LAKE UNTERSEE was selected from more than 100 full-length play submission to the 2013 Source Festival.  Before it was submitted for Source it received development support from our friends and DC neighbors The Inkwell.  Here Inkwell Executive Director Anne McCaw talks about her experience with the play.

The journey to Lake Untersee

by Anne M. McCaw
Executive Director, The Inkwell

I recently got a sneak peak at the Source Festival’s upcoming production of Lake Untersee by Joe Waechter, sitting in on a first run of the play in full.  I’ve a vested interest in this beautiful play, and it was a thrilling moment to see it up on its feet.  My associates at The Inkwell and I are so grateful to the producers of the Source Theatre Festival for having such great taste (in our humble opinion) to choose this play for production.   Before I share my thoughts about the run-through, let me tell you about my journey to Lake Untersee — the one imagined by Joe — which began nearly three years ago.

I’m the Executive Director of The Inkwell (www.inkwelltheater.org), a theatre company here in Washington, DC that supports playwrights in developing new plays that push boundaries.  Every 18 months, we ask writers to send us their most imaginative and ambitious plays.  A team of between 60 and 90 readers then review each and every play at least three times.  After three rounds of review, we choose between 20 and 30 to explore with a team of directors, dramaturgs, designers, and actors.  Our collaborations with playwrights take many forms, but they start with an initial conversation about their plays and then a development process we call a FIRST CONTACT showcase.  Over a week, we explore 20-minute excerpts of the latest draft of three plays with a team of directors, dramaturgs, and actors.  At the end of the week, we present the excerpts, with each dramaturg as guides for audience members.


I was one of the first people from The Inkwell to read an early draft of Lake Untersee in 2010.  I was immediately taken with the play’s lyricism and humor.  I remember laughing out loud as I read Phyllis’ lament about her teenage son Rocky, whose primary form of communication is grunting.  And I was pulled into Rocky’s predicament expressed in a mix of poetry, imagery of Antarctica, teenage speak, and a devolution of language as Rocky struggles to express his secret desires. Lake Untersee was one of 23 plays we chose to explore after reading more than 350.  I’d like to say we did a perfect job of introducing Joe to The Inkwell’s development process, but that would be a lie.  In fact, we gave him an awfully bad first date, putting him in a rehearsal room with a serious mistake in casting.  It was a painful moment for all of us.   We didn’t want to let go of Joe, so we invited him back for a second exploration of a 20-minute excerpt of his play about eight months later.   He graciously accepted. I’m pleased to report that we learned a lot from our error, and we had a terrific time working with Joe, looking specifically at the ending of the play.  I was the dramaturg for the process and have since worked with Joe and the folks at the Source Theatre Festival on the play.

I’ve now read Lake Untersee at least seven times (I now have trouble keeping count) in a variety of iterations.  I’ve read four different endings of the play.  I’ve seen each character grow in complexity.  I’ve seen the language of the play become leaner, deeper, more poignant.  And as many times as I reread the ending of the play (which came out of the FIRST CONTACT development process with The Inkwell), I still shed a tear or two.

With a few weeks until opening night on June 12th, it’s a nervous and thrilling time for the actors and director at the Source Festival.   I felt their tremendous passion for the play on May 22nd when they presented their interpretations of it for an audience that consisted of the producing staff of the festival, the production designers, myself, and Joe.

In seeing this first run-through (often known in the theater world as a “stumble through”), I was reminded of all the reasons I love the play — and that reading a play over and over is an entirely different experience from seeing it performed.  As delighted and moved as I have always been by Lake Untersee, I don’t think I fully appreciated the play’s depth until I saw key moments fully realized. 

I laughed even harder at the interplay between Rocky and his mother.  My breath caught in my throat when Rocky made a snow angel and then a snow dog (yes, it’s possible) on the carpet of the rehearsal room.  I found new favorite moments like Rocky and his father’s girlfriend staring at an unfinished mural.  And I think I understand Rocky’s journey in way I never would from just reading lines of dialogue and stage directions. I hope you all will join the expedition to Lake Untersee — with Rocky and his family, with snow angels and icebergs and penguins and aliens.  I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.


