A Source of Serious Renovation

$1 Million Makeover Is More Extensive And Expensive Than Originally Planned

Renovation of the Source Theatre, now owned and managed by the nonprofit Cultural Development Corp., will be more extensive, expensive and later than originally planned. "We wanted to get it right," says the group's Anne L. Corbett.

The makeover will cost upwards of $1 million and include a new roof, new heating/air conditioning and stage lighting and sound systems, Corbett says. Work, which was to begin early this year, won't start until August. Corbett expects the theater to be "booked solid" until then, with shows by Actors' Theatre of Washington, Scena Theatre, the music-and-theater hybrid In Series, the new Constellation troupe and the Capital Fringe Festival in July.

After the corporation purchased the building for $610,000 cash and assumed the $298,000 mortgage (which it is negotiating to pay to the city in the form of community outreach), Corbett says, the group considered whether to "get it patched up and open as soon as possible" or "do a major overhaul." They "chose the side of doing more rather than less."

The chief goal is to make Source a genuine state-of-the-art, multiuse space, Corbett says, getting rid of the "rat's nest of lighting and sound cables" so that one company can perform there in the afternoon and another can get ready for an evening show in just a couple of hours. "The turnaround time in-between is really critical," she says, to keep the theater fully booked and in the black.

Thinking Theater

Contemporary American Theater Festival Artistic Director Ed Herendeen is calling his season "thinktheater." Some of his selections for this year's four-play repertory (July 6-29) on the Shepherd University campus in Shepherdstown, W.Va., may spark controversy but Herendeen hopes they will ignite a bit of empathy, compassion and understanding, too.

"There's no question that we live in a divided country . . . there's no question that our world is divided. And how do we reach across? Maybe by talking. Maybe by listening," he says.

The highest-profile work he has chosen is "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," a solo piece compiled by British actor Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner from the diaries and e-mails of the young American activist killed by an Israeli military bulldozer flattening a Palestinian home in Gaza. Herendeen says he feels drawn to "this young idealistic woman who wanted to change the world, what it is that she had to say." Plans by the New York Theatre Workshop to do the piece set off supporters of Israel; the company backed down and ignited off another protest. Anne Marie Nest, who played the precocious child in "Mr. Marmalade" at CATF last summer, will play Corrie.

Herendeen will direct "1001," in which playwright Jason Grote cuts between the classic Persian tale of Scheherazade and a post-9/11 Manhattan love story of an Arab woman and a Jewish man.

Lee Blessing ("Thief River," "Flag Day") will contribute "Lonesome Hollow," set in the "soonish" future, in which a constitutionally altered United States forces paroled sex offenders to live in a kind of penal colony, along with people such as artists.

"The Pursuit of Happiness," the middle play in a trilogy by CATF regular Richard Dresser ("Below the Belt," "Rounding Third"), is about a bourgeois couple dumbfounded when their brainy daughter decides to skip college. Herendeen will direct. The first play in Dresser's look at class in America was last year's "Augusta," about two women working as maids in a summer community.

Follow Spot

· Washington actor Gary Sloan (Otto Frank in Round House's "The Diary of Anne Frank") portrays famed 19th-century actor Edwin Booth in the solo show "Haunted Prince: The Ghosts of Edwin Booth." It continues in the National Portrait Gallery's auditorium April 2, 9 and 16 at 7 p.m. Call 202-275-0570 or e-mail http://NPGPublic Programs@si.edu to reserve free seats.