Floodgates Open for the Source Festival

The closed Source Theater at 14th and T streets NW will reopen with three weeks of shows, including a 10-minute play series June 23-29. A week of one-acts July 9-13 wraps up the festival. (By Tom Kochel)

· "Catch" by Graeme Gillis, directed by Steven Mazzola.

· "Murmuring in a Dead Tongue" by J.T. Rogers, directed by Jennifer Nelson.

· "Sunday Night" by Julian Sheppard ("Buicks" and "Los Angeles" off-Broadway), staged by Dorothy Neumann.

· "This Perfect World" by Chris Stezin ("Sleeping and Waking," "What Dogs Do"), the only Washington writer in the group; directed by John Vreeke.

This will be a theater-rich summer. The Source Festival will overlap in part with the final week of the Mason Festival of the Arts (June 12-29), which also includes new plays, and with the Capital Fringe Festival (July 10-27).

The Ghosts of War

Naomi Wallace doesn't write easy plays. Washington theatergoers may have seen "One Flea Spare," set in 17th-century London during the plague, or "Slaughter City," a slice of life among rage-filled workers in a meatpacking factory. Her dialogue can be poetic but fierce, her political ideas radical, the sexuality highly charged.

Tonight through June 28, Rep Stage in Columbia will put on Wallace's 1994 "In the Heart of America." Blending reality, dreams, past and present, it is the story of a Palestinian American woman in search of her brother -- or the soul of her brother -- a soldier perhaps killed in the Gulf War, and his buddy, who was also his lover. Other characters include the ghost of a women who survived the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the "soul" of Lt. William Calley, convicted for his role in My Lai. A seduction scene uses the names of weapons as a kind of lyric poetry.

"I was interested in how the language of war could be recycled, albeit with small alterations, from one war to another," Wallace wrote in an e-mail. "The first Gulf War was sold to us almost as a love-story-in-progress. Weapons were given user-friendly and even poetic names, such as Fishbeds, Floggers, Fulcrums. . . . I was fascinated by the processes the language went through to turn weapons into extensions of our goodwill and courage." She further explained, "Rather than language serving power, as it does during war, I'm interested in the power of language to unsettle and make us see things differently."

Director Kasi Campbell observed via e-mail that "the eroticization of war and weaponry makes for intriguing aural/visual metaphors in staging the work, and Wallace's language frees you in wonderful and terrible ways to explore those images buried in the psyche."

Wallace's work has been championed by no less than Tony Kushner ("Angels in America"), and she has won prestigious awards such as a MacArthur grant and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, but her plays, with their overtly political content, have been more popular in England. Even so, next spring she has works coming to New York ("Things of Dry Hours") and the Humana Festival in Louisville ("The Hard Weather Boating Party").

The Kentucky-born playwright has lived in England since 1997 with her husband, writer Bruce McLeod, and children. The daughter of an American father from a privileged background and a Dutch mother whose family ran a safe house in Amsterdam for Jews and communists during World War II, Wallace "grew up hearing stories about resistance, and the importance of finding out the lie and looking it in the face."