Floodgates Open for the Source Festival

910 Works Offered For 10-Minute Slots; Renovated Venue To Reopen June 21

What do you do if you put out a call for new 10-minute plays for a summer festival, and you get 910 submissions for 25 slots?

Jeremy Skidmore, producer of the summer Source Festival, got 80 readers to help winnow the 910 to about 120. Then a committee of artistic directors and dramaturges from around the country narrowed that list to 40. Skidmore and associate producers Merry Alderman, Sarah Coleman and Jessie Gallogly picked the final 25. The whole process took about six months.

The festival opens June 21 and will launch the newly renovated Source venue at 14th and T streets NW. It includes a week of 10-minute plays (June 23-29); a day (June 30) of pieces written, rehearsed and performed in a 24-hour frenzy; a week of interdisciplinary work (July 1-6), including performance art, spoken word, music and comedy; and a week of one-act plays (July 9-13), also commissioned by Skidmore.

"I've just been really moved and just very impressed with how generous everybody's been with their time," Skidmore says of the Washington area artistic directors donating their time to stage the 10-minute plays. He's having fun matchmaking directors to scripts, which he misses from his days as artistic director at Theater Alliance. "None of the pairings are random," he notes. Signature's Eric Schaeffer, for example, will stage "this really bawdy, outrageous, sexual physical comedy," Synetic's Paata Tsikurishvili will do "a play that's wordless and all stage directions," and Joy Zinoman of Studio Theatre will direct "a really intense, beautiful piece about three women in a war-torn country."

Zinoman agrees she has "a great play" to direct (Heather McDonald's "The Two Marys"), set "in the basement of a museum in a war zone, and it's fierce." She recognizes Skidmore's "large vision idea" for launching the new Source.

Another 10-minute play is by Theater J's Ari Roth. "The Great White Undulating Orb in the Bed Between Us" is about a couple whose married life is nearly ruined when the husband can't tear himself away from his laptop, even in bed. Deborah Kirby of tiny Journeymen Theater Ensemble will direct. "I think it's fabulous," she says of the festival. "I can't tell you how hysterical it was to come to one of the informational meetings . . . and be sitting next to Michael Kahn" of Shakespeare Theatre Company. Kirby sees the whole experience as a "bonus" for herself and for Journeymen.

For the one-acts, Skidmore says he contacted "20 playwrights that I really admired . . . who were almost but not completely established yet, and asked them to write a piece that was 30 to 60 minutes in length." From those he "picked six that I liked the most."

The plays and their writers, several of whom are having their work performed in Washington for the first time, are:

· "Tumor" by Sheila Callaghan, whose "Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake)" is currently at Catalyst Theater; directed by Kasi Campbell.

· "The Mnemonist" by Julia Cho ("The Piano Teacher" last year in New York), directed by David Muse.