The people who built the Legacy — and the institution that resourced them
The four founders, the origin witnesses, the contributing faculty, and the critical early contributors who shaped Developmental Theatre.
Developmental Theatre cohered in the 1970s around four founders and the University of Colorado — the institution that resourced them. What began as a single touring company grew into an M.A. programme, an international network of successor theatres, and a fifty-year practice still active today.
Richard Knaub, Chuck Wilcox, Lola Wilcox, and Martin Cobin launched the Colorado Caravan at CU Boulder in 1971. Each brought a distinct discipline — direction, playwriting, education, scholarship — and each stayed with the practice long enough to hand it on.
Co-founder, Colorado Caravan
One of the four founding faculty at the University of Colorado who shaped the Colorado Caravan under NEA Title III grants in the 1970s. Placeholder bio — real content arrives with the Drive import.
Co-founder, playwright, and pedagogue
Wrote the Colorado Caravan’s founding manifesto and many of the children’s plays still in the DT:FC library. Placeholder bio — real content arrives with the Drive import.
Co-founder, director, and educator
Lola shaped the Caravan’s repertoire and led generations of teachers into the discipline. Placeholder bio — real content arrives with the Drive import.
Co-founder, scholar of Developmental Drama
Authored the field’s foundational articulation of Developmental Drama. Placeholder bio — real content arrives with the Drive import.
Two voices from the Caravan floor carry the origin practice forward in their own words:
I was in the 1976–7 Colorado Caravan troupe. What we made together — the games, the warm-ups, the shared vocabulary of ensemble — I later gathered into a compilation that has become the base for the Theatre Games section of this website. Every game there has a lineage back to the Caravan floor.
The workshops we ran after every performance became a discipline of their own. I’ve been writing the practice down as the Workshop Manual for facilitators; when it publishes it will live in both this Legacy section and the Theatre Games section.
CU faculty whose scholarship and languages widened the Caravan’s reach beyond the departmental theatre programme.
Contributing faculty; Shakespeare translator (Chinese)
CU faculty and translator whose decades of work opened Shakespeare to Chinese audiences and shaped DT:FC’s Shakespeare pedagogy. Placeholder bio — real content arrives with the Drive import.
Contributing faculty
CU faculty whose contributions helped shape the Caravan’s early work. Placeholder bio — real content arrives with the Drive import.
The University of Colorado was more than an academic host — it was the material ground the Caravan grew from. CU supplied the van the company drove, the gas that filled it, the rehearsal space where scripts were tested, and even Lola’s desk. Housing came from the Chautauqua Park cabins, whose shared kitchens and mountain-porch dinners built the offstage rapport that made the ensemble work.
Federal Title III funding underwrote the touring. When the National Endowment for the Arts added a Dissemination & Diffusion Grant, the Caravan’s reach multiplied. At its height the company was performing for over 30,000 children each year, and for 100,000 or more when All-Town performances combined elementary, middle-school, and high-school audiences under a single roof. A national evaluation team designated the programme “exemplary.”
The same funding stream built an M.A. programme in Developmental Theatre at CU, granted within three years and led by Dr. Martin Cobin. The programme’s graduates seeded companies across the country and beyond — the Overland Stage Company in Wyoming in 1978, followed by successor theatres in Maine, Montana, Hawaii, Denmark, and Australia. Across fifty years the Caravan and its offshoots have performed for over six million people on three continents.
The theoretical and practical texts the Caravan’s founders drew on as they built the practice. The list is short by design — these six works anchor most of Developmental Theatre’s vocabulary.
Durland, Frances Caldwell — Creative Dramatics for Children (1952)
McCaslin, Nellie — Creative Drama in the Classroom (1968)
Siks, Geraldine Brain — Creative Dramatics: An Art for Children (1958)
Spolin, Viola — Improvisation for the Theater (1963)
Tyas, Billy .
Title and year pending client confirmation.
Way, Brian — Development through Drama (1967)
People whose sustained work with the Caravan, the CSF outreach programme, or the successor theatres kept the practice alive across decades. Not founders; not faculty; indispensable.
CSF Education Director
2001–2010
Oversaw Shakespeare in the Schools, Shakespeare in the Community, and Shakespeare in the Summer at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and helped shape the Will Power outreach programme that Chuck Wilcox toured as Will Shakespeare.
Caravan tour actor, Overland Stage Company
Ten years of Caravan tours and residencies; a founding force in the Overland Stage Company; contributed extensively to this website’s development.
Contributor
Contribution pending client confirmation per source spec §4.5 item 4.
The Caravan’s Shakespeare influence carried into the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s outreach programme. Richard Devin’s era established outreach as central to CSF’s mission; Chuck Wilcox toured for CSF as Will Shakespeare himself, taking the character into schools across the state.
The programme continues today under Amanda Giguere. CSF publishes a Facebook video on the outreach programme (link pending) and a Will Power article (hosting pending) that document the work in the current era.
The Caravan and the M.A. programme ceased when their institutional sponsors moved on. What they built, however, did not. Decades of exploration, teaching, touring, and revision have produced Developmental Theatre: Fearless Creativity — the current continuation of the work these founders began.