The notion that writers in Hollywood are lazy, disposable crybabies has been a stock type for decades – just ask the guys and gals outside the studio gates with the clever picket signs. But in the theater, playwrights are revered. A new company in town is taking big steps to help emerging dramatists refine their voices -- while at the same time, demystifying for audiences just how it is that a “well-made play” gets, well, made.

The Inkubator Festival is a monthlong coming-out party for The Inkwell, a collective of seasoned actors, directors and designers that will focus on in-development works exclusively.

“What young writers really need are productions,” says Inkwell Artistic Director Jessica Burgess, neatly summing up the ethos of her new enterprise. “They don’t have to be the most beautiful or the most polished. [Playwrights] need to see their drafts up on their feet to awaken their imaginations to a greater variety of possibilities.”

Lee Liebskind, Dan Ennis, and Lisa Hill-Corley at a rehearsal for The F Word. Photo by Melissa Blackall.

Inkwell’s first event was the Page-to-Stage Festival at the Kennedy Center last September, wherein three playwrights attended staged readings of their draft scripts. But the company made its debut in earnest earlier this month with a series of workshops and open rehearsals that will culminate in four-show runs of two of the plays (and another staged reading of a third). The first of the plays. Anne McCaw's OK, opens tomorrow night at the H Street Playhouse.

Both OK and James McManus’s Underground underwent revisions after being read at the Page-to-Stage festival last fall, and are now receiving full-blown productions, with sets, props, lights, and sound cues. And of course, actors who are “off book,” though they may be getting script changes right up until the final rehearsal. “We understand that this is a little bit of a tightrope-walk,” says Steve Beall, one of Underground's seven cast members.

Underground, a drama that uses the event of a coal mine collapse to explore the life of a West Virgina town, also had a reading at New York’s Lark Theatre between the KenCen reading and the present. Not everyone in the cast and crew is sure that the changes since last September are improvements, but in the Inkwell, the writer is king. Says director Chris Niebling, “I need to look at this from Jim’s point of view, and think about what’s going to best help him to develop his script.”

Steve Beall (foreground) and Frank Mancino rehearse a scene from Underground. Photo by Melissa Blackall.

Beall is more direct: “It came back from the Lark with a bunch of changes I didn’t care for. At first I thought, ‘What the hell is [McManus] listening to these people for?’ But then I thought, ‘What the hell is he listening to any of us for?’” Beall laughs. “He doesn’t need writing advice from me.”

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Burgess says the idea of starting a company devoted to plays that are “80 percent finished” came to her first in 2001, when she directed a 10-minute piece by her college roommate for the Source Theatre Festival, then helped the author flesh out the material into a full-length play. But it was a two-year stint in the literary department at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, during which she read dozens of solicited and unsolicited scripts, that gave her an inkling of which plays gets produced and why. “Writers were writing for staged readings or television,” Burgess recalls. “I can’t tell you how many plays I read where it’s set in a New York apartment and nothing happens. It was sitcom theatre. I began to wonder why writers were writing like this. To me, it seemed to point to writers not getting staged.”

By the time she’d done directing work at a few Humana Festivals (the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, KY’s annual showcase of new American plays; basically, it’s to theater what Sundance is to the movies) and helmed some strong shows locally (including Rorschach’s crazy-great 2005 production of The Beard of Avon) she felt ready to plant her stake in the ground. Last spring, Burgess reached out to friends in D.C. theater and quickly found herself at the head of a 15-member company.

The fact that these plays are being presented as works-in-progress by developing playwrights doesn’t mean these scribes are rookies. OK author Anne M. McCaw has had works produced locally by Rorschach Theater, the Theatre Conspiracy, and by various companies in San Francisco. She wrote her first draft of OK in 2001. Meanwhile, Underground dramatist James McManus has seven plays to his credit, including 2006’s Cherry Smoke, which won a Princess Grace Award and was staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and published by Samuel French.

“Jim is one of those guys who is going to go somewhere,” Burgess says. “I wouldn’t be able to produce his play next year, but this year I can,” she says, noting that McManus just moved to New York, where she expects his regional success — two Schubert Fellowships while he was earning his MFA from Carnegie Mellon; two “Best New Play” awards from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review — to be replicated on a national scale.

Inkwell Artistic Director Jessica Burgess leads a panel discussion as part of the Inkubator Festival. Photo by Melissa Blackall.

Burgess chose the plays herself for this first go-round, but she says the company will consider full-length plays submitted via its website going forward, and will form a literary committee to decide which works get developed. She’s open to the idea of working with playwrights with less experience than McManus or McCaw, and more D.C. playwrights especially.

The current crop of Inkwell plays are an eclectic mix by any measure. McCaw's OK, directed by Burgess, answers the question of just what Wyatt’s Earp’s and Doc Holliday’s girlfriends were doing while their menfolk were shooting it out with the McLaurys and the Clantons at the OK Corral. It will be performed Jan. 22, 24, and 26 at 8 p.m. Jan. 27 at 3 p.m.

Melissa Blackall's The F Word, directed by Patrick Torres, isn't about the particular f-word that separates broadcast TV from cable, but one that introduces a different set of taboos: “Fat.” This show explores the trials and tribulations of the plus-sized and those who live in constant fear of becoming so through a series of vignettes. The F Word gets a staged reading Saturday, Jan. 26th at 12 p.m.

Underground we've already told you about. “One of the things I like about it as an older guy is that it’s a multi-generational script,” says Beall, 55. “I’m bored to death with plays about all you twenty-and-thirtysomethings.” Underground will be performed Jan. 23, 25, and 27 at 8 p.m., and Jan. 26 at 3 p.m.

Each of the plays has held at least two open rehearsals, wherein member of the public were invited to watch the cast and directors at work. Niebling says that at the first of the open rehearsals, only one woman turned up — but she stuck around and watched intently for two-and-a-half hours. “We did nothing different,” he recalls. “We weren’t running it, we weren’t putting on a show. She just hung out and watched,” asking questions during breaks but otherwise simply observing.

After the Inkubator Festival wraps up, Inkwell will set its sights on the revived Source Theatre Festival this summer. Burgess has agreed to program content for the Flashpoint Gallery, the Source Festival’s secondary space. She also wants to stage a full production of Blackall’s The F-Word.

Beale, for one, sees the Inkwell as a place for those who profess to care about the vitality of the theater to put up or shut up.

“If actors or anybody else with an interest in theater aren’t involved with things like this, then they need to stop bemoaning the state of theater in America,” he says.

All performances are at the H Street Playhouse, 1365 H St. NE. Tickets are available here and priced on a pay-what-you-can basis.