Not all of our best storytellers tell their tales with words and voices. Some do it with sound, with light and, in the cases of Kevin Nelson and Tina Anderson, with the physical worlds they build for actors to play in.

Anderson is believed to be the most prolific Colorado theater scenic designer of the past 20 years. In 2023 alone, she not only designed seven different playgrounds for three different theater companies, she completed two projects for openings on the same weekend – twice.

That’s like building a new house about every six or seven weeks.

Nelson has been quietly building his skill set as a design assistant with the DCPA Theatre Company since 2017. But he visually exploded onto the scene on his own this year with two sleek and utterly original looks for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s massive outdoor amphitheater offerings, a full slate of shows for the theater students at Metropolitan State University of Denver, and he dropped an utterly rad design for the Lone Tree Arts Center’s splashy return to producing live theater – ”Dreamgirls.” (And let me just say, for that one, he came up with the best use of salad bowls since the invention of salad.)

Anderson, a graduate of Boulder High School and Colorado State University, has a particular adroitness for creating worlds that involve a lot of actors performing on very tiny stages. “I love the challenge,” she said. “The smaller venues send my brain into overdrive.”

Anderson designed a full year of shows for Cherry Creek Theatre that included “The Headliners,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” and “Sondheim on Sondheim.” She also created the stark and somber landscape of “The Laramie Project” for the Arvada Center, incorporating a collage of panels that allowed for the use of real-life multimedia (by Garrett Thompson) for the first time in an Arvada Center studio-theater show. And for the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company, Anderson created “Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B,” “Eden Prairie, 1971” and, her crowning glory of 2023, the mining disaster “Coal Country.”

That’s an impressive range of worlds – two of them world premieres – spanning an 1890s British flat, a vaudevillian-era dressing room, a suburban backyard, a coal mine and more.

“Coal Country,” like “The Laramie Project,” is a direct-address play that had actors reciting testimonials drawn from witnesses to the 2012 Upper Big Branch Mine explosion in Raleigh County, Va. Anderson framed the playing space to make it look as if we were trapped inside that doomed mine a thousand feet below the surface just a Steve Earle barre chord away from where 29 of 31 miners died in a single day.

Director Jessica Robblee challenged Anderson to imagine a mine that would frame the beautiful, scary, stifling structure of the story – “and she delivered,” Robblee said.

“Life just gets better whenever Tina is in the conversation. She combines artfulness, experience and intelligence about what everyone else needs – all with that twinkle and her brilliant sense of humor.”

Nelson’s unique challenge in seizing his first opportunity to design on the iconic Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre stage is that the Colorado Shakespeare Festival runs in repertory – meaning he had to design sets for both “Much Ado About Nothing” and “King Lear” for two different directors with different creative visions – and in ways that would both complement and distinguish one another.

And then there’s what they call the dreaded “changeover.” Because the two plays alternated on varying nights, the separate sets had to be moved in and out according to the show schedule.

“The goal is always to have two sets that work in total concert with one another so we are not spending laborious hours changing from one set to the next.” said Franz. And then there are the not-so-simple logistics of where everything fits. “For example, the ‘Lear’ set was built right behind the ‘Much Ado’ set – and it stayed there the whole time,” Franz said with a laugh. The audience was none the wiser.   

“Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Kevin Rich, was set in 1920s Paris after the end of World War I. The location is a governor’s mansion and gardens, set against a backdrop of privilege and prosperity – but not so far removed from war and disease.

“Kevin created this beautiful exterior of a chateau outside of Paris, and we wanted it to feel like a wonderful playground space for the soldiers coming home after the war,” Franz said. But if you know the play, you know a central conceit is that a lot of comic eavesdropping takes place. So Nelson created a working water fountain, that, like a gun in a Chekhov play, you just knew was going to be used as a hiding place at some point – to great comic effect.

“King Lear,” on the other hand, is set in a bleak ancient mythical kingdom somewhere in the middle of England. Director Carolyn Howarth, noting that the word “nothing” is uttered 34 times during the play, seized on the starkness. “Carolyn wanted not a lot of fuss,” Franz said. “Just an abstract landscape grounded in nature – a castle exterior and natural heath, with no moving parts.”

Nelson, who is originally from Lake Villa, Ill., “really vibed with that,” Franz said. He delivered something that was deceptive in its simplicity: That is, its lack of simplicity. Nelson anchored the world with the outline of two massive, lit shapes – a triangle and a square – creating multiple right angles that reinforced the ideas of rigidity and an utter absence of nuance. Perfectly matching the king’s absolute, ruinous (and really just plain stupid) judgments about his daughters’ feelings for him.

“It was purposely not symmetrical, which knocks us off balance – and that is so perfect for ‘Lear,’” said Franz.

She describes Nelson as a “positive, outgoing, courteous and passionate” human and a designer who “comes up with these bold, beautiful designs that are still functional,” she said. “Believe me, we love our Shakespeare here at the festival – but we are always trying to make it speak to today. And Kevin’s ‘Lear’ set is a bold example of that.”

Anderson, in keeping with her typical high annual output, already has seven jobs booked for seven different companies in 2024: Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company’s “What the Constitution Means to Me” (Jan. 27-Feb. 11 at The Savoy Denver and May 3-19 at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder); “Road to Lethe” (April 26-March 18 at the Benchmark Theatre in Lakewood); Cherry Creek Theatre’s “The Heartbeat of the Sun” (May 3-19 at the Mizel Center); Curious Theatre’s “Cullud Wattah” at the Acoma Center (May 18-June 15); “POTUS” for Thunder River Theatre Company in Carbondale (June 14-30); “Legally Blonde the Musical” for Parker Arts’ at the PACE Center (June 28-July 21) and “Sweeney Todd” for the Off-Square Theatre Company in Jackson, Wyo. (Oct. 18-Nov. 2).

Note: The True West Awards, now in their 23rd year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.