Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Broadway's Most Urgent Play Was Made in a Day
The Creators Project: Each fall, The 24 Hour Plays puts playwrights, directors, actors and musicians through the ringer for a night of frenetic theater. Here’s how it works: everyone meets up at 9 PM the day before the curtain call, actors, writers, and directors group off into six different groups and go through props. The actors talk about scenes or roles they’ve always wanted to play. The playwrights stay up all night writing, and the actors and directors return the following morning, rehearse, run tech, and then, finally, perform six short plays to a packed audience. In any normal year, it’s a wild, emotionally charged theater. But this year’s Broadway performance, which landed just six days after the election, was more like a primal scream.
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2 comments:
I really love the trend of creating over short periods of time. It seems to pop up in all sorts of disciplines: the 24 hour comics, NaNoWriMo, and hackathons. We did an exercise in directing were a larger group had to create a piece in ten minutes. The idea is that when the time constraints are so tight, you don’t have time to second-guess yourself and what comes out is sometimes terrible, sometimes brilliant but is more often than not completely honest because you don’t have time to think of a way to hide your true intentions for a piece. We get a taste of this at CMU with the annual tradition of Playground. With this event happening just six days after the incredibly emotional US election I wish I could have seen what truths were able to be expressed on that stage and I look forward to seeing how my peers are able to open up about the heavy emotional processing we have all been doing in the coming week and in the art they create.
I think the real beautiful thing about this play festival, as Daveed Diggs pointed out, is the focus and presence in the moment that those involved are required to have in order to make the festival a success. I also think the emphasis on pure creation is important, as many creatives can get locked inside their own head, and fail to actually generate work, no matter the initial caliber or quality of content. The current event mindfulness that is also practiced is valuable, and I think this type of content naturally walks hand in hand with this kind of festival. I appreciate the range of those involved, and how this festival is built and structured to inspire and guide and mentor future generations of creatives. This has a very important place in arts culture, to ensure that there is continued relevancy, clarity of voice, and opportunity for all to join in, wherever they might wish to.
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