This summer marks the fifth year Washington will be home to the Source Festival. From Friday through July 1, the festival will present 24 original works for the stage: three full-length plays, 18 10-minute plays and three Artistic Blind Dates.
The festival’s 10-minute plays are organized around three themes, each inspired by one of the full-length plays. The first full-length play is “Qualities of Starlight” by Gabriel Dean, in which Theo Turner is a young cosmologist who suffers a personal “big bang” when he visits his parents in the Appalachian South and finds them living a very unconventional life.
The second full-length play is “The House Halfway” by Norman Allen, in which people gather at Dandle House overlooking the Caribbean to help guests in their suicides. “The Uses of Enchantment,” by Gregory Moss,” is the final full-length play. In it, Jenny Stone struggles with a new school, a new town and her mother’s departure until she discovers a way to deal with life through fairy tales.
| If you go |
| The Source Festival |
| » Where: Source, 1835 14th St. NW |
| » When: Friday through July 1 |
| » Info: $10 to $20; 202-315-1305; culturaldc.org |
Six 10-minute plays are associated with each full-length play. “We really look for fresh new voices in these plays,” said Jenny McConnell Frederick, the festival’s director of performing arts. “We’re looking for plays that don’t simply have shock value but will tell stories we haven’t heard before.
“The call for 10-minute plays is nationwide, so we send it out to all places that playwrights might check. We usually get between six and seven hundred plays. We have over 100 readers, and each play submitted gets read at least twice.”
In the Artistic Blind Dates, artists from different disciplines are chosen to collaborate. “We do an open call for artists in every discipline, then ask them to talk about their own aesthetic,” Frederick said. “A panel of specialists evaluates them and creates three groups that are as artistically diverse as possible.”
In addition to its productions, this year the festival is inaugurating a unique mentoring program for directors, pairing leading local theater artists with early and mid-career directors. Jennifer Nelson, Jason Loewith and Randy Baker will work as mentors to the directors of the 10-minute plays.
“They will be available at the first rehearsal and the first designer runs at a couple of different times so that the other midcareer directors can hear their thoughts,” Frederick said. “They’ll be there so that the directors can bounce ideas off them. We want to make the most of this opportunity we have, where we have over 100 artists together in one place.”
“We’re especially excited about the festival this year. It’s really exciting to bring all this energy to Washington.”
