Every year, the Experimental Theater Board puts on the 24-Hour Show, a series of one-act plays that written and produced in twenty-four hours. This year's madness begins on a Friday night at 8 pm when all the writers-to-be assemble in the CMC and the four producers, Karen Borchert '08, Ben Egerman '08, Max Leibowitz '08, and Kristine Mackin '09, announce that the games have begun.
The writers work on their plays in the CMC's computer labs all night long. The writing process is intense, requiring large doses of coffee. Sometimes, at three in the morning, a writer will have to scrap the whole play and start it again. "We've had people not make it," says Leibowitz, although he adds that that sort of experience is rare.
Most of the writers finish their scripts by 8 am the next morning, in time to hand their scripts off to the actors and catch some sleep. Then it is the job of the actors to memorize and rehearse the play in the next twelve hours, in time to put on the show at 8 pm that night. The producers act as facilitators, helping anybody who needs it, at any stage of the process.
"I had never even conceived of it before," Leibowitz said, of the idea of writing and producing an entire play in 24 hours. "This directing experience is so different from directing a [regular] play." But he enjoys the experience, he says.
Some of the writers' original visions of the plays change over the course of the twenty-four hours. The original plot of "The Fruits of Our Labors," for example, was going to include a sexbot who blackmails a college student so the student can have a romance with her professor, and the robot can become God. In the final version of the play, the robot just wants to become a childbot, but when she and the student fight over the professor, she ends up getting reprogrammed as a country-western jukebox.
Other plots stayed remarkably the same. Justin Snyder reported that his play was going to be about "A farmer who becomes king of a small pseudo-European country," and that is exactly what happens in "The Cucumber King and I," plus or minus a few alcoholic queens and elephants.
The other 24-hour plays included:
"Damnation is Just Another Word for Love," in which an average Joe accidentally signs over his soul to an inept Devil when he thinks he is actually signing a bar tab,
"String Cross'd Love," a version of Romeo and Juliet with Yo-Yos,
"Flashenstein," a version of the Frankenstein story where the monster terrorizes the villagers by flashing them, and
"The Exuberance of Oppression: A Fairy Tale," a princess's quest to retrieve the Orb of Incredible Significance, assisted by a reluctant jackalope who just wants to go home.
