Floodgates Open for the Source Festival
910 Works Offered For 10-Minute Slots; Renovated Venue To Reopen June 21

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, May 28, 2008

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.

· "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."