There may not be a big open sky inside the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, but that won’t stop Terence Anthony’s new play Godspeed (Jan. 30-Feb. 22) from plunging audiences deep into the heart of a good ol’ fashioned Western, the likes of which they probably haven’t seen before. Set in 1865, Anthony’s world premiere play, which received a reading as part of the 2024 Colorado New Play Summit, follows a woman who escaped slavery, fled to Mexico, and is now back, transformed into Godspeed, a gunslinger with vengeance on her mind.
“From the very first scene, it grabbed me,” said director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, who praised Anthony’s ability to meld historical information with an entertaining story. “I’m a fan of a female anti-hero, but Godspeed is a hero hero.”
Anthony said he was inspired to write the play while researching what it was like during the time following the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, including when enslaved people were finally freed in Texas in 1865.
“I was kind of blown away by what I found, and just how the chaos, the violence, the fear, and terror were largely forgotten, never mentioned, or covered up,” Anthony said. That whole period, he said, from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era, is “a point in history that I feel like has been really glossed over, or manipulated in ways that really don’t serve us. I think it really is a great window into how we got to where we are today.”
A play set in 1865 Texas of course had to be a Western. Anthony grew up loving the genre, which he said feels under-explored onstage, especially given its potential to explore race, gender, capitalism, and colonialism.
“The Western sort of breaks down to: What do we do with people where the authority is so spread out, when we’re making our own rules? Who are we as people?” Anthony explained. His lead character, he said, “discovers what freedom means at that moment in history, and we’re able to discover it through her. She thinks that freedom means one thing, then discovers what the reality is.”
