Now in its third year, the Source Festival will be offering new and innovative forms of theater/performing arts through July 3.
“It’s going to be a really great mix of talent,” festival producer Jenny McConnell Frederick said. “You’re going to see some familiar faces that you know and love since all of the performers are local, and you’re going to see some exciting new artists. Then the playwrights come from across the country.”
Some of the offerings will be familiar, for instance the 10-minute plays. According to Frederick, 535 submissions were received from across the country and those scripts were whittled down to the 18 that will be presented during the first week of the three-week festival, until June 20.
There are also new offerings this year: a talent show and three full-length plays.
“The talent show will be an old-school, high school, kitschy talent show mixed with some real talent,” Frederick said. “It was designed as a way to incorporate our Source Festival artists and the community. It will be a really fun night. We have ABC 7’s Jennifer Donelan as our emcee and the winners will get a $100 prize.” The talent show is at 8 p.m. June 21.
The other new element in this year’s festival are the full-length plays, which will be presented in the third week (June 27-July 3).
“We felt that because full-length plays are such an important part of the complexion of theater in America, we wanted to include them here,” Frederick explained.
“We have three fantastic plays by wonderful playwrights. Sean Graney’s play, ‘It’s Lonely Out in Space’ takes place in a spaceship themed bar and includes an astronaut who shows up bringing drinks. We’re doing ‘Splinters’ by Emily Schwend, a beautiful play about a teenage girl whose sister has gone missing. The third play, ‘This Is Not A Time Bomb,’ by Aaron Wigdor Levy, is about three guys and two girls in a prep school in Brooklyn who are getting in touch with their love of hip-hop.”
Between the talent show and the full-length plays, during the second week of the festival (June 22-26), the “Artistic Blind Dates” will be presented. “Those are an evolution of something that happened the first two years of the festival,” Frederick said. “This year we had an open call and were looking for artists from every field — filmmakers, musicians, dancers, visual artists, not just theater artists.
“Then we had a team of panelists who selected 12 of them. We paired them into four groups of three. They each received grant money and three months to collaborate and come up with whatever project they wanted to create that reflected all their abilities. We’ve ended up with four really amazing, totally unique projects.”
All productions will be done at Source, 1835 14th St. NW. Tickets, which cost $18, can be purchased by calling 866-811-4111 or on the Web site at sourcedc.org.