The America presented in the early days of television was such a freshly-scrubbed portrait of flawless domesticity- breadwinning husbands coming home to wives vacuuming in pearls. We tend to remember a bygone era not by actual events, but by the images of its popular culture. So now we think of these Donna Reed/Lucille Ball households as the midcentury norm, when in truth they never actually existed. So I wanted to take that model, and fold in the actual events on the front page of the paper inthe early fifties. Two couples, living outside the norm, hoping to protect themselves by achieving the aspirational ideal they’ve seen on television. It’s a proposition I find desperate, sad, and hilarious. —Topher Payne, Playwright PERFECT ARRANGEMENT   TOPHER PAYNE is the author of more than a dozen produced works for the stage, including LAKEBOTTOM PROPER and LAKEBOTTOM PRIME at The Springer Opera House, TOKENS OF AFFECTION and SWELL PARTY at Georgia Ensemble Theatre, ANGRY FAGS at 7 Stages, and The Process Theatre’s ABOVE THE FOLD, which won the 2009 Metro Atlanta Theatre Award for Best Play of the Year. Topher served as a Grand Marshal for the 2011 Atlanta Pride Parade, and has been honored with numerous distinctions by the community, including: Best Local Playwright (Creative Loafing Reader’s Choice, 2010, 2011, 2012); Best Local Writer and Best Local Actor (GA Voice Reader’s Choice, 2010, 2011, 2012); Artist of the Year (David Magazine 2011); Best Local Playwright (Sunday Paper, 2010); and Best Humor Columnist (National Newspaper Association Awards, 2012.) Topher lives in Atlanta with his husband, his dog, and his imaginary friends. His next work, THE ONLY LIGHT IN RENO, locks Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor in a hotel room during a citywide blackout. It premieres in January 2014 at Georgia Ensemble Theatre.
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The America presented in the early days of television was such a freshly-scrubbed portrait of flawless domesticity- breadwinning husbands coming home to wives vacuuming in pearls. We tend to remember a bygone era not by actual events, but by the images of its popular culture. So now we think of these Donna Reed/Lucille Ball households as the midcentury norm, when in truth they never actually existed. So I wanted to take that model, and fold in the actual events on the front page of the paper inthe early fifties. Two couples, living outside the norm, hoping to protect themselves by achieving the aspirational ideal they’ve seen on television. It’s a proposition I find desperate, sad, and hilarious.

—Topher Payne, Playwright PERFECT ARRANGEMENT

 

TOPHER PAYNE is the author of more than a dozen produced works for the stage, including LAKEBOTTOM PROPER and LAKEBOTTOM PRIME at The Springer Opera House, TOKENS OF AFFECTION and SWELL PARTY at Georgia Ensemble Theatre, ANGRY FAGS at 7 Stages, and The Process Theatre’s ABOVE THE FOLD, which won the 2009 Metro Atlanta Theatre Award for Best Play of the Year.

Topher served as a Grand Marshal for the 2011 Atlanta Pride Parade, and has been honored with numerous distinctions by the community, including: Best Local Playwright (Creative Loafing Reader’s Choice, 2010, 2011, 2012); Best Local Writer and Best Local Actor (GA Voice Reader’s Choice, 2010, 2011, 2012); Artist of the Year (David Magazine 2011); Best Local Playwright (Sunday Paper, 2010); and Best Humor Columnist (National Newspaper Association Awards, 2012.)

Topher lives in Atlanta with his husband, his dog, and his imaginary friends. His next work, THE ONLY LIGHT IN RENO, locks Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor in a hotel room during a citywide blackout. It premieres in January 2014 at Georgia Ensemble Theatre.

