Generous Company’s Gumbo, a festival this month at Theatre Project, is unusual—even for a place that has long been a hub for Baltimore’s avant-garde. The festival, which will take place at the theater over the course of three weekends, consists almost entirely of unfinished plays. Arranged by local ensemble Generous Company—which performed I Am the Machine Gunner at Theatre Project in 2010—it features 16 new theatrical works in various stages of development, ranging from staged readings to more elaborate productions.

The first weekend will showcase a series of intertwined plays called Last Chance: The Story of a Broken Heartland, set in a small town in the Ozarks, by Generous Company member David White. The second weekend features an as yet untitled multimedia work by Generous Company, replete with puppets, music, live performance, and video. (Local companies Annex Theatre and Un Saddest Factory Theatre will also present pieces that weekend.) And on the final weekend, several new plays developed at WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory, an annual two-week-long retreat for pre-professional playwrights run by Generous Company, will hit the stage.

“We’re looking at [the festival] as a way to let people see how we work and what we do,” says Mike Vandercook, Generous Company’s executive director. (The company is highly collaborative and does not have an artistic director.) “The play doesn’t become real without an audience, and this is a chance to get a glimpse of what goes into putting up a play.”

Megan Gogerty, a playwright with two pieces coming to Theatre Project in January—Bad Panda, which may premiere later this year, and the completed Feet First in the Water With a Baby in My Teeth—says presenting unfinished work to an audience can be extremely useful for a playwright. “When you’re writing, when you’re rehearsing, it’s all guesswork,” she says on the phone from her home in Iowa City. “You don’t really know what you have until the people are in the room with you. Audience is this wonderful barometer because they cannot lie. If it’s funny, they’ll laugh. . .or be moved, or hold their breath. When a play is working, everyone in the audience shifts in their seats at the same time. It’s remarkable. And when it’s not working, it’s also remarkable, but now it’s remarkably painful. Everybody’s moving around and checking their watches—little Indiglo lights pop up.”

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