Tinashe Kajese-Bolden and Christopher Moses, Jennings Hertz Artistic Directors
“Some stories arrive like a whisper, gently unfolding. Others crash into the room, undeniable, demanding to be heard. THE RESERVOIR was both.”
“It first entered our world as a finalist for the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition, a program that has long been a home for bold new voices. When we gathered in Rehearsal Hall A for its reading two years ago, something remarkable happened. The air itself seemed to shift. Words lifted off the page, weaving through the room like threads of memory, like echoes of laughter and loss. We watched as the audience — strangers only moments before — breathed in unison, bound by the story unfolding before them. By the time the final words were spoken, we knew: This was a play we would never forget.
Jake Brasch has given us something rare — a story that carries the weight of generations yet moves with the lightness of human resilience. The Reservoir is about memory — the kind we cling to and the kind that slips through our fingers. It is about addiction and its long shadow, about the past reaching for the present. And it is about love — the kind that endures even when words are lost, even when the road back to one another feels impossibly long.
Jake tells this story with the wisdom of an old soul and the sharp wit of someone who knows that humor is survival. Even in its heaviest moments, this play breathes with levity, reminding us that laughter is its own kind of grace. And, at its heart, The Reservoir holds a truth that is both personal and universal: That even when we falter, even when we forget, love has a way of remembering for us.
Bringing this play to the Alliance stage — alongside our partners at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and the Geffen Playhouse — is a testament to the power of new work to move, to challenge, to heal. This is why we gather in the theater. To sit together. To listen. To feel. And to leave changed.
Thank you for being here, for making space for this story, and for taking this journey with us.”
– Tinashe Kajese-Bolden and Christopher Moses, Jennings Hertz Artistic Directors
The Reservoir will premiere on the Hertz Stage March 29 through May 4, 2025 – learn more.
