A group of children dressed in animal costumes perform a fable in an outdoor setting. Seems as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell picture.  The truth is far more complex and troubling in A Frontier, As Told by the Frontier, a fascinating new play from Jason Gray Platt premiering at the Source Festival.    

Hold on, Millie Martindale (Raven Bonniwell)! You got some ‘splainin’ to do. You’ve just tried to break a date with your husband’s boss’ awful wife Kitty Sunderson (Karen Lange) by pretending you had an appointment with a butcher on U Street – and now Kitty wants to go to the butcher with you! How are […]

Joseph Campbell once said that a myth was a public dream, and a dream was a private myth. In the mountains of Peru, or else in someone’s mind, there is a myth about a fox, a crow and a hare. It is obscure, bloody and full of remorse, and so is a path to the […]

Four and a half years ago, scientists from the Tawani Foundation decided to test Lake Untersee – a highly alkaline body of water capped by a thick shelf of ice in Antarctica – for extremophile microorganisms, which is to say tiny, living creatures which thrive under extreme conditions. They found some – most notably, an […]

The phrase “artistic blind date” is full of implication, suggesting not only that the matchmakers at Cultural DC put these artists together at the outset of their collaboration but that we may be in for a hell of a time, and not always in a good way. After all, we approach blind dates with a […]

“Good Christ, we need new forms, new passions, new work, new ideas,” Con rails in Stupid Fucking Bird. “New forms of theater that can actually make you feel like living better or fuller or…more!” Well. For the past five years, no one has done more to promote new forms, new passions and new ideas in […]

The six short plays which make up the Source Festival collection Afterward lack the individual superstar brilliance of some of the plays in its other two collections, On the Cusp and In the Midst, but all of them are interesting and fun, and some of them are very good indeed.

It is a complicated and difficult art to do a ten-minute play. The playwright must establish his emotional tone immediately, and thereafter add to it. John Guare says that the playwright has fifteen minutes to win his audience over, but for the ten-minute playwright, the production is finished before the fifteen-minute mark is ever reached. […]

Let’s face it: the principal reason you (or anyone) goes to an evening of ten-minute plays is to sample the future. Writing a compelling ten-minute play is an important step in a playwright’s development, in that it forces her to find the core of a story’s dramatic moment, and to bring it to us in […]