Given just 24 hours to write, cast, rehearse and perform a play, most would wilt under the white-hot lights of the stage.
Instead, Paul North did a cartwheel.
North, along with fellow graduate student Greg Farber, was amazingly relaxed considering the grueling circumstances by which their creation, The 24 Hour Play Festival, came together at Arizona State University Prism Theatre in Tempe Saturday night.
The unusual production was the second major performance sponsored by Playwrights on Campus, a group comprised of budding undergraduate and graduate students interested in writing theatrical pieces.
Each of the free festival's eight ten-minute performances started purely from scratch. At 8 p.m. Friday, eight playwrights were given 12 hours each to write an original play, and then pass his/her respective script on to an assigned director. The director's task was to take the brand-new script and bring it to life, teaching it to a hand-picked group of actors who had a mere 12 hours to put together a polished, audience-ready performance.
While actors prepped before show time, applying makeup in the theater's bathrooms and repeating lines to imaginary onlookers, festival co-creator and playwright Paul North could be seen performing a cartwheel directed at no audience in particular.
"We just try to make it fun," Farber said. "Part of the fun of it is that we don't really know what's going to come out of it all."
Actors of all levels took on the challenge, performing in front of about 100 people, Farber said.
"It's good experience for people who don't have experience on-stage," freshman director Dana Gal said.
The inclusion of both experienced and inexperienced actors made for "interesting moments", junior director Rachel Kenton said.
"It's not fantastic theater, but it's a lot of fun," Kenton said.
To keep the playwrights honest and ensure that each performance was truly fresh, certain keywords were incorporated into the plays' dialogue, Farber said.
Somewhat common words such as "crimson" and "volcano", along with the more outlandish "your momma" and "exploderize" helped maintain the integrity of the '24 hour play' format.
However, the addition of the word "sexpot" in all eight performances proved to be too racy for some.
During the first performance of the night, The Ghost of a Vaginal Future, the use of a pink balloon as a prop representing a clitoris prompted a woman and a young girl to make an early exit.
"It's a college play," said freshman Bunta Yamazaki, a performer in the first act. "You've got to expect the worst."
Oddly enough, the first segment's director, Mario Mendoza, works at a local youth theater, Yumazaki said.
Sexuality was a strong theme running throughout many of the plays, including Live Broadcast from the Cerebral Cortex of David Higgenbottom, which featured a series of news reports chronicling a young man's sexual drought.
"We were writing last night, not having sex," North said. "So that's why we write about it."
The festival was the spring semester's first event in the newly-opened Performing and Media Arts Building, which houses facilities for both the Herberger College of Fine Arts and the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication.
Playwrights on Campus' next performance, Insomnia and Sunglasses: An evening of ten-minute plays, will run Feb. 15-17 in the Nelson Fine Arts Center.
Reach the reporter at: nathaniel.lipka@asu.edu.
