When Denver’s Jeffrey Neuman began to lose his hearing, he found his voice as a playwright.

Both journeys go back about 15 years. That’s when Neuman’s diminishing hearing started to become debilitating – not only for him, but for his husband, Mark Reidel.

“Because it’s really hard being a spouse to somebody who cannot hear anything – but believes they can,” he said with prototypical Neuman panache. Reidel urged Neuman to get tested, and in 2009, a doctor classified him as severely hard of hearing.

“They really couldn’t believe how bad my hearing had become, or how much I had just been compensating,” said Neuman, who realized he was not so much hearing conversations anymore but rather piecing them together by watching people’s faces.

That’s also when he started to explore playwriting. Not as a conscious response to his disability – ”but I do feel like there’s a connection there,” he said. Deciphering what someone might have just told Neuman in a crowded room is not unlike him constructing a narrative on his laptop, he said.

“It’s piecing together a story,” he said. “When you lose a sense, you are basically put into a position where you’ve got to collect whatever information you can and put it into an order that makes sense to you so that you can figure out what’s going on in your world.”

Which is also a pretty good description of playwriting.

Back then, Neuman had taken up the theatrical practice of dramaturgy, which is essentially helping playwrights to find their own stories. “But I never trusted my own voice as a writer – ever,” he said. “I was too fearful to put my own stuff out into the world.”

But fear can be a powerful motivator, too. Neuman didn’t know where – or whether – the deterioration of his hearing was going to stop. “It made me realize that you might not have all your faculties all your life, so it’s now or never.”

So, he started writing. And he’s been writing ever since. He’s completed seven full-length plays and had five of them fully produced, which is a little like a baseball player batting .714 for his entire career. He’s twice been named a finalist for the Heideman Award, the nation’s top 10-minute play contest. His most successful play to date, provocatively titled “Insex” – a comic look at two praying mantises, post-coitus – has been staged dozens of times around the world.

Good thing he started writing when he did. Neuman’s hearing is down to 15 percent in one ear and 12 percent in the other without the help of assisted listening devices.

The Neuman trifecta

Denver has a strong and supportive local playwriting community with many acclaimed local writers whose work occasionally scores the jackpot of a full staging. Josh Hartwell’s “Music of Flight: The Falcon,” a new superhero tale set to live music by the Colorado Chamber Players, will be staged at three metro locations from May 4-13. And his “The Estate Sale” will be staged by The Catamounts from June 4-24 in Aurora. Now through April 30, And Toto Too Theatre Company is staging two one-act plays by Rebecca Gorman O’Neill. Buntport Theater is a collective ensemble whose upcoming “Best Town” (May 19-June 11) will be its 52nd original full-length production. Melissa Lucero McCarl’s “The Heartbeat of the Sun” has a full staging coming that hasn’t been officially announced yet. 

But perhaps no individual playwright has pulled off a trifecta like Neuman, who will have three different plays staged by three different local theater companies in 2023, starting with Cherry Creek Theater’s “The Headliners,” opening May 5 at the JCC Mizel Arts and Culture Center.

What’s immediately evident about Neuman’s catalog is its remarkable range, with story fodder spanning family dynamics, office politics, history, current events and overt sexuality – like the play “What You Will,” which takes place entirely in a gym steam room. His three 2023 spotlight plays take a pointed look at America in the here and now – often by unearthing never-before-told stories of the “then.”

“The Headliners,” a play with live music, tells the true story of two vaudevillians who thumbed their noses at gender norms by publicly announcing their engagement while wearing gender-reversed attire – In 1908. “Eva Tanguay and Julian Eltinge were two of the most famous people in America, if not the world,” Neuman said. She was the Lady Gaga of the day; he was the world’s foremost female impersonator. And there is a reason you have never heard of them. Their publicity stunt backfired, and it came with severe consequences. But was it performance? Or was it something more personal for the two stars involved? Neuman hopes his play will be seen as a timely exploration of power, celebrity, gender and sexuality.

