In celebration of the 17th annual Page-to-Stage Festival, more than 60 theater companies—both new and established—will ascend to The Kennedy Center this coming weekend (Sept. 1-3) to offer a series of free readings and snippets of plays and musicals in development.
“It’s a compelling mystery, and it has been for all 16 years. What has traditionally been the last weekend of summer, we wind up having multiple thousands of people coming in here to sit down and participate in concert readings of new works,” says Gregg Henry, curator of the annual Page-to-Stage Festival. “That’s the must-see element of it. When you see all these people supporting theaters whether they have budgets of $50 or budgets of a couple of million dollars, they are all there for the same thing.”
A collection of local, regional and national playwrights, librettists, and composers will take part in this year’s event, and it doesn’t matter where the show is in its development—the work can be fully staged or simply scripts in hand, working out some kinks.
A number of the plays that will be featured will tie in to the Kennedy Center’s season-long investigation of The Human Journey.
“The one that comes to mind is Gala Hispanic’s Paso Nuevo Youth Performance Group’s A Butterfly’s Eyes,” Henry says. “They are getting immigrant kids and refugee kids to tell their story and are making theater out of it. It’s just proving to be such potent work and so fruitful for Gala Hispanic and also those kids.”
Diversity is also a watchword of this year’s festival. One can look at just any one day in the festival to see shows of different races, genders, sexual orientation and even political ideas.
“It kind of knocks me back on my heels every year, when I see what the community is doing and why they are doing it,” Henry says. “It’s powerful stuff.”
For example, the University of Maryland will be presenting two pieces: Luna by Hana Huie and directed by Jasmine Mitchell and I’ve Been a Woman by Jordan Ealey, directed by Leticia Ridley. The former details how people construct identity in the midst of obstacles and expectations—in the form of a Chinese-American family; while the latter features two souls that are reincarnated in black women’s bodies during feminist movements of the past, present, and future.
“They have a playwriting teacher—Jennifer Barclay, who has only been there for a few years but is really doing great work and getting some good writing going with the students,” Henry says. “I’m real excited about that.”
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After taking a few years off, Signature Theater returns to Page-to-Stage in 2018 to offer a selection of new musicals in development, which will include a sneak peak of the world premiere musical Blackbeard, which will open in June 2019. “The past few years we have misaligned but this year, getting them back to showcase new musicals they have in the hopper is a welcome return,” Henry says.
A big benefit of Page-to-Stage is it allows theater artists to receive feedback and network with others in the theater community, which helps in refining the work and developing relationships that lead to later collaborations.
The Page-to-Stage team is making more of a concerted effort to have more shows and activities for families and children in 2018.
ArtStream Inc., will present The Miraculous Tales of Stonehaven, written and directed by Madeleine Barry, which follows the journey of three regular kids who encounter giants, trolls and dragons in a race to save a kingdom in peril.
“We saw a higher concentration of families bringing their kids last year and we found we didn’t have enough for them,” Henry says. “This year, there’s puppetry going on, we have a couple of our own Kennedy Center TYA productions currently in development, and we have a workshop with live looping and hip hop theater. It’s all geared towards engaging young people.”
Numerous activities will be part of the weekend as well, including Kostume Karaoke, corn hole, and a morning yoga session that will marry artists and their audiences to have conversations on works in a more dynamic setting.
Page-to-Stage has always been about celebrating playwrights and the theaters who love them, and there’s been some discussion among the theater community of late about creating a playwright resource center.
“There are long-standing entities like that in Chicago, Minneapolis and New York, but strangely, there hasn’t been one in D.C., not a designated resource center,” Henry says. “Whether that be a professional development for playwrights or a place people can go and get professional advice to get their plays read. We will hold a brainstorming session for that during Page-to-Stage this year since we have such a great concentration of playwrights in the building, it’s a great time to get some ideas on the table.”
“I love how the companies are experimenting with how they share the work, whether it be an open rehearsal or a more traditional concert reading, or maybe they even just got new pages from the playwright right before the presentation and what you’re going to see is a cold reading,” Henrey says. “Everyone has embraced the aesthetic of Page-to-Stage and know that that’s okay. They are sharing what’s new and audiences have come to appreciate and understand that’s what the weekend is about.”
There is limited seating available for each show. General Admission seating opens approximately 30 minutes prior to each event.
Here’s a printable schedule for Page-to-Stage 2018
PARTICIPATING THEATERS INCLUDE:
African-American Collective Theater (ACT); Alliance for New Music-Theatre; Ally Theatre Company; Arcturus Theater Company; Arts on the Horizon; ArtStream Inc; Baltimore Playwrights Festival; Best Medicine Rep; Brave Soul Collective; Bridge Club; Cage Free Voices Theatre; Catholic University; City Kids Theater; Collington Players; Crash of Rhinos; DayDreamers International; Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue; Faction of Fools; Federal Theatre Project First Draft at The Rose Theatre Co.; FRESHH Inc; GALA presents: Paso Nuevo Youth Performance Group; Georgetown University; GildaPapoose Collective; Guillotine Theatre JBE Productions; Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences; Liberated Muse Arts Group; Monumental Theatre Company; Mosaic Theater Company; National Conservancy of Dramatic Arts; One Off Productions; Open Circle Theatre Company; Openstage; Pipeline Playwrights; Playwrights Collaborative; Playwrights Group of Baltimore; Rorschach Theatre; Safe Streets Arts Foundation; Scena Theatre; Selah City Urban Theatre; Seventh Street Playhouse; Showcase on Main; Signature Theater; Soul-Satisfying Productions; Spooky Action Theater; Starting Gate Theatrical; Synetic Theater; The Apothetae; The Highwood Theatre;The Indian Ocean Theatre Company; The Lark Play Development Center; The Law Theater Project; The Welders; The Wheel Theatre Company; Theater Alliance; Tonic Theater Company; Too Much Damn (TMD) Theater; Unexpected Stage Company; University of Maryland—School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies; Unknown Penguin; Venus Theatre; Voices Unbarred; Washington Improv Theater; Washington Stage Guild; Washington Women in Theatre; We Happy Few; Who What Where Theater Collective; Wit’s End Puppets; Young Playwrights’ Theater (YPT).
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