Labor Day is just around the corner, a time of relaxation, barbecues, final trips to the beach, heavy traffic and…dozens of plays crammed into one weekend?
The Kennedy Center hopes it can lure theater-lovers away from their family functions and jaunts to the shore, and get them to take advantage of the Fourth Annual Page-To-Stage New Play Festival, held from Sept 3-5. The free event’s lineup was announced this week, and it is brimming with established and new talent from local actors, musicians and playwrights.
The event includes readings and productions from nearly every local theater around, including adaptations and works heavily influenced by The Epic of Gilgamesh, Lysistrata, Dracula and Richard III (not to mention a Las Vegas-style take on The Marriage of Figaro).
Works relying less on allusion include Charter Theatre’s Monkey Boy, which features among other things a cockatoo with Tourette’s Syndrome; The Playwrights’ Forum’s Happy Holidays, which relies on TV’s “Average Joe” and “I Want To Be a Millionaire” as its muses; Washington Shakespeare Company’s Lunch, which uses an eighth grade cafeteria as the setting of a musical; and Theater Alliance’s provacatively-titled Pervert.
