Sleep-deprived and having done nothing but playwriting and rehearsal for the last 24 hours, participants of the 24 Hour Play Festival performed in front of a nearly full Lyceum Theatre in Tempe on Oct. 4.
"The 24 Hour Play Festival is a fast paced new work development process in which artists are put into teams, receive prompts, and then work together to create brand new ten minute plays all within a 24 hour period," Kristin Hunt, assistant director of theatre at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, said in a written statement.
The play festival — open to all majors — gave students a chance to exercise their creativity and take a step back from the traditional months-long process of putting together a full-length production.
Fizz Perez, a freshman studying theater, said the hardest part about working within the condensed time frame was keeping the team's energy up.
"We were energized. We were really ready to go into this," Fizz said. "We were laughing. We're having fun. But the second it hit 1 a.m., it's all gone."
In their productions, participants were required to include the word "commandeer," props provided to them and the nonverbal element of "snow angel."
In addition, they had to incorporate the line "Just because I'm not named after a creepy bird or an obscure vegetable doesn't make me any less of a man" from the play "Soul Magnet Beneath the Limestone."
Sticking to these rules, the students performed their short plays.
The festival consisted of five performances: "Killer Holiday," "Gary's Return," "Day 9178," "Murder at Party Martys" and "The Story of Milo."
"24 hours, it's the perfect amount of time, because you can dedicate yourself fully during that time," Christopher Bourque, a junior studying theater, said. "In our reality, memorization doesn't take too long, especially when it's spread out over a group."
Even with the right amount of time and the right skillset, the students in each performance group faced some rough patches along the way.
"We were in tech, so we had gone on that stage for the first time, and we were working with lights for the first time and sound effects for the first time and we really hadn't gotten our comedic flow down," Fletcher Whittington, a senior studying business and theater said. "We sort of had, we describe it as a locker room pep talk, afterwards, and we just practiced it as many times as we could."
At the conclusion of the event, the audience was asked to vote for their favorite performance. The winning team members would each receive a gold-painted top hat — a prop utilized throughout each of the performances.
As everyone gathered around talking amongst themselves and eating from the array of food, the winning performance of the festival was announced: "The Story of Milo."
"It went way better than I thought it would. We won," Aiden Rodriguez, a freshman studying theater and a member of the winning performance, said. "I'm going to be honest, we didn't even use all of our time as efficiently as we could have, but we made a good product."
Even though the participants had been awake for over 24 hours, Whittington said that being in the festival was a fantastic opportunity.
"If you're really pumped on something, it can keep you up past when you think your limits are," Whittington said. "I would love to do something like this again."
Edited by Kasturi Tale, Sophia Braccio and Ellis Preston.
Reach the reporter at jhamil33@asu.edu.
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Jen Hamilton is a freshman studying Journalism and Mass Communications with a minor in Political Science. This is their first semester with The State Press.
