Last August, as playwright Jessica Kahkoska was driving through surreal-looking plumes of orange wildfire smoke enveloping Interstate 70 near Idaho Springs, she couldn’t help but feel that the image of hopeful headlights poking through the toxic daytime haze looked to her somehow theatrical. Beautiful, even.

“I was listening to music at the same time,” said Kahkoska, who had been collecting notes for a possible play about Colorado wildfires. “And I just had this moment where I thought, ‘Maybe the wildfire play sings.’ ”

Two months later, the East Troublesome fire erupted in Kremmling, 100 miles northwest of Denver. Over the next 10 weeks, the blaze would scorch nearly 200,000 acres, an area almost twice the size of Denver’s city limits. More than 35,000 were displaced. Two people died and 300 homes were destroyed. By the time it was fully contained, East Troublesome had become the second-largest wildfire in Colorado history.

Fast forward to today, and Kahkoska has her play. Make that a musical.

The DCPA Theatre Company, forced into an agonizingly prolonged dormancy by the pandemic, commissioned Kahkoska to write “Wild Fire” — real-life stories based on 30 interviews with residents of ravaged Grand County. From that material, Kahkoska has crafted eight composite characters whose lives and livelihoods were put in imminent danger, including a fire marshal, park ranger, rancher and reporter.

“The story looks at what resiliency and recovery look like,” Kahkoska said. “But it’s not so much a story about loss as it is a story about how we come back from loss.”

And woven throughout that story are the authentic folk sounds of Colorado music artists both well-known and under-known, including Gregory Alan Isakov, Cary Morin, Chimney Choir, Daniel Rodriguez, Elephant Revival and SHEL.

“One of the first guiding values that emerged in the creative process was that this is a story by and for Colorado audiences,” said Kahkoska. “So drawing from Colorado artists for the music was not a restraint; it was actually an inspiration.”

Kahkoska was attracted to folk songs, rather than Broadway-style tunes, “because they give us different colors to moments of the story,” she said. “The reason that is vital here is because ‘Wild Fire’ is tackling and holding space for difficult-to-articulate feelings and experiences that are so big, we simply don’t have words for them. But that’s what music does: It helps us try to get a hold of the really big things.”

Kahkoska chose three songs by Isakov, a Grammy Award-nominated singer-songwriter who was born in South African and has been based out of Boulder for nearly 20 years. In addition to “3 a.m.” and “Second Chances,” Kahkoska was particularly drawn to the message of “Berth”:

“Quit all that, quit all that, quit all that looking back.”

“To me, that is an absolutely brilliant lyric because there is something so active in it,” Kahkoska said. “We all found ourselves staring down a lot of different grief and loss last year, and in creating a piece of theatre that addresses that loss, here we have this amazing lyric that really helps us try to claw out.”

Songs, she said, evoke feelings in people in a way spoken words can’t. “And there is something so completely sacred,” she added, about songs performed live. In “Wild Fire,” they are performed live by an ensemble of eight actor/musicians who each play their own instruments.

SHEL’s “Lost at Sea” is a lilting, rocking song, “and we use it to address the feeling of being displaced from your home,” Kahkoska said. Morin’s “Cradle to Grave” features prayerful lyrics and is played at a moment in the story when local firefighters are making a stand to save the town of Grand Lake.

But there’s another reason it was important to Kahkoska to bring local musicians into the telling of this deeply Colorado story, which will be performed only three times in three different Colorado towns this week: Monday at the Levitt Pavilion in Denver, Wednesday in Dillon and Friday in Winter Park. In addition to the wildfire survivors, “Wild Fire” is being performed by and for fellow Coloradans who are in their own stages of pandemic recovery.

The shutdown wiped out the livelihoods of hundreds of local actors. For most cast members, “Wild Fire” will be their first paying job in at least 18 months. And there’s no way of knowing what stories of loss audience members will have endured, measured both economically and in lives. Even the venues where the musical will be performed are in recovery – including Levitt Pavilion, which lost out on $2 million in potential concert revenue in 2020. And it may be years before the Denver Center, which has lost out on an estimated $80 million in unrealized ticket sales since March 2020, forcing mass job eliminations and interminable furloughs, is back to its former self.

“There is a need for recovery all around us,” Kahkoska said. And that’s what she hopes will make the communal experience of watching “Wild Fire” outside, among those most directly impacted, all the more powerful.

“We are definitely taking this show to our audience,” Kahkoska said. “And I can tell you, as someone who has spent most of my life in rural Colorado, it is deeply meaningful to me that we are bringing this show to these mountain towns. To me, that’s what theatre can do in this moment: Build something new and take it outside and to the places where it can most resonate.”

To Kahkoska, “Wild Fire” is a letter of both love and admiration to Grand County. “In a year when so much was already happening, there was something about this fire that stood out as a special kind of loss and sadness,” she said. But, like the purple lupine flowers that are growing again in the charred forest outside of Grand Lake, “Wild Fire’’ is itself an exercise in rebirth and recovery.

And if, as part of that regeneration, “Wild Fire” introduces new audiences to beloved but largely underground longtime local bands like Chimney Choir, well then, Kahkoska said: “I couldn’t ask for a cooler opportunity.”

Denver Gazette contributing arts columnist John Moore is an award-winning journalist who was named one of the 10 most influential theater critics by American Theatre Magazine. He is now producing independent journalism as part of his own company, Moore Media.

‘Wild Fire’

• Presented by the DCPA Theatre Company in partnership with History Colorado’s Museum of Memory

• Monday, Aug. 16: At Levitt Pavilion, Denver, 7 p.m.

• Wednesday, Aug. 18: At Dillon Amphitheater, 7 p.m.

• Friday, Aug. 20: At Rendezvous Event Center, Winter Park, 7 p.m.

• Tickets: 303-893-4100 or denvercenter.org

• Note: The DCPA is offering up to 1,000 free tickets to firefighters across the three performances, chosen by lottery.