ST. GEORGE — Coming back to the red rocks to serve as the executive director for the Center for the Arts at Kayenta was a full circle moment fo r Miranda Wright. Growing up in St. George and seeing first hand the inspiring wonder that living in southern Utah brings to an artist led her to attend Southern Utah University for her Bachelor’s degree in theatre management.
“In Utah, I was exposed to so much theatre that was traditional, and so much Shakespeare!” Wright reminisced. Upon graduation, she knew she wanted to continue her love of theatre making into understanding new ways of art making. “When I pursued my MFA program at CalArts, so much of what we did was the most experimental and new theatre you could imagine.”
Having set down roots in Los Angeles, Wright began a theatre company with zero budget and grew it into a highly successful company that drew over a million dollars in revenue each year. She found audiences had a curiosity about the kinds of art that could be made involving movement, music, dance, technology and new methods of storytelling. During the shutdowns surrounding COVID-19 in 2020, Wright began to sense that she might have reached the apex of that role and began to look for something new.
“I thought having spent so much time in LA, that I was just never going to leave, and certainly I didn’t imagine coming back home to southern Utah.” But when the job came up with Kayenta, everything seemed to click into place. She found a home in coming home that seems to be a perfect fit with the rare true presenting house in southern Utah’s largely theatre producing environment.
The Center for the Arts at Kayenta was founded in 2011 as environment that fosters artistic endeavors for educational and cultural enrichment purposes. Their aim is to become Southern Utah’s premier venue for professional quality, multi-disciplinary performing arts in an intimate space, fostering awareness, appreciation, education, and enjoyment of diverse artistic forms and ideas.
Four years ago, that mission took a new step forward with the creation of the Kayenta New Play Lab. Under Wright’s direction, the lab has become a competitive hub of finding and developing new works from new and established playwrights. Kayenta New Play Lab funds playwrights for 10 day residencies to be inspired by the wonders of southern Utah and see their plays progress through several days of rehearsal and two public performances. From a competitive field of submissions, Kayenta selects six playwrights who are given five days of housing and support to write and develop their scripts prior to workshopping them. Local actors and directors are then brought in to workshop the script for four hours a day with the playwrights, many of whom continue to refine and revise the scripts based on what they see and hear in the workshopping phase. From there, each is given a pair of public performances on dates that work with the playwrights schedule. Once the workshop phase is finished, one play is selected based on feedback from artists and audiences to move into a fully mounted premiere production at the Center for the Arts at Kayenta.
The Kayenta New Play Lab has featured established Utah writers such as Gina Young, Julie Jensen and Jami Brandli, whose show The Magician’s Sister was selected for presentation in the lab’s first season. Subsequent seasons have shown Kayenta’s reach with nationally celebrated writers such as Debora Threedy, Matthew Ivan Bennett and Ken Narasaki, with space for Utah writers whose works stand up alongside these national stalwarts.
This year, Kayenta received at $25,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts the Kayenta New Play Lab. This year, many awards from NEA focused on projects that engage American history, heritage and culture. Receiving this award demonstrates that the lab has gained footing as a nationally respected developmental space.
This year, the cohort of six playwrights features an even balance of Southern Utah playwrights and established writers based in Los Angeles. Locals will recognize names like Peter Sham whose 2011 musical Lend Me a Tenor was nominated for an Olivier award. His show this year is called The Franklin Event and centers on Benjamin Franklin materializing in our day and grappling with the complicated legacy of our founding fathers.
Another known name in making new works is Jennie Webb who has spend decades celebrating new works through organizations such as Moving Arts MADLab, the Seedlings program as part of Will Greer’s Theatricum Botanicum, and has been a finalist for the O’Neill Playwrights award and PlayPenn semifinalist. Her show show Wound Care follows a woman seeking restitution from the state of California after her estranged mother was forced to be sterilized.
Wright candidly discussed the importance of new works, pointing to both modern successes, and the reality that the shows we cherish today were themselves new work decades or centuries ago. In creating the Kayenta New Play Lab, which features more traditionally structured scripts and storytelling, though no musicals this year, Wright is able to bridge the gap between the old and the new, the traditional and experimental. While the lab performances started on August 7 this year, audiences have two more weeks to enter the intimate 150-person space at the Center for the Arts at Kayenta before these new works travel from pages to their next great stages.
Editor’s Note: Quotes from interview was lightly edited for clarity.
MORE INFO: The 2026 Kayenta New Play Lab is currently running at the Center for the Arts at Kayenta (881 Coyote Gulch Court, Ivins, UT 84738) in the Lorraine Boccardo Theater. Now in its fourth year, the Lab brings six playwrights to Kayenta for intensive development residencies culminating in staged readings and guided audience talkbacks. The 2026 lineup includes Am I a Good Dog? by Rook Reilley, A Matter of Perspective by Lisa Quoresimo, The Franklin Event by Peter Sham, If the Creek Don’t Rise by Tyree Marshall, Wound Care by Jennie Webb, and UNTITLED Plantation Wedding Play by chandra thomas. Performances run on three consecutive weekends from August 7–23, with readings generally held at 7:30 PM on Friday or Saturday evenings and 3:00 PM on Saturday or Sunday afternoons. Individual tickets range from $12 to $25, with a package for all six plays available for $100. For the full schedule, information on each play and playwright, and official ticketing, visit the Center for the Arts at Kayenta website: https://kayentaarts.org/.
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