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.