Hour Twenty-Three: In Which Your Faithful Correspondent Signs Off

Seventeen minutes to showtime, and the audience is starting to trickle in. It's been a real privilege to blog this event on behalf of the William Inge Center, and I hope that you've enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about the making of the 24-Hour Plays. These students ought to be incredibly proud of everything that they've accomplished over the past twenty-four hours, and of course they've had a lot of help from the directors, the volunteers, and the staff of the Inge Center.

An hour before curtain, all of the participants in this year's Plays gathered in the theater for one last general meeting. "Stuff's going to go wrong," Peter Ellenstein told them. "It always does. Lines will get dropped, cues will get missed. So try to help each other out. Remember: this is about creativity and making friends and having fun, not about putting forward a perfect show. Although that would also be great." This advice somehow seemed to crystallize the spirit of the 24-Hour Plays, that commitment to craft that operates side-by-side with a willingness to explore and take risks and be silly at 3am when your body is telling you that it's long past your bedtime.

Speaking of which, I have six new plays to watch, and then several precious hours of sleep to catch up on. So good night, and thanks for reading.

Setting the Stage

What are the 24-Hour Plays?

The 24-Hour Plays are an ongoing project that invites writers, directors, and actors to bring entirely new plays into the world in the space of a single, madcap day. First staged in New York City in 1995, the 24-Hour Plays operate on the idea that art doesn't always need to be polished, that exciting things can happen on the page and on the stage when time is short and the clock is ticking. In a way, it's like a poet who chooses to write her poems in meter. Sometimes, the constraints that we choose are what allows us to do our most interesting work.

Here's the timeline: everyone involved in the Plays gathers at 8pm, with a costume piece and a prop in hand. The playwrights choose the actors that they want to cast in their plays, and then work through the night to write six short plays. At 7am, the directors show up, and the playwrights resent them for getting a good night's sleep. The directors then read through the plays, choose the one that they want to stage, and then launch into a full day of rehearsal with their cast. Lines get learned (usually), stars are born, and at 8pm the curtain goes up on the world premiere of six brand-new plays. It's a beautiful thing.

What does it mean to "liveblog" the Plays?

One thing that makes the 24-Hour Plays so unique is the process of bringing the plays into being—a process that audience members don't get to see if all that they do is show up for the performance. So, this year, the William Inge Center for the Arts has invited ICC librarian Marcel LaFlamme to hang out behind the scenes and document the 24-Hour Plays by posting to a blog. Rather than waiting until next week to read a write-up about how the plays were produced, audience members can actually check the blog throughout the night and into the day of the performance to get the raw, unfiltered account of the process as it unfolds. It's instant gratification for a digital generation.

Who is participating in the Plays?

The 2008 High School 24-Hour Plays are being sponsored by the William Inge Center for the Arts, in cooperation with The 24-Hour Plays. Students participating in the Plays are coming from as far afield as Topeka, Wichita, and Joplin, Missouri, as well as local high schools including Independence, Neodesha, Sedan, and Labette County. Technical assistance will be provided by students in the theater program at Independence Community College.