Photo Flash: First Look at Reston Community Players' THE PASSAGE

On June 20-21, Reston Community Players will perform the finalist of its 2013-2014 New Play Project season at the Industrial Strength Theatre in Herndon. RCP will premiere a fully staged production of Donald C. Drake's new play, The Passage, an exploration about the ways family and friends come together to say good bye in a world where assisted suicide is the norm. Scroll down for a first look at the cast!

The Passage is set some time in the not-too-distant future, when assisted suicide has become a legal and accepted practice and is woven into the social fabric. It covers the four hours preceding the scheduled passage of Angus Dewart, as family members and friends gather at the traditional party given to people about to depart this world.

The cast for The Passage includes Rick Kenney (Angus), Carole Preston (Susan), Michael Clendenin (Frank), Erin Campagnoni (Eileen), Cameron Bond (Nicholas), and K. Sridhar (Mr. Singh).

Playwright Donald C. Drake has had productions and readings in Philadelphia, New York City, San Francisco, Vienna (Austria), Norfolk, Palm Springs and several other cities and has won many competitions, including a staged reading at the O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference. He has been writing all his life, first as a precocious kid in grade school and later in adult life as a journalist and playwright. He ended up combining these two careers with each one benefiting from the other. As special projects writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the news stories he did provided compelling material for his plays. And as playwright he pioneered the use of playwriting techniques to dramatize and explain complex news events. The technique was so successful that he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist three times and one of the narrative stories he edited won a Pulitzer. Though he loved his work as a journalist, playwriting was his first love and he ultimately left the Inquirer to become a full-time playwright. He is a member of the Philadelphia Dramatists Center and the Dramatists Guild of America.

The Passage will be performed at the Industrial Strength Theater -- 269 Sunset Park Dr. Herndon, VA - on June 20-21 at 8:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased online at http://restonplayers.org/npps-the-passage.

Photo Credit: Traci J. Brooks Studios