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The average play that you’d see in a theatre rehearses for two to three months and puts on performances for two weeks that strive for perfection. The average play in the Elizabethtown College 24-Hour Play Festival rehearses for one hour and performs one night only.

The Festival took place from 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 21 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22. During that time, students wrote, cast, staged, directed and performed six original plays.

I had the opportunity to follow both the event and its multi-talented members as they raced against the clock.

Friday night, festival participants congregated in the Brinser Lecture Room (BLR) in Steinman Hall, a multipurpose room if ever there was one.

The BLR housed playwrights typing lines and stage directions into Word documents as they tried to verbalize their visions and directors scrawling notes on every inch of whiteboard space.

One such director was senior theatre major Mika Cook, who debriefed me on the night’s events.

“Earlier tonight we separated who was acting, who was playwriting, who was directing, and then we had actors do a few auditions. Then the directors and playwrights got together and they cast the shows. And everyone here is currently writing plays,” Cook said.

“It’s kind of like the eye of the storm right now. We have to have our scripts to our directors by eight in the morning, and none of the madness that will happen tomorrow can happen without the scripts. So now myself and all of the other playwrights are just trying to get our concepts fleshed out and on paper,” junior theatre performance and technology major Erin Vago said.

“I’m hoping to be done by one or two, but the answer to ‘will I be sleeping tonight’ is I don’t know!” she continued. Such is the madness of the 24-Hour Play Festival.
Saturday afternoon, I checked back in with Cook and Vago and was amazed at how much the entire company had progressed within a few short hours. What were once ideas became fully fledged works of art.

“It’s really interesting because for both of the plays I’m directing we did readthroughs, and then we put them up with rough blocking on the stage, and then we would do it where we wouldn’t read stage directions and the actors would just go for it, and the actors are taking a lot of risks by not having the ample amount of time that they usually do,” Cook said. “Seeing it go from just a verbal thing to a shaky physical thing to something that looks and sounds like a play has been really cool to see.”

Vago echoed her sentiments.

“I’m very happy with what my director has done with the play that I wrote, and the actors took it above and beyond what I could have hoped for, which is great when you’ve had less time and are less confident in what you’ve written. Actually seeing it on stage and having the collaboration of everyone involved has really turned it into something different which is amazing,” she said.

After all of the rehearsals for each of the six plays concluded, everyone was rewarded for all their hard work with a pizza break. From then on, actors, directors and playwrights alike prepared themselves as best as they could for the night’s production.

“I’m not quite prepared yet, but I think I will be by the time we get to the show. I’ve got to be,” Vago said with a laugh. It’s a feeling that was across the board: determination and excitement with a dash of nerves for good measure.

“I have more excitement than nerves, I think,” Cook said. “I’m excited to see how everyone does! Everyone’s kind of in the same sleep deprived state but they’re all working really hard, and they’re on their A game, and I’m excited to see what they do! The waiting game commences.”

At 7:30 p.m. Saturday night, the 24-Hour Play Festival reached its end — and its beginning: the show. Containing six plays, the show lasted about an hour, but encompassed the work of many more.

Actors relied on “soft memorization” which allowed them to use their scripts on stage, rather than commit seven minutes of dialogue to memory in such a short amount of time. The performance wasn’t perfect; mistakes happened, pages got mixed up, cues were missed. But it was hard to tell that the scripts hadn’t been mapped out for weeks, the actors hadn’t spent days upon days analyzing their characters’ motivations and goals and that direction wasn’t given based on a few hours (or less) of rehearsal.

“Overall, I think tonight was a really big success! My play got a lot of laughs and the play that I directed turned out really great too. I’m really proud of myself and everyone who pulled this off,” Vago said, enthused after bows and flushed with excitement.

For Cook, the completion of the fest provided as much introspection as it did pride.

“I think that when people think about theatre they automatically either think of Broadway or some sort of professional theatre where it’s a mainstage show or a very well-known show, and no one ever thinks about this type of theatre,” she said. “I think that seeing theatre in a different way than it’s usually done is so important, especially with the state that theatre is in at Etown, and it was awesome for me to see, because even as a person that does theatre I can fall into that mindset. So this was really eye-opening for me.”

Vago had similar insights.

“I just love doing this so much, it gives people the opportunity to work on a show that isn’t mainstage, so it’s run by students, it’s done by students, there’s a lot of camaraderie, we’re all just a great big family. An opportunity to create art is never lost here with us,” she said.