Daniel Crane, left, and Erin Weaver at the 2010 Page-to-Stage Festival.

Carol Pratt

Capital Fringe and Source Festival are in the rearview. How will lovers of new and inexpensive work whet their appetites before next summer? Look no further than the Kennedy Center’s 12th Annual Page-Stage Festival. Coming at you this Labor Day weekend, Page-to-Stage is a collection of free readings and rehearsals of work being developed by local Washington and Baltimore-area theatre artists. To help you plan ahead, theatreWashington breaks down who’s doing what.

If you’re an Everything Old Is New Again kind of guy/gal…

Classics endure for a reason, and one of those many reasons is that each successive generation of artists finds inspiration in them. Faction of Fools will be presenting their own commedia dell’arte version of The Three Musketeers. 1st Stage offers up One More Night, a musical written by Lou Ann K. Behan and Gary Fitzgerald, which transports elements of the Grimm Brothers’ “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” to Napoleonic Italy. Synetic Theater will be previewing their upcoming movement-based interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, while Theater J gives audiences a sneak peak of Our Suburb, Darrah Cloud’s update of Our Town, moving the action to the 1970s in suburban Illinois.

If Bio-Theatre is really your thing…

Hollywood biopics are often criticized for taking creative liberties with their subject’s life; luckily, theatre is all about taking creative liberties. MetroStage is showcasing Ella Fitzgerald: First Lady of Song, the Maurice Hines-conceived musical that will be going up in January. American Ensemble Theater will present a staged reading of The Law of Return, Martin Blank’s political thriller based on the real-life Jonathan Jay Pollard espionage case and his capture in DC. And First Draft gives us Hinged, Sarah Sorkin’s look at the act of preserving someone’s historical legacy—in this case, an obscure Tudor court painter named Levina Terling.

If you want to be taken to Another World…

Tired of watching the same kitchen-sink drama taking place in someone’s crappy New York apartment? The National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts takes us to the 17th century in The Good Devil, In Spite of Himself, Mario Baldessari’s comedy about a traveling commedia troupe hounded by restrictive government decrees. African Continuum Theatre Company shows us a less cliché New York in Thembi Duncan’s Mon Chaton, a depiction of gay and lesbian life during the Harlem Renaissance. And Flying V gives us The Pirate Laureate and the King of the Sea, Zachary Fernebok’s next chapter in the story of Finn, a pirate in a world where poets fight word-to-word combat on the high seas.

If you want A Little Bit Of Everything…

Sometimes life is full of interesting surprises. dog & pony dc is already poised to give an audience a unique experience with its Toast Incubator Salon, a participatory devising workshop where audience members watch works-in-progress and then collaborate on something new. Theater Alliance will show a selection of short plays under the heading Risk and Return, culled from a writing prompt sent out on Facebook. And finally, The Inkwell presents excerpts from eight different plays in ten and twenty minute installments, guaranteeing a smorgasbord of variety.

For full festival details and specific dates and times, visit the Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage event page.  

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