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Source Theatre Company Celebrates its 16th Annual Washington Theatre Festival
by Sylvia S. Cutler, July, 1996
For a month beginning July 10, Source Theatre will present 70 new scripts in workshops,
staged readings, and a competition. In its years of operation, this innovative group has
had 12 nominees for the Helen Hayes Award for an Outstanding New Play, and has won four
times. The Festival has also received the 1994 Mayor's Arts Award for Excellence in
Service to the Arts and in 1993, The Washington Post Award for Distinguished Service.
Source's mission, begun in 1977, is to give new theatre artists and playwrights a
chance to develop their skills. Here is the place to try out new ideas, to explore new
concepts, to be daring and innovative. Everything is explored.
This particular festival production--"Migrant Voices," by playwright Martha
King De Silva and a monologue written by Patricia S. Smith called "Tennessee:
Waltzing in the Valley"-- is being staged at the National Museum of Women in the
Arts, itself an innovative idea. The Museum is housed in a former bank at the corner of
New York Avenue and 12th Street. The exterior is imposing; the interior is impressive.
Walls, rails, floors are all a pale marble. One feels that one is stepping into a temple
in ancient Rome. No art is in sight. All of it is in small rooms off the cavernous central
hall.
The auditorium is a small one, perhaps 200 seats. Yet for the small audience, only a
handful of people, it seemed huge. It is a good theatre, but there is a problem with
acoustics.The players were lost in the excess of space, and often their voices could
barely be heard.
In "Migrant Voices," playwright Martha King De Silva was striving to portray
the feelings of women--migrant workers--in the Great Depression. based on photographs by
photographer Dorothea Lange taken in 1935.
One of the women was a former slave who had been freed. For people who had been
sheltered, fed, clothed, told what to do by a master, freedom was frightening. Where to
go? What to do? How to take control of one's life when one has never had to make a
decision about anything. Obviously, if this was happening in 1935, the speaker was
referring to her family's life when she was a very young child, for slaves were freed
after the Civil War.
Another woman told about her family's trek across the United States looking for work.
When one of her children died, her husband mourned, but she could only think that there
was one less mouth to feed.
A third woman lived in a house without running water, and she told how she and her
family had to trek two miles to the nearest source of water several times a day, and how
at last, they were able to afford to buy piping which for which they planned to dig
trenches (two miles!), and lay the pipe from the source to their ramshackle house.
Two other women had other stories to tell, and all of the stories were interspersed,
one reminiscence at a time. They dovetailed their stories so seamlessly, it was as if it
were all one story. Of them all, it was the slave whose story was the most poignant.
Participating were Robin Ervin, Wendy Spriggs, Mary Guzzy-Siegel, Cynthia L. Webb and
Laurene Mullins. Robin Ervin was the director.
Another type of "story" was a monologue written by Patricia S. Smith called
"Tennessee: Waltzing in the Valley." What started out as a two-minute monologue
ended up as a one-hour narrative, about how life hands you a poker hand and it's up to you
to figure out how to play it. The narrator in this one was Annie Houston and the director
was Chuck Young.
It was essentially a play-by-play description of a young woman's life. She meets a man
at a party and she describes him as luminous. A slide is flashed onto a backdrop and there
we see a man with enough hair, facial and otherwise, to populate the pates of all the
balding men of America. She goes on to tell how the relationship developed, how he changed
her life, married her, beat her, and how she became involved with another man; how she
lost the child of her first marriage, and on an on. (Other slides were shown; none was
clear.) The most predominant problem with this narrative was that we couldn't hear it. Ms.
Houston chose to speak in intimate tones. Hopefully, the first row heard it; we didn't. It
was therefore difficult to follow the narrative, which, to put it bluntly was about fifty
minutes too long. The only thing my companion and I could say for sure was that this story
took place in Tennessee.
Of the two "plays," the first has the stuff of prizes; the second should be
turned into a novelette. Nevertheless, it was an interesting evening, and our conclusion
was that the Source is well worth supporting and visitin.
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