Foster Cheng
Staff Writer
Last Saturday night marked the annual 24 Hour Play Festival. The concept of the festival, put on by Effie’s Players (a drama club on campus) is that all content in the festival is created in just 24 hours. Writers meet on Friday night and stay up writing their plays. Next morning, actors come to receive their scripts and spend the day learning and rehearsing before the big night. Anyone looking for perspective should note: Productions usually take months to prepare, and that’s only considering the auditioning and rehearsing portion of the process. Because of the Facing RACE event, this year’s festival was shortened to only 23 hours, leaving a slightly greater challenge to be met.
The first play shown was a two-man drama titled “Ten Years On.” Written by Eli Millette ’17 and directed by Marisa Adame ’17, the piece showed the reunion of a father and daughter, who were estranged for ten years. Scott Wagner ’17 and Emily Gammons ’17 gave impressive performances and were able to portray the abandonment issues that Millette was playing with.
Second came Matt Rossi ’17 and Skylar Ruprecht’s ’17 “Underbakers.” Inspired in part by the movie “Undertakers” and, as Rossi put it, “from sheer exhaustion and from my love of surreal situations and obnoxious characters,” it featured a funeral gone awry colliding with a drug bust gone wrong. Ashley Wagner ’17, Alanna Edmonds ’17, Tara Abhaskun ’16, Emily Gammons ’17, Jake Beckstead ’16, Scott Wagner ’17 and a few randomly pulled audience members helped make the ridiculous, yet hilarious, scenario work.
Finally, there was a relatively new tradition in the 24 Hour Play Festival. This was only the second year that film has been included in the festival, and it seemed to work extremely well. Mamoudou N’Diaye ’14 recruited “a random group of kids” to play a group of friends trying to figure out what to do with a dead body the morning after a party. N’Diaye says that this film, “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Dead Fish,” was “more of an improv comedy experience than a film acting experience.” He also thinks “adding film to the festival brings a new level of theatre to the forefront of the campus’ radar. Film has mostly been swept under the table as of these last few years but it’s on a comeback.” Anyone who is interested in seeing the film can find it on N’Diaye’s YouTube channel.
In addition to film, get ready to see a higher number of plays and possibly even improv at the next festival. Alex Dereix ’14, president of Effie’s Players, says she’d love to see the event grow bigger: “Next year, I think this would be a cool event to collaborate with another performance group, such as Don’t Throw Shoes, and make it more of a ‘festival’.”
Can’t wait until next year to see more? Don’t worry! The Laramie Project arrives in November, as well as a one-act play festival and a mainstage performance next semester.