Tom Horan’s Static, in which a young girl who knows the legend of a couple driven mad by the objects in their house grows up to acquire the house — and the mysterious box of cassette tapes inside it — will be one of three full-length feature plays which Cultural DC’s Source Festival will present this June, the Festival announced on its website.
“Static is very closed in, confined within the walls of this one house where the air is thick with mystery and loss; it feels haunted in every sense of the word, and it’s easy to imagine someone cooped up in there for too long going mad,” said Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle. Bridget Grace Sheaff will direct this play, which Horan developed at the Kennedy Center MFA Workshop.
A man transforms himself into a woman whose wife simultaneously loves and grieves. A young woman resolves to become a man, and another woman provides comfort and encouragement. Uneasily, the four of them seek equilibrium with each other, with mothers and colleagues, in lives spent in dreams and struggles. This is Georgette Kelly’s Ballast.
The final full-length play is Jennifer Fawcett’s Buried Cities, a story about a couple robbed at gunpoint, a young man who grieves the death of his surrogate father in war by playing the most violent video games possible, and a young woman with inexplicable ties to a labyrinth.
Although neither Ballast nor Buried Cities appear to have been reviewed, both playwrights come to the table with strong credentials. Kelly, like Horan, has had work developed at the Kennedy Center and she has also studied under Tina Howe, Arthur Kopit and former Arena Stage dramaturg Mark Bly. Ballast was a finalist in the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition. Fawcett received a NEFA National Theatre Project Award for Out of Bounds, a play about bullying, and her Birth Witches received an ATCA/Steinberg new play nomination.
Margot Mansburg will direct Ballast and Ryan Maxwell will direct Buried Cities.
In addition to the three full-length plays, the Source Festival will, as usual, feature eighteen ten-minute plays, presented in three six-play sets, and three “artistic blind dates”, in which artists from different disciplines will collaborate on stories which present themselves through more than one medium.
The Source Festival will run from June 8 to July 3, 2-16 at Source, 1835 14th Street, Washington, DC. Details and tickets.
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