Anyone who has every participated in theatre knows that it is almost impossible to rehearse and then perform a play in one week; on the night of Friday, October 10, through the following night, Ross Shenker ’11, and a devoted group of playwrights, actors, and directors will try to prove that a play can be written, staged, rehearsed and performed in the space of 24 hours.
Between Friday night and Saturday at 8pm when “Blitz-plays” opens in the ’92 theatre, Shenker, along with playwrights Robby Hardesty ’11, Jo Firestone ’09, Zachary Rebich ’11, Jake Hunt ’12, and composer Abaye Steinmetz-Silber ’12 will not sleep. At 8pm on Friday, the group will gather and draw titles from a hat: Five plays and one musical will be written to fit the titles, which will share a common theme. Participants will also know the size of their cast and the genders of the actors they will work with. The writers and composers will then retreat to their rooms and write for the rest of the night.
At 9am the next day the directors of each “blitz-play,” which Shenker described as “a fifteen minute short play,” will arrive to cast each play based on the resumes and head-shots submitted by prospective actors. As soon as this process has finished, the playwrights, actors, and directors will meet each other and begin rehearsing—for an 8pm curtain.
“I expect it will be awesome,” said Rebich. “But I have no idea how we’re going to get to awesome from nothing.”
This may seem unfamiliar—or maybe even absurd—to you (it certainly did to me at first!) but as Shenker said, performing plays in 24 hours from page to stage is not a new concept at Wesleyan.
“This was actually a tradition in past years, but it didn’t happen last year,” Shenker said. “What they needed was someone crazy enough to coordinate it.”
That person is Shenker, and he is even adding his own spin to this tradition: this year, for the first time, the 24-hour festival will include a musical.
“I was thinking about including a musical, but I could never have done it if Abaye [Steinmetz-Silber] hadn’t come forward and said that he was interested in composing one,” he said.
Tickets for “Blitz-plays” will be available for free at the Usdan box office starting at noon on Saturday. I would advise all my readers to get one and check it out—the production seems like it has a mix of all the right ingredients to make for a great show: ingenuity, energy, talent…and a bit of insanity.
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