Source Fest Playwrights, Making Every Minute Count

Give Estep Nagy 10 minutes and he'll give you a world. Or an interesting slice of one, anyway. In "A Taste of Heaven," the playwright introduces us to a young veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq who rapidly recounts a weird, wild day in a forbidding landscape half a world away.

At first, you suspect the 10-minute piece -- one of 25 playlets making up the opening acts of a resuscitated three-week drama festival at Source Theatre -- is going to be one of those post-traumatic-stress accounts of a terrible combat experience. But the dramatist has something less predictable in mind and -- because of the magnetism of the actor, Daniel Eichner, and the swell ear of the director, Kathleen Akerley -- that something emerges as a supple take on what war can do to, and for, a soldier.

"A Taste of Heaven" is presented in the "A" program, one of three rotating evenings of 10-minute plays that run through Sunday in Week 1 of the Source Festival, a multi-part event that inaugurates the rehabilitated black-box space on 14th Street NW. Each of the three programs offers eight or nine short works, introduced by a different host. The emcee of evening "A" is magician Matthew Holtzclaw, a compadre of Teller's; "B" is presided over by poet Regie Cabico; and "C" by DJ W. Ellington Felton.

The hosts set a tone of affable spontaneity at the "A" and "B" sessions I attended, although the delicate among you should be forewarned about Cabico's very blue spoken-word material. Given the tight budget, the productions themselves, staged with minimal props, are well-rehearsed, and some even use simple sound and lighting to polished effect. This is no doubt partly a result of a decision by the festival's producers to recruit a number of strong directors from around town -- some of them artistic directors of major companies -- to stage the pieces.

As one might expect in theater of such concise construction, the impact of the plays ranges from potent to negligible. The topics of the pieces, selected from among more than 900 submissions, explore a spectrum of contemporary concerns, but on the first two evenings, nine of the 17 works are built around notions of domestic or dating life.

In Aaron Levy's "First/Last," for instance, a couple seated on a bench (the fine Michael Grew and Meghan Nesmith, well-directed by Robert McNamara) engage in a bit of self-examination through a game of self-deception. In "Without Parachutes," playwright Eric Levitz puts another couple (Parker Dixon and Amy Quiggins) through a romantic postmortem from a more harrowing perch: as passengers on a jet attempting an emergency landing.

The funniest among the relationship plays during these first two programs is Sheri Graubert's "Magnolia Day," in which a svelte bride-to-be, played by the piquant Sarah Fischer, is evilly tempted by her passive-aggressive sister (Margo Seibert), who passes under her nose the Magnolia Bakery cupcakes they share on this one day each year. Although the playlet's conclusion doesn't quite live up to the pleasurable setup, Fischer and Seibert, under Jeffrey Johnson's direction, strike a merrily recognizable chord of the kind of sisterly love that has strings attached.

That's the thing about a 10-minute play. It doesn't, and often shouldn't, have to resolve itself with a zing -- or, as they say in comedy, a button. But at some point, it seems, it's required to have an intriguing character revelation or to take some kind of narrative turn, whether subtle or hairpin. (At least in conventional work. There's only one nonlinear play in the "A" and "B" programs: "Yes to Everything," Philip Dawkins's impressionistic look at a difficult childhood, which is expertly delivered by Nanna Ingvarsson.)

The least successful pieces tend also to be the most earnest, such as Rick Park's "NOLA," a solemn tribute to the dislocated victims of Hurricane Katrina, or "Urashima Taro," Francesca Sanders's dry memory playlet about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

A far higher level of achievement is attained in better-built pieces such as Matt Mayerchak's "Empties," a character-driven play set in 1978, about two young restaurant workers hanging out as the place closes up for the night. One of them is waiting for his turn in a van with a waitress. The exchange between actors Mark Halpern and Aaron Bliden, in Howard Shalwitz's atmospheric staging, gives you a sense of both a complete little work and a tantalizing sense of a much larger one.

On these evenings, too, you're provided entree to other nifty, isolated delights. As a flaky security guard listening to a co-worker's bizarre zoo story in Mike Batistick's well-drawn "Urban Legend," Jay Saunders is hilariously loose and in the moment. And portraying a playground mom with a chip on her shoulder, Vanessa Bradchulis paints a bitterly funny portrait of ambivalent motherhood, in Jeni Mahoney's "Running in Circles Screaming."

Like Eichner and his bravura turn in "A Taste of Heaven," these actors confirm that there are no small parts. Not even in small plays.

Source Festival 10-Minute plays. Produced by Jeremy Skidmore. Associate producers, Merry Alderman, Sarah Coleman, Jessie Gallogly. Group A plays: today and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. Group B plays: tonight at 11, tomorrow at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 p.m.; Group C plays: tomorrow at 11 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m., Sunday at 8 p.m. At Source, 1835 14th St. NW. Visit http://www.sourcedc.org.