24 hours, 7 plays, 1 festival

Shortly before midnight last Friday, I entered the Charrier Room of Theatre Intime and found myself surrounded by an odd assortment of people: everyone from awkward freshman to theatrical veterans.

As midnight approached, we entered the theater. In an opening ceremony set to the “Ghostbusters” theme song on repeat, the producers — Max Rosmarin ’11 and Ariel Sibert ’12 — explained to everyone what was going to happen: For the next 24 hours, the 36 of us were going to write, direct and act in seven short plays as part of Theatre Intime’s eighth annual 24-hour playwriting festival.

And as if that weren’t grueling enough, every writer had to pick several prompts out of a hat — all of which had to be incorporated in some way into the play. These prompts ranged from the quotidian (“Quick! How do we get out?”) to the curious (“an idiom misremembered by a foreigner”). Each director also received a grab bag of props that would have to be used in the plays. These consisted of a yellow plastic truck, a bag of stones, a piece of fake sparkly hair and a piece of “ectoplasm” — a white, fuzzy Halloween decoration meant to represent ghosts or spider-webs.

At 12:30 a.m., the actors and directors left to get some sleep, and the writers — several of whom had had the foresight to go to Starbucks earlier — began working on their scripts. Each play had to include eight of its 10 prompts, but some writers incorporated more. With the exception of the writer who had the (mis)fortune to receive the prompt “something that Intime clearly does not have the resources to represent on stage,” the writers were asked to remain reasonable in the scope of their play.

Eight hours later, the writers were at last free to go back to their dorms and sleep, while the actors (of whom I was one) and directors started trickling in.

We drank coffee and ate bagels as we read over the audition monologue — an amusing letter to Apple proposing a new piece of technology to prevent inebriated Internet communication. Each actor read part of the monologue, then received a piece of direction and read it again. The directors also asked if we would be comfortable with very close physical contact on stage. Most of us apprehensively said yes.

Once casting was complete, around 10 a.m., we dispersed to our different rehearsal rooms. After reading through the play, we began trying to memorize lines. Throughout this process, our directors explained character motivation and blocking. We ran lines with and without scripts, and then began trying to perform the scene.

Just before dinner we scoured the basement of Theatre Intime for costumes and additional props. After a brief dinner break, the directors met with the technicians to run through lighting cues. We put on our costumes, ran lines and made sure all the props were in place.

Then, showtime! The audience included not just students, but also parents who were on campus for Freshman Parents Weekend. The producers explained to the audience how the festival process worked and introduced each play by asking the audience to read aloud the prompts. Some plays used the prompts in particularly creative ways.

Raffi Grinberg ’12 and Charlotte Weisberg ’13, for example, who co-wrote “This is What You Get for Making Out All the Time,” used one of their prompts, “META!,” to drive the play. Its main characters, played by Philip Rosen ’14 and Dan Abromowitz ’13, explained that the writers had failed to write them a play, so they’d each written their own.

“They Met in the Bathroom” was the last play of the performance, in part for logistical reasons. Incorporating the prompt “violence that is indistinguishable from sex or vice versa,” it followed the ill-fated romance of two characters who met in the bathroom. The play ended with real food flung and smeared across the stage, which made for some interesting cleanup afterward but provided plenty of excitement and humor during the actual performance.

After the plays, audience members and past participants filled out ballots voting for a range of categories that included “best actor” and “best use of prompts.” The most awards went to the play written by Julia Rose ’12, titled, “That Dank, Nasty Plague, or A Queste For Survivall in These Most Trying Tymes.” Rose’s play followed a young man, an innocent milkmaid, a monk with an inappropriate scrapbook, and a one-legged, syphilitic prostitute as they struggled to survive in a kingdom filled with zombies and stricken by plague.

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Was it a work of genius or a work of delirium? After enduring 24 hours of hard (but still fun) work at the festival, I honestly couldn’t tell the difference.