Boobies!

Last night I attended a free theatre project on campus, and it was dismal. The rules of the game were simple: playwrights were given a subject the night before and had to write a through the night (ostensibly), get actors the next day, rehearse, and presto, the 24 Hour Theatre Project.

Here's a couple of areas where they went askew:

1. One page of text goes a LONG way. A seven page script is about 10-15 minutes. THAT'S ENOUGH!

2. You have 24 hours to write something. Unless your John Fucking Patrick Shanley, make it funny, make it entertaining, and DON'T TAKE YOURSELF SO SERIOUSLY.

3. Scene changes must be simple and/or non-existent. Turning off the lights in a coffee shop "open mic" setup confuses the audience. It's time-consuming and gives a false (hopeful?) impression that your skit finished.

4. Be kind to your actors: treat the pieces as staged readings and let them hold the scripts. There's nothing like watching "popular frat guy #32" try to use his Pabst-riddled-brain to find his next line. It's undue pressure, and it bogs down the event.

5. You go to a predominately white, upper-middle class, homogenized and prudish university in Crazy Town, Oregon. Try to write about what you know. Not all "polyamorous" couples are hippie space cadets, nor are all Jamba Juice employees unintelligent assholes, etc, etc. Before you decide to make gross judgments and class distinctions, remember that you are just a clueless college student who gets everything paid for by your parents.

See, it hurts, right?

I leave you with the Midwest Teen Sex Show and one of my favorite topics: boobies. This episode no doubt was written in about 24 hours by, no doubt, a team of people. Of course they have a minimal budget and a joie de vivre towards what they are doing, and it shows me that we young (*ahem*) people still can create something that might have the faint traces of a narrative and/or thematic strain.