24-Hour Plays

Thursday, when I got home from work, I received an email informing me that the Claremont Colleges had 24-Hour Plays going on this weekend. I found out about the last one a week after the production, so, not wanting to miss it again, I headed off to participate as soon as I left work on Friday.

By way of explanation, 24-Hour Plays come about every semester (well, we missed one semester in the last three years, but that's not bad for an ad-hoc production). Volunteers sign up to write, direct, and act. Some people choose to wear multiple hats, as I have done twice before and would have done again today, had we not encountered problems. In any case, the writers assemble at a designated location at 9 p.m. on Friday. There they receive instuctions about what they must include in a play (in the past it has been a fencing mask, a pencil, or a floppy disk; this time it was blanket, either word or object) and how many characters they may have. Then they have 11 hours to write plays, on script per team. They deliver the scripts by 8 a.m. on Saturday.

At 9 a.m. on Saturday, the directors gather, read scripts, and threaten one another with paper cuts in a battle over who will (or won't) direct which plays. The actors assemble at 10 and get cast. By 9 p.m. on Saturday, 24 hours after the writers assemble, the curtain goes up on the first play. Thus, the name comes from the period between the gathering of the writers and the start of the first performance.

It's a rather silly exercise (we didn't invent it, so don't blame us), but it can be great fun staying up long hours preparing a script that is almost inevitably filled with silliness. This time, my friend and I wrote about people who live near a campus coffee shop in a post-apocalyptic world; their entire culture and mythology is based up a book of Peanuts cartoons, and their leader is the Linus, protector of the Blanket. All of our actors but one flaked on us, and we dumped on of the three plays early. A second was relegated to being a dramatic reading. Ours survived as a full production, but it would have been better to have produced all three.

I look forward to working with (now) experienced producers in the Fall. The lessons of a low turn-out, combined with techniques that have drawn triple-digit audiences before, should go far in making the next round a bigger success. Soon, however, the production will have to move beyond a few people. We'll see if we might be able to turn it into an institution.