Bright lights accompany a buzzy story
Assistant Professor Nina McConigley’s play, Cowboys and East Indians, is coming to Denver’s biggest stage! Co-written by Matthew Spangler, the play (which had its first staged reading at the 2024 Colorado New Play Summit), will have its world premiere with the Denver Center Theatre Company during the 2025-2026 season.
Announced on March 1 at the 2025 Summit, Cowboys and East Indians is slated to debut in January 2026. After its run in Denver, it will head to the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.
Hailed by Denver Gazette as “the story that stirred the most buzz last year,” the play follows an Indian American family and their assimilation into “the tight-knit fabric of conservative Casper, Wyoming.”
“Growing up in Wyoming, the first big play I ever saw was at the Denver Center for Performing Arts. To have my play have its world premiere there feels magical. To see the American West I know on the stage means so much to me. I am so thankful to Colorado State for allowing me to do my research and writing to tell these unique stories,” said McConigley.
Stayed tuned for the full announcement from DCPA! See previous coverage of McConigley and Cowboys and East Indians by CPR News and CSU SOURCE.
Faculty Bio
Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She earned her MA from the University of Wyoming, and her MFA at the University of Houston. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. In 2019-2020, was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and she has an essay collection about the American West forthcoming in 2025 from the University of Georgia Press. Her novel, How to Commit A Postcolonial Murder, will be published by Pantheon Books in early 2026.