my senior year of college.

In that transition, I took a class where consuming live theater was part of it – reading play scripts and going to see some productions. That class really blew my mind. It just sort of opened this whole world for me to dive into. In my last semester, I got a job as a receptionist at Dramatist Play Service. I worked at Dramatist for about a decade and worked my way up while also going to grad school for playwriting. I was also working on the side as a playwright in the downtown, noncommercial theater scenes in New York City.

When I left (Dramatist), I was the editorial director. It’s one of those millennial stories that don’t happen anymore. I was publishing 100-plus new plays per year and going to see everything that happened on Broadway and off Broadway for five years, which is over 300 shows a year.

SS: Some say that theater is dead. What do you think? 

HR: That’s a question that’s tearing “Theater” with a capital “T” apart right now. And, you know, no shade to everybody who’s making theater in Durango, it’s just that trajectory of Broadway shows, which are the .01% of theater that gets produced. That ends up being what every single community theater across the country produces. Which really has led to this houseification of what theater is and who is excited about it. There has been this sort of absence of a developmental pipeline that encourages a breadth of new artists across the country.

SS: What are some of the things that inspire you about theater? 

HR: You just need human beings and a text. Really, you just need humans. That is revolutionary on so many levels. It’s so inherently anti-capitalist, even when you get to the commercial level. It’s such an interesting way to reframe arts in general for American consumers. I’m sick of screens. I think we’re all really sick of screens, and I think especially younger people who have rarely encountered that sort of communal aspect of consuming things because even live music now – like a Taylor Swift show – is beyond entertainment. It’s a spectacle at the highest level.

SS:  What’s coming up that you want to let people know about?

HR: Well, I’m hoping that I’m able to build out of a performing arts space in Durango because I have run various types of organizations from small to large. I’m hoping to turn it into an interdisciplinary producing arm that is based in Durango but has deep roots and connections in L.A., New York and Chicago to have a sort of reciprocal flow of work … and make Durango a hub for the Four Corners area, for not just performing arts but things like record production. We could make records here! Why not? I’m hoping to bring in a lot of different kinds of artists and see what works.