I began writing A FRONTIER – my thesis play for my MFA at Columbia – in 2009, a moment of national uncertainty that was both financial and moral. With so many families struggling (and continuing to struggle), with so many dreams fractured through the skin, it felt as though we were deceiving ourselves if we did not take a sober look at the mythologies that this country has prided itself on, and that it has perpetuated in its position as the land of opportunity. Participation in the American narrative has brought great wealth and prosperity, along with severe inequality and environmental devastation. But it is very difficult to adjust the stories that give us definition: stories about our country, our family, our culture. Four years later, there is a tentative sense of economic recovery for some, but the underlying problems have not necessarily been addressed: too many of us cling desperately to the old American ideal. How could we not, when it is all we know? —Jason Gray Platt, Playwright, A FRONTIER, AS TOLD BY THE FRONTIER     Jason Gray Platt’s work has been produced and developed around the country by the Source Festival, American Repertory Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Round House Theater, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, P73, Red Bull Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Abingdon Theatre Company, The Inkwell, The Inconvenience, and through residencies at The Millay Colony and Djerassi. He received a Helen Hayes Nomination for The Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play in 2013 and was the 2007 runner-up for Princess Grace Award in playwriting. Originally from Arizona, Jason now lives in Brooklyn. BA: Vassar; MFA: Columbia.
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I began writing A FRONTIER – my thesis play for my MFA at Columbia – in 2009, a moment of national uncertainty that was both financial and moral. With so many families struggling (and continuing to struggle), with so many dreams fractured through the skin, it felt as though we were deceiving ourselves if we did not take a sober look at the mythologies that this country has prided itself on, and that it has perpetuated in its position as the land of opportunity. Participation in the American narrative has brought great wealth and prosperity, along with severe inequality and environmental devastation. But it is very difficult to adjust the stories that give us definition: stories about our country, our family, our culture. Four years later, there is a tentative sense of economic recovery for some, but the underlying problems have not necessarily been addressed: too many of us cling desperately to the old American ideal. How could we not, when it is all we know?

—Jason Gray Platt, Playwright, A FRONTIER, AS TOLD BY THE FRONTIER

 

 

Jason Gray Platt’s work has been produced and developed around the country by the Source Festival, American Repertory Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Round House Theater, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, P73, Red Bull Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Abingdon Theatre Company, The Inkwell, The Inconvenience, and through residencies at The Millay Colony and Djerassi. He received a Helen Hayes Nomination for The Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play in 2013 and was the 2007 runner-up for Princess Grace Award in playwriting. Originally from Arizona, Jason now lives in Brooklyn. BA: Vassar; MFA: Columbia.

“My personal compass has always pointed toward the coldest, most remote places on our planet. Even as a child, I grew up researching and daydreaming about family vacations to Iceland and Antarctica. In these dark corners of the world, where all the complications of our daily lives become frozen, true connection seems possible. Lake Untersee was born from this idea, that perhaps in the absence of these distractions and in the spirit of adventure, we can become a more perfect version of ourselves.”                                      —Joe Waechter, Playwright LAKE UNTERSEE     Joe Waechter’s plays include PROFILES, Lake Untersee, Good Ol’ Boys, The Hidden People, and The Strangler. His work has been developed or produced by Playwrights Horizons, Ars Nova, American Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theatre, Trinity Repertory Theatre, The Kennedy Center, The Amoralists, The Hangar Theatre, Red Eye, The Inkwell, Clubbed Thumb, Perishable Theatre, Pavement Group, and The 25¢ Opera of San Francisco. Upcoming projects include readings and workshops at Portland Stage’s Little Festival of the Unexpected and PlayPenn, and residencies with SPACE at Ryder Farm and The Arctic Circle.   Awards include the McKnight Advancement Grant and two Jerome Fellowships at the Playwrights’ Center, a Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship, the Weston Award in Playwriting, a Jerome Emerging Artist Residency at Tofte Lake Center, and the Clauder Competition Gold Prize. In 2009, Joe received a travel grant to develop The Hidden People, a three-part epic mash-up of Icelandic folklore, Norse mythology, and The Bible.   Joe also creates work for other medium, including the “headphone operas” The Hoot Owl and Howard Gap Road, and animmersive virtual reality piece titled Antarctica. MFA Playwriting, Brown University. www.joewaechter.com  
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“My personal compass has always pointed toward the coldest, most remote places on our planet. Even as a child, I grew up researching and daydreaming about family vacations to Iceland and Antarctica. In these dark corners of the world, where all the complications of our daily lives become frozen, true connection seems possible. Lake Untersee was born from this idea, that perhaps in the absence of these distractions and in the spirit of adventure, we can become a more perfect version of ourselves.”

                                     —Joe Waechter, Playwright LAKE UNTERSEE

 

 

Joe Waechter’s plays include PROFILES, Lake Untersee, Good Ol’ Boys, The Hidden People, and The Strangler. His work has been developed or produced by Playwrights Horizons, Ars Nova, American Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theatre, Trinity Repertory Theatre, The Kennedy Center, The Amoralists, The Hangar Theatre, Red Eye, The Inkwell, Clubbed Thumb, Perishable Theatre, Pavement Group, and The 25¢ Opera of San Francisco. Upcoming projects include readings and workshops at Portland Stage’s Little Festival of the Unexpected and PlayPenn, and residencies with SPACE at Ryder Farm and The Arctic Circle.

 

Awards include the McKnight Advancement Grant and two Jerome Fellowships at the Playwrights’ Center, a Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship, the Weston Award in Playwriting, a Jerome Emerging Artist Residency at Tofte Lake Center, and the Clauder Competition Gold Prize. In 2009, Joe received a travel grant to develop The Hidden People, a three-part epic mash-up of Icelandic folklore, Norse mythology, and The Bible.

 

Joe also creates work for other medium, including the “headphone operas” The Hoot Owl and Howard Gap Road, and animmersive virtual reality piece titled Antarctica. MFA Playwriting, Brown University. www.joewaechter.com

 

Here are some photo’s from the Artistic Blind Date (ABD) team, Momentum, Interrupted. For those that don’t know what an ABD is, it’s when three artists from disparate mediums come together to learn from each other’s medium and create something new together. It involves a lot of experimentation, as we’ll see in these photos.

Workshop Weekend

Okay, so it’s been awhile. In case you’ve forgotten, my name is Emily­­one of three assistant producers and dramaturgs for the Source Festival. I’’ve been busy, you’’ve been busy, Jenny’s been busy. We’’ve all been busy. And the blog has been neglected. But it’s a new year and new, beautiful spring and that means…blogging! I’’m happy to be back, and I hope you are to, so let’s get to it!

Last weekend Source Festival hosted its 3rd annual workshop weekend. It was a weekend of fun and productivity where playwrights came and talked about their work, listened to it be read out loud, gave feedback and took notes. It was a time for playwrights, directors and dramaturgs to meet and collaborate.


The weekend started off on Friday when all the playwrights came from out of town to meet here, in Washington, DC. Joel Waechter (Lake Untersee) came from Minneapolis, Topher Payne (Perfect Arrangement) came from Atlanta and Jason Gray Platt (A Frontier, As Told by the Frontier) came from New York City. We all introduced ourselves, and then read excerpts from each play. After that and a tour of Source, we went over to Marvin’s to get drinks and chat. (It was a bit chilly but sunny and generally lovely, you’’ll be happy to know.) From there, most of the group went to Ben’’s Chili Bowl to get famous half­smokes, which everyone enjoyed.


Then it was Saturday! It was the very beginning of Saturday when we all convened again. We assembled into play­groups. I was with Perfect Arrangement, with Topher, Linda Lombardi, our director, and an assembled cast. Topher started us off by telling us the backstory of his play, both in terms of style and content. The play takes place in 1950, and uses the classic sitcom style­­you know the kind, lots of cheesy ad breaks and laugh lines. The content of the play, however, is much more serious, as it describes the Lavender Scare, a period of time when homosexual men and women were blacklisted from the government. Topher discussed all of this and more, such as the Sodomy laws during 1950. It was fascinating, and we ended the day with a quick rehearsal of a scene to be acted the next day and then…break!


I can’’t tell you what the crew did Saturday night because I wasn’’t there, but I think it involved bar hopping around Mount Pleasant and H Street, as one does when one is in town.


Sunday was our big event. We announced the 2013 lineup and had the playwrights say a little bit about their plays and then they presented that scene I mentioned above. We had a great turnout and lots of enthusiasm from everyone involved. There was coffee and bagels and doughnuts and doughnut holes. Mmmhmmm. Overall, I think the weekend was extremely successful. Playwrights found new aspects of their plays to work on, directors got to hear their plays read aloud for the first time and actors got to meet fellow actors. Next step is first rehearsal, where we’ll all convene for a second time for some table work and possibly a little rehearsal.

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