After Action Report: Playwriting

I am exhausted. Maybe because I’m getting old (you know, now that I’m officially in my third decade), maybe because I haven’t been eating terribly healthy the last few days, or maybe because my sleep deficit has reached a recent extreme. Most likely, it’s all of the above.

The 24 Hour New Play Festival was fantastic.

Friday evening, I raced from work to the grange hall hosting the event, and for which the event is a fundraiser. (Because how else does rural Maine do things but through grange halls?)

We had four adult teams and two youth teams. Everyone arrived knowing their roles, and names were drawn out of a fish bowl. First the writers, determining order of performance, then directors, then actors.

After a few ice breakers, we broke into our teams for improv games to give writers and directors a feel for the actors’ range, and maybe help kick off a few concepts for the plays. In one of the games with my team, a parking garage was mentioned. My brain immediately decided that the parking garage needed a monster.

So that’s what I wrote. I got home at 10:30pm and crawled into bed around 1:30am, to get up at 6 to look it over before I sent it out. It was creatively titled The Monster in the Parking Garage.

Some of the language was pure vanity on my part and should have been cut, but it was little better than a rough draft, so I’m not too bothered by that. The actors did a phenomenal job creating characters, and the director was hands-down awesome. (Currently, I’m considering polishing it a tiny bit and putting it up on my sadly neglected personal blog because it was fun to write and I like to share these things. What do you think? Yes? No?)

Performances started at 7pm Saturday night. We had a decent audience turnout, all forgiving of the scripts onstage. The directors introduced each show, than at the end all the writers came up for a talk-back where the audience asked questions and made (constructive) comments.

It was a fantastic experience – terrifying, but fantastic – and I would definitely do it again.

Just not right away.

The post After Action Report: Playwriting appeared first on Anxiety Ink.