24-Hour Play Festival

It’s Saturday at 8 p.m., and whether you’re getting ready to throw your hands up in the air another time or bundling up for a late night snowball fight, one thing is relatively certain — you’re not preparing for yet another all-nighter. At the very least, you wouldn’t be doing so voluntarily.

Not so for a select few last Saturday, Jan. 15, who signed up for the 24-Hour Play Festival. At its core, the festival is an insane concept. The clock started 8 p.m. Saturday, and stopped 8 p.m. Sunday. The process, such as it is, began with eight playwrights creating eight original plays — that means from scratch, people — to be completed by 8 a.m. Sunday morning, at which point rehearsals begin, with doors opening to the public 12 hours later.

This is a compressed time frame, for sure. Coffee and donuts help, according to Michael Kessler ’11, a theatre major and, along with Heather Pynne ’11, co-producer of the event.

“If you’re going to meet people at 8 p.m. to tell them they’re going to be up all night writing a play, some candy is a good thing,” Kessler said. “And my philosophy is that food is mandatory if you’re going to get people up before noon on Sunday.”

The madcap whirl is motivation enough for many, who participate in the festival year after year, pulled in by the opportunity to act in a setting where going all out is not only encouraged, but also absolutely essential.

“You have to produce the results,” Elizabeth King ’13 said. “You have to make a character, learn lines quickly, so you take giant risks in one day that might take weeks to get to with a normal production schedule. We got there at 8 a.m., but people were all like ‘let’s do this!’”

King acted the part of 35 year-old Peter Pan, who had recently been laid off from Disney World. The role is emblematic of the cast, which featured highbrow drag queens (pinkies most certainly up with their teacups); deranged clowns inhabiting Limbo Land; an asthmatic Bachelor and his homicidal hopefuls; a cowboy a la Woody and his trusty sidekick, a mysterious Russian; and many other memorable characters.

Perhaps surprisingly, the shortened amount of time did not result in a pressure-cooker atmosphere. Participants made up a curious jumble, with some people returning to theatre after a long hiatus, a brave few who had never acted before and theatre majors eager for the chance to not take their art too seriously.

“It’s one of the most productive days you’ll ever have at Middlebury,” David Malinski ’11 said. “I’m always shocked by how people just make it work. There’s not time for a process, and everyone goes at it in a million different ways. I’m fascinated by new angles on traditionally established concepts, and in this case concentration leads to fascinating results. You don’t get to over-think, and it gets done, there’s a full house and people are laughing  — what more could you want?”