September 2, 2008

The 24-Hour Play Fest: The Drama Olympics

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The physical requirements of a thespian’s life can be gritty and grueling, so it’s no coincidence that actors, like athletes, often stretch before a performance. Last Tuesday in the Schwartz Center, two teams of actors, playwrights and directors came together for the second 24-hour Playfest, an event that’s both a mad-dash and marathon. After everyone congregated to decide on a theme (this year’s was love stories inspired by pop songs), the playwrights pulled an all-nighter, typing out an entire 20-minute script. As soon as they finished, the director and actors began memorizing lines, blocking scenes and building characters before showtime, which occurred exactly 24-hours after the cast assembled the night before.
The first play, Given the Premise That I Can Send One Scene a Week to Your Dreaming Sleep, written by alumna Jessi Pollack ’07, poked fun at hyper-masculinity with inspiration from the song “No Sissies” by Hawksley Workman. On a prototypically dark and stormy night, two girlfriends gab about love, depression and experiments with dubious substances. Before long, they begin recounting their failed relationships — one girl (played by Mackenzie Cooley ’12) obsesses over a conceited womanizer who keeps attempting to pop his flaccid collar; the other girl (played by Sarah Dalton ’11) dates a wannabe rap-star who affects a gangsta attitude at odds with his middle-class, suburban roots. Myles Rowland ’11 deftly switches back and forth between these two benighted boyfriend roles, literally changing his character at the drop of a hat.
In the middle of the play, someone seems to push rewind, creating a comedic sequence in which the characters speed through the entire play backwards. Director Katherine Karaus ’10 milks a lot of laughs out of those sort of slapstick moments, which are interspersed throughout.
When the girls go through their paces again, their simultaneous dates end with the girlfriends themselves hooking-up; after airing all their dirty laundry, each girl’s pretty boy seems as expendable as a smelly, solitary sock.
The second play, written by Amanda Idoko ’10, The Long and Winding Road Back to His Home, investigates what it means to say “home is where the heart is” in a society where so many people are itinerant or live in what seem to be anonymous boxes. A lonely office worker (Zachary Davis ’12) comes home to find “a crazy lady” (Sonja Gabrielsen ’11) squatting in his apartment.
When she refuses to leave, claiming that she realized the apartment was the inspiration for her best painting, he becomes increasingly irate. Nonetheless, over the course of her stalkerish visits, he slowly discovers a sense of place that he never before had in his cold, cubical world. One day, he tries to convince a friend (played by X Li ’11) to see the cracks in his wall as a metaphor for the paths in life. The friend just sees a blank wall, a bit annoyed that he was interrupted from drinking and watching the game.
When the “crazy lady” reappears, the office worker tries to ask her out, despite the fact that she had already decided to move away. The dramatic sentiment is effectively understated, and the friend’s flabbergasted protests add an element of gentle satire without which the love story may have been too sappy. As it is, however, director Lauren VanDyke ’10 manages to portray a genuine change of heart in both characters.
Danny Munguia ’11 and Brandon Imp ’10 acted as stage managers for both plays, which were geared to introduce freshmen and transfer students to the theater scene at Cornell, with experienced thespians helping to pass the torch to a new generation of students interested in drama. Imp, who also coordinated the festival, said, “The best thing about a 24-Hour Playfest is that nothing you do is wrong; it is the ultimate trial-and-error.” In this case, though, both plays not only got across the finish line, but were also successful, captivating dramas in their own right.