A Taste at Page to Stage

We've launched, loyal readers!  We're off!  We're out of the starting gate... you pick your metaphor.

In plainer speak, we started our second Inkubator Festival at Page to Stage last week... and it was such a treat to hang out in The Kennedy Center's North Atrium with directors, actors, dramaturges, and playwrights to catch up, talk shop, and get a taste of five new plays!

There's so much to share about our Page to Stage activities, but here's a great summary from DC Theatre Scene... the inteprid Rosalind Lacy joined us for the entire day of events.

I thought I'd also share with you my notes from our showcase event, where we presented 20-minute excerpts from four new plays, each with a political bent.  As the supervising dramaturge, I am serving as a sommelier of sorts, helping playgoers taste all the rich, surprising flavors of the plays we have chosen to explore.  Let me know if that metaphor works for you.

Without further ado, let me introduce you to the plays we showcased last week:

Island of Outcasts by Fengar Gael

What you are about to see is the first 20 minutes of a wildly imaginative take on the next phase of human existence.  The play is set on the imaginary island of Dolphina, amidst the raging storms brought on by climate change.  On Dolphina, two idealist marine biologists hatch their own solution to perpetuate a species on the verge of extinction... that species is, of course, human beings.

Our readers were fascinated by the magical way that Fengar approaches pressing issues of the day... of climate change, of how we steward the planet and ourselves, and of the ethics of scientific experimentation.

 

Here's a comment on the play from one of our readers:

"Nearly everything about the play is memorable.  It suggests visual, musical, and dramatic possibilities that are stunning to consider -- from raging storms on a tropical island to shimmering swimmers and ethereal songs of fish people."

Empire of the Trees by Adam Kraar

We now go back in time to 1963, the moment before Kennedy is assassinated, as our picture of perfect America dies.  An expatriot, a Jewish American, is living in New Delhi, coming to terms with the loss of her child, her loneliness, and a crisis of identity that often comes when a person is uprooted and taken from everything they know.

Again, we are seeing the very beginning of the play, as well as a journey of the imagination that the heroine, Deborah, finds herself in.

This is also a story explored through magic, through the mythology of India, and through a dangerous, compelling relationship between our heroine and a poor Indian bookseller.

Our readers loves the mixture of political events, of mythology and literature, and the journey of troubled people in a landscape that they don't really understand.

i put the fear of mexico in 'em by Matthew Paul Olmos

This is a tense thriller of a play, and it kept us all on the edge as we read it.

It's also a dissection of difference, of connection, of the borders and barriers we use to distance ourselves, and those dangerous moments when we cross over those borders and barriers.

This is the very beginning of the play when two hapless tourists, Adrey and Jonah, have wandered down an alley in Tijuana to find Efren and Juana.  While it first appears that we are the edge of a nasty confrontation, we soon learn that they have more in common that it seems, more in common that either couple is comfortable with.

Matthew is getting a lot of attention with this play.  He recently received a workshop at the Sundance Institute, and the play will receive a reading in October at Gala Hispanic here in DC.  We're delighted to showcase it and these characters, all of whom are dangerous and terribly delicate, brutal and passionate and terrified of the future.

Monkey Adored by Henry Murray

We end this showcase in another strange and surprising place, in the world of animals.  Literally.

This is a play from the perspective of animals, those that fight and love and lose as we do, yet always fighting the pernicious ways of man, who are in search of the next lab experiment.

This excerpt drops us into the middle of the play, when Sonny Bonobo, a monkey, is about to engage in an act of terrorism.  His partner of the moment, Brown Spot the dog, is dead set against Sonny's activism, struggling to come to terms with his deep sense of loyalty in a world of people and animals who are not very loyal to him.  We also catch a glimpse of Sonny's compatriot, James the Rat, and Sonny's former lover, Madeleine the Cat.

I was the one who first this play, and it made me laugh and laugh and laugh.  But there's something else beyond a set-up of animals wrestling with a human condition.  The language is stunning, moving, surprising.  The philosophical discussion is engaging.  The characters are complex, rich, hilarious.  And you'll see here in this excerpt a theatricality that is truly surprising, funny, and thought provoking.

We'll be creating a library of these excerpts and of the suite of plays we are exploring through our Inkubator Festival, which picks up speed again on September 24th, where we host an open rehearsal for Strike Seek Find, a dark, brutal, and truly modern take on The Odyssey from the perspective of Telemachus, Odysseus's son.

Stay tuned!