As the Stage Turns

If you weren't able to make it to last Saturday's 24 Hour Play Festival here at UPT, you missed a very unique and enjoyable experience. If you didn't already know about the 24 Hour Play Festival, seven teams from Lake and Mendocino Counties (the group from Sonoma County canceled due to smoke) wrote, memorized, and produced their own short plays (see previous entry for more information).

This year's festival was the best yet, with all teams coming together to make a really enjoyable evening.

But I wanted to give you, dear reader, an inside look at what it takes to do something like this. You see, I was the writer/director for my team--Team UPT.

REPRESENT!

