The weekend before Thanksgiving, the seventh edition of the 24-Hour Theater Project was staged in Northampton. In the space of one day, six plays were written, rehearsed and performed. The Advocate‘s theater critic, Chris Rohmann, was one of the directors.
Friday, 6 p.m.
About 20 of us are gathered in one of the galleries of the Northampton Center for the Arts: playwrights, directors, actors and technical crew. We’re there for the launch of this year’s 24-hour seat-of-the-pants, skin-of-the-teeth (choose your idiom) adventure in instant playmaking. Tonight, six playwrights will each leave with the information they’ll use to create, overnight, a 10-minute play. Tomorrow, those new works will be rehearsed on the run and performed that night—twice.
I’ve participated in this almost-annual Northampton event twice before and twice in the UMass Theater Department’s version. It’s intense, stressful, scary, thrilling, humbling and addictive. I’m feeling both pumped and more than a little apprehensive.
Tonight is “the draw,” the lottery that decides the cast for each play, overseen by the project’s producer and self-described Randomness Coordinator, Elaine Hoffman. Each playwright draws, at random, the number of actors they’ll have to work with—three or four—then envelopes containing the descriptions (no names) of the 21 actors: appearance, experience, particular strengths, special skills. Using this information, each dramatist will craft a play. This, of course, is completely backward from standard play production. Instead of writing a play and then casting the parts, each playwright is presented with a cast for whom to write a play.
Finally, the two dramaturgs, John Broglio and Susan Cocalis, both veterans of the project, announce the “trigger line”—a phrase which must be included somewhere in each play. This year it’s “hanging in the closet,” which immediately evokes images of bedroom corpses. In the end, though, none of the playwrights will go in that direction. Instead, this year’s plays will turn out to be by far the raunchiest crop in the project’s history.
Friday, 7 p.m.
The playwrights depart to hit the keyboard and the coffee, and the directors adjourn to check out the Center’s auditorium, a big, high-ceilinged former ballroom, where tomorrow’s performance will take place. We discuss options for setting up the stage space and seating configuration to maximize intimacy and minimize echo. Overnight tonight, while the playwrights are creating, technical director Rachel Putnam will hang and focus the lights, so the decisions we make now are what we’ll live with tomorrow. We decide on a fairly compact playing space backed by cloth flats, with the audience seated around it in a half-horseshoe.
Twenty-four hours till curtain-up.
Saturday, 7:15 a.m.
Seven what? This is not an hour that theater people are usually subjected to. But we have less than 12 hours to take a brand-new play from page to stage.
In the downstairs lobby of the Smith College theater building, the company mingles over coffee and bagels as, one by one, the bleary-eyed playwrights come in with their creations hot off the printer. Each play—again, at random—is assigned to a director. I draw the one written by Rose Martula, daughter of the project’s founder, Tanyss Martula, who recently moved to the Valley from L.A. The title, Driving Miss Crazy, looks promising. I start reading, and within 30 seconds I’m laughing out loud.
It’s a three-hander that takes place entirely in a car being driven from the suburbs into progressively sketchier neighborhoods. It’s a screwball farce about a dysfunctional family, but with a somber twist in its tail, as the family outing turns out to be a quest for drugs. The challenge will be finding ways to make the physically static, car-bound scene dynamic. As I read, I’m already thinking of bits of “business” and visual gags.
The characters are Dougie (“a chain-wearing Guido-type,” according to the script), his cousin Betsy (“wide-eyed cheerleader-type”) and Dougie’s “housewife-ish” mother, a Cheetoh-munching dingbat. I’ve seen all three actors on stage previously and have a sense of their style and range—a plus when you’re working against the clock. Patricia Mew, who plays the mother, has been involved in the 24-Hour Theater Project from its beginning; Rachel Garbus, a Northamptonite who’s now attending Smith, is Betsy; and Dougie is Troy Pepicelli, a UMass student from Revere.
Saturday, 8:30 a.m.
I’m feeling good as we head upstairs to our rehearsal room. In this project, a lot depends on the luck of the draw, and I’ve lucked out with a terrific script and strong cast. Our stage manager is Jaz Tupelo, who was recruited to participate by Bill Dwight, another 24-Hour regular who’s in one of the other plays. She confides to me that it’s been some 15 years since she’s done something like this (she’s a radio producer by profession), but she’s up for it and already taking notes on the props we’ll need.
Seated around a table, we read through the play, the first time the actors have seen the script. They’re tickled by the humor and the zany characters. Troy tells us, “Dougie’s like half my family.” With today’s compressed schedule, there’s not a lot of time for digging into characters’ motivations and back stories, work the actors would do in a more humane rehearsal period. But we talk a bit about the family relationships and the scene’s overall arc—the emotional journey each character takes during the play’s vehicular one.
Meanwhile, Rose is making some cuts in the script to tighten things up. Usually the playwrights go home to bed after the first read-through, but Rose, astonishingly, reports that she’d finished writing by 11 last night and got some sleep, so she’s with us for most of the morning.
We set up the conventional car stand-ins, two pairs of chairs (we’ll have short benches for the performance). The very first line begs for some action: “Je-sus fuck! We’re gonna die!” yells the old lady (everybody in this show is foul-mouthed) and Dougie adds, “Slow down!” I suggest we start with a sharp 90-degree turn, indicated by Rachel wildly turning the (mimed) steering wheel and everyone leaning over to one side.
About half an hour in, the two dramaturgs show up. They’re sitting in on parts of each rehearsal to gauge the tone, in preparation to set the running order, and to make suggestions. After watching a bit, they make two. The script says Dougie and Betsy are in the front seat, but I’m worried about Pat being seen in the back, so I’ve put Troy in the backseat as well. The John and Susan point out that most of the interactions are between Dougie and Betsy, with the mother kibitzing from the back, and say they can arrange for a six-inch platform to raise Pat behind the others for sightline purposes.
They also point out that if a car turns left your body leans right—the opposite of what we’ve been doing. We accept the seating suggestion, which really does work much better, but after trying the more accurate leaning posture a few times, we revert to the original because it more clearly indicates the direction of the turn to the audience.
Saturday, 10:15 a.m.
Pee and snack break. Rose tells me she usually feels more comfortable writing men’s parts, and “I kind of panicked when I saw I had two women to write for.” But she picked up on the descriptions on the actor forms—that Pat is good at being “goofy” and Rachel “looks like a cheerleader-type”—as well as Troy’s preference for comic roles. She says she set the scene in a car because there’s a car scene in the full-length play she’s currently working on, “and I wanted to explore that form some more.”
She also confesses that when she finished the first draft she realized she’d forgotten to include the trigger line, so she kind of stuck it in at the end. As Dougie is getting out of the car to make the drug score, he remembers he has Betsy’s cigarettes in his pocket. “They were in your coat, hanging in the closet.”
Back to work.
In the course of the journey, Dougie tells a long, funny story about eating ricotta, which gets progressively nauseating, and Betsy gets progressively anxious for a cigarette. Both of these invite physical business. We work up a sequence in which Betsy gets more and more grossed out by Dougie’s narrative (“Okay, this is now officially disgusting”) and finally pulls the car over and pukes out the door; and another in which Betsy, while driving, rummages through her handbag in search of cigs, handing things to Dougie as she pulls them out.
What can she give him that will be funny and that he can do something with? How about birth-control pills, which he recognizes only as some kind of pharmaceuticals and starts popping? No, too hard to clearly indicate what they are. We settle on a large prescription bottle, and Jaz suggests a bottle of Jack Daniels, which Dougie can also sample.
This is my favorite part of a rehearsal process. Everyone is throwing out ideas, we’re laughing about them, trying them out, rejecting ones that don’t work and honing those that do. Troy and Rachel, though they’ve never met before today, are working together beautifully, both of them natural comics, smart and spontaneous, and Pat is adding a wacky counterpoint from the backseat: “My god, are those gangbangers? They’ve all got nice shoes.”
As we work through the script, Jaz has been making notes on prop and costume needs: pill and Jack bottles, bag of Cheetohs, gold chain for Troy. She’s also keeping track of where we need sound effects for the car: swerves, braking, peeling out. Eventually I realize that will be much too complicated for this low-tech process, and scratch them all. But I also want to have a hip-hop beat in the background as the car moves into the ghetto where the drug deal will happen.
Saturday, 2 p.m.
After a lunch break, we reassemble for a technical rehearsal at the Center for the Arts. The benches and platform that will represent our car are there—a cadre of prop and costume runners have been busy all morning—and the prop bottles and snack bag are on their way, but the search is still on for Dougie’s gold chain. For the hip-hop track, the closest thing Rachel Putnam has on her laptop is the latest Girl Talk release. That doesn’t work—too melodic and un-macho—but someone’s got Jay-Z’s “Run This Town” on their iPod. Perfect.
Sitting in the house, John Hadden, director of Peter Shelburne’s play, The Storage Unit, whispers, “I love tech. Flesh and blood mixed with machinery. Gives me a kick.” As we run our show, the other directors and crew are laughing. Good sign.