Next, The Catamounts will present Neuman’s “ of the Farm,” an immersive outdoor adventure that will take place from June 1-25 on and around the historic Metzger Farm in Westminster. It’s a play commissioned by the city that explores the life of former Colorado Attorney General John Metzger, who at one time ran that very farm. “He was trying to do some really important things with regard to conservationism and environmentalism at a time when that was not a conversation,” Neuman said. “And at the same time, he was Colorado’s attorney general, and social justice was very important to him.”

Then comes “The Road to Lethe,” a retelling of the Greek myth of the golden apple that lit the spark for the Trojan War. For Neuman, writing that play was a way of grappling with lessons from the Black Lives Movement. In this surreal, funhouse mirror tale, three old women hire a Black handyman who has suffered a profound loss to assemble the contents of a large Amazon package mysteriously left on their doorstep. The play runs Dec. 2-23 in Lakewood.

Certainly, this is the Jeff Neuman Moment. And no one is more surprised – or humbled – or bemused –  that is happening now, in 2023, than Neuman himself.

He is, by his own description, “a queer, disabled Jew – but I’m also a white man.” One who is deeply aware of – and aligned with – the call for all Americans to address centuries of inequities in every form that have disproportionately favored white men. Neuman wrote “The Road to Lethe,” he said, “using the Greek legend as a lens to look at racial trauma.”

There are many who believe stories of racial trauma should be left to people who’ve experienced racial trauma themselves – and Neuman agrees. “Writing ‘The Road to Lethe’ came with a lot of soul-searching as to how I might be contributing – readily or unwittingly – to systems of oppression in my own daily life,” he said. “I’m not trying to tell anybody’s story but my own. I want to figure out how to be a better person, how to be a better human being, how to be a better advocate, how to be a better ally.”

There really are no easy answers, Neuman said, to the “Why me? Why now?” questions. Neuman believes nothing is owed to him. But, one thing he does know: “While I do consider myself incredibly lucky to have landed these three productions, this is more than luck. I’ve put in a lot of work over the past four years to bring these opportunities to life, and to show theater-makers in this town that I’m a collaborator they can trust.”

This Neuman Moment, for one of his frequent collaborators, is fully a reflection of his ability to foster positive, long-term relationships. Amanda Berg Wilson is the founder of The Catamounts, which exists to tell original stories that both ideologically and physically venture into new territories – like creating “ on the Farm” on an actual farm. “You want to go into these creative processes with some knowns,” she said, “because there are so many unknowns.”

Neuman is a known.

“Creating brand new pieces for site-specific spaces is already quite challenging,” Berg Wilson said. “And to know that we’re doing so with someone who is open and collaborative and disciplined and hard-working and self-managed is just worth its weight in gold.”

Dipping the pen and podium

Neuman is also a “known” outside the local theater community. He was raised in upstate New York, came to Colorado on a whim with a friend who ditched him in 1994 and he decided to stay – first for grad school at CU Boulder and then for all of the other reasons people stay in Colorado. Against all odds, Neuman parlayed his intense love for both books and the venerable Denver Post Pen & Podium series at the University of Denver into one of the sweetest gigs in town.

For the past 10 years, Neuman has moderated the series’ longform, live discussions with dozens of his literary heroes, from Gregory McGuire to Barbara Kingsolver to perhaps the most intellectually intimidating man on the planet, Tony Kushner. But his greatest thrill was meeting John Irving, who is not only his favorite novelist: “He’s a god in my opinion.” Neuman swears he is not exaggerating when he says he lost 17 pounds in the weeks leading up to Irving’s appearance – Neuman’s first as the series’ moderator.

Part of it was self-doubt from his hearing loss. Part of it was hero worship. Part of it was the 90-minute run time. And part of it, Neuman said with a laugh, “is that I only have two emotional states – anxious and nervous.”

But he could not keep food down for weeks in advance. As he was introducing Irving, “my leg stopped working,” he said. “I just went to this place of complete panic.” But he got through it, and when Irving emerged from the wings, he gave Neuman a hug and whispered into his earpiece: “That’s the best introduction I’ve ever had in my life.” Neuman, and his fear, were released.

That’s the Neuman that Berg Wilson is excited for more of the world to meet this year.

“There’s nothing better than when your faith in someone’s artistry is realized by the world,” she said. “I just think it’s really great when the people that you love start to be beloved by others.”