The 10-minute play is a relative newcomer to the contemporary stage, but it has grown like ivy. Numerous festivals, how-to courses and script collections are devoted to the mini-genre, which has also spawned a particularly addictive variant.
The format’s attraction is that it gets playmaking back to basics. A 10-minute play can contain a complete dramatic arc in a quickly achieved bite-size package. It’s appealing to playwrights because they can write one in a few hours, and to producers, actors and directors because they can stage it almost as quickly. These qualities have produced an allied form, the play-in-a-day festival, in which short plays are written, rehearsed and performed in the space of 24 hours. It’s a kind of art-as-triathlon that’s nail-bitingly fun for participants and audiences alike.
Two versions of this instant-theater phenomenon have established themselves in the Valley. Play-in-a-Day at UMass, begun in 2003, returns next month after a two-year hiatus. In Northampton, the 24-Hour Theater Project, founded by Tanyss Martula in 2002, has another outing next fall. But first, she and co-producer Elaine Hoffman are ringing yet another change on the petite-play concept.
This weekend and next, they’re presenting Back to Back, an evening of three short plays, each performed twice, with different casts and staged by different directors (and with more than a day to rehearse). The idea is to see how distinct concepts and directing styles can shape a given script and an audience’s experience of it. I’m one of the six directors participating in this unique experiment.
The production is in Window, the storefront gallery in Northampton where the A.P.E. art center moved when Thorne’s third floor was lost as an arts venue. The pieces are performed with minimal props and sets in an intimate, semi-round seating configuration.
I’m directing Dead Duck, by Eric Henry Sanders, which was written for 2008’s 24-Hour Theater Project. Sheila Siragusa is staging the other version of it. The Main Event, by Tanyss Martula, gets separate treatments by Toby Bercovici and Kim Mancuso; and Frank Borrelli and Julian Olf are handling a scene from Rose Martula’s full-length play Brooklyn. There are 18 actors altogether in the six casts, making it a scene-by-scene epic.
Each pair of directors has had to keep ideas secret and rehearsals separate to keep the process pure, but I dropped in on rehearsals for The Main Event to compare those two directors’ approaches, and they do appear quite different.
The piece is set in the audience section of an unspecified venue for an unspecified event. Kim Mancuso’s version uses a middle-aged cast and two steel benches, while Toby Bercovici’s is acted by college students on a triangle of stools, and each production imagines a different occasion.
Dead Duck takes place in a farmhouse and is triggered by bad news about a prize pet, as implied by the title. It could be played as a grim drama or a black comedy. My cast tends toward the latter, and as of this writing I have no idea what my opposite number, Sheila Siragusa, is doing with our mutual play. We get to see each other’s work just before opening night.
Back to Back: April 22-24 and 29-May 1, A.P.E. at Window, 126 Main St., Northampton, (413) 586-5553.
Play-in-a-Day: May 8, Rand Theater, UMass-Amherst, (413) 545-2511 or (800) 999-UMAS.