After each show completes its tech, the actors scatter. I encounter them pacing the halls muttering to themselves and making dramatic facial expressions. If you didn’t know the context, you’d think they were a bit unhinged. I pass by two actors chatting together. One of them, Duncan Grossman, is saying, “Hey, were you going to go to that party tonight? There’s going to be live music. The drummer is awesome.” It’s not till Abby Haas-Hooven answers him, “Just keep opening boxes, George,” that I realize they’re running lines from their show.
Mark Gaudet, the director of Jeffrey Stingerstein’s script, Dinner with Polly and Peter, observes that the process is “a bit chaotic, but it works on everybody’s good will. The stopwatch starts and you just try to mine the script the best you can.”
Court Dorsey, who’s playing a crusty custodian in The Storage Unit, tells me he’s feeling good, but “I’d feel better if I had these lines down cold.” The actors have been told they can carry their scripts on stage—no one expects instant memorization—but some, amazingly, are off book. One of them is Rachel Garbus, who says the play is short enough that by the time she’s said her lines over and over in rehearsal she just knows them. That makes me a little nervous, but I’ll trust her, and having her hands free makes it much easier for her to do the driving motions and other bits of business.
Saturday, 4 p.m.
A buffet has been laid out in the adjoining gallery, and everyone digs in. Most of the directors are giving last-minute notes to their actors. I’m not. I feel the show is in pretty good shape, I’m confident of my cast, and I want to give them a chance to relax and/or run through their parts on their own. But am I overlooking something? Probably too late now if so. I am worried, though, about Dougie’s chain, which still hasn’t arrived.
After the dinner break, the production stage manager, Tina Padgett, calls the whole company together. There are almost 60 of us in onstage and backstage roles—an army that set up camp just this morning and will demobilize later tonight. “We’re going to do a cue-to-cue through the show,” she announces—just the action surrounding sound and light cues, not the complete plays. Tonight’s opening performance will be the first time the show is run straight through.
“The stage managers will bring the props and set pieces on and off between the scenes,” Tina advises the actors. “Unless you’ve been specifically told to bring something on with you, don’t do it. Just act.” She adds. “And when you’re backstage, don’t sit on anything that is a prop. We have very fast changes and you can’t be in the way.”
After the cue-to-cue, it’s wait and worry for everyone. I’m feeling a little light-headed from too much coffee and Costco brownies from dinner. Just as Tina calls “Half hour, the house is now open,” Dougie’s gold chain arrives.
Saturday, 7 p.m.
It’s curtain time, and away we go. I’m standing at the back of the house (the show is sold out) and now I’m nervous. The song that’s going through my head isn’t Irving Berlin’s optimistic “There’s No Business Like Show Business” but Cole Porter’s hymn to frantic rehearsals and first-night nerves: “Another pain where the ulcers grow, another op’nin’ of another show.”
The first of tonight’s six world premieres, The Storage Unit, is followed by Meryl Cohn’s The Cure, directed by Tim Cochran. And here’s where the coincidental through-line of raunchiness in this year’s plays begins. In it, a gay man (Mark Teffer) is being “cured” of his homosexuality via sex therapy with a woman (Moe McElligott) who proudly announces that he’s reached Stage Four, cunnilingus, and is ready for Stage Five: enjoying it.
Next up is our Driving Miss Crazy, which contains more blue language than all the other plays put together, then Chronic Pain, by Cynthia Kennison, a sketch about a couple of rock musicians whose airplane has crashed in a farmyard. Then it’s right back to raunchy. The very first line in Dinner with Polly and Peter is spoken to Bill Dwight by Dee Waterman, in real life a pillar of her community: “Peter, I don’t understand why you won’t go down on me.” What are the chances “dining at the Y” would figure prominently in two of these random plays?
The last one, Tobias K. Davis’s Arts and Sciences, directed by Ellen Morbyrne, only hints at sexual adventures, as Kimaya Diggs, Anna Richardson and Linda Tardiff enact a lesbian love triangle under the nose of their high school teacher (Manfred Melcher). At the end, all 21 performers, plus the directors, playwrights and stage managers, fill the stage for a group bow to the welcome sound of enthusiastic applause.
Saturday, 10:30 p.m.
The second performance of our double feature was smoother than the first, as the actors settled more confidently into their parts, and the audience was even more responsive. And no-script Rachel only missed one cue. Now there are hugs and congratulations backstage as the company unwinds with celebratory wine and a big cake proclaiming “Congratulations—You Did It!” There are comparisons of the two performances, dissections of finer points, and some second guesses: “If we’d had longer, we could have&” But a lot of what makes this thing work, for cast and audience alike, is the high-pressure adrenalized energy level.
I’m headed home, bone-weary but giddy with the day’s rush of excitement and a happy feeling of accomplishment—or is it simply the relief of pulling it off without disaster?
