We're in the papers! Along with Scott Bakula...

Here's Anne again, checking in to let you know that The Inkwell has gotten it's first piece of press!  In the Backstage column in the Style section of The Washington Post, there's a great article on what we are up to with the Inkubator Festival and our up-coming Inkubator productions that open on January 22nd at H Street Playhouse.

Go ahead and read the article at The Washington Post website, and in addition to keeping up with our festival, you can learn more about Scott Bakula (of Enterprise and Quantum Leap fame) and his singing career.  Sadly, he is not joining us on stage next week... but our Inkubator productions will be exciting nonetheless.

Or you can read all about it below....

FRESH INK

By Jane Horwitz

Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 16, 2008; Page C05

The Inkwell, a fledgling organization dedicated to nurturing and producing new plays, is in the midst of a mini-festival at H Street Playhouse through Jan. 28. (Go to http://www.inkwelltheatre.org for the schedule.)

Born last September, when it presented pieces at the Kennedy Center's Page to Stage festival, the Inkwell is a descendant of the Hatchery, a new-play incubator that presented works in 2005 and 2006. Jessica Burgess, a carryover from the Hatchery, is artistic director.

For "suggested donations" of $10 or so, the public can attend open rehearsals and bare-bones "Inkubator" productions of two plays -- Anne McCaw's "OK," about the women behind the men who fought the gunfight at the OK Corral, and "Underground" by James McManus, about a West Virginia mining accident. A third new work, "The F Word" -- as in fat -- by Melissa Blackall, will have a staged reading.

Burgess, who directs around town and was in charge of finding new works for Catalyst Theater, will stage "OK" and was deeply involved in choosing all three plays, which are "about what it means to be American here, now."

She also liked the way they sounded in her head.

" 'OK' has beautiful cowboy poetry and 'Underground' has this earthy West Virginia accent [that] brings out the poetry in that community," while "The F Word" is "surprisingly funny," poking fun at "the American obsession with its gut."

Aside from McManus, a winner of the Princess Grace Award for playwriting, whose work came to Burgess's attention while she was at Catalyst, the playwrights are friends and Inkwell members. Next year, she says, they'll seek full-length plays in an open submission process "from anywhere and everywhere."

The Inkwell offers something playwrights don't get at other Washington theaters, Burgess maintains. Others may workshop plays and stage world premiere productions -- a goal of any development process -- but "what we're doing is the step before that production," says the director. She wants theatergoers to think of an Inkwell showcase as "the final draft" of a play -- "designed and fully staged, because designers ask good questions about a text" -- but not the final product.

Putting playwrights, designers and audiences together early to see what percolates is an Inkwell mission.

Burgess cites a stage direction in "OK" that calls for a character to put a drop of honey on a wilted sunflower, which blooms again onstage. "I loved the challenge of that stage direction," she says. "We want to just engage the playwrights' imaginations in creating the impossible onstage." Even on a tiny budget, "there are different ways to make that moment seem like it's happening," she explains, with lighting, other effects and just plain acting.

"The complicity between audience and actor is incredible. The audience will always go the extra mile in their imagination. That's why they go to the theater. They want theater magic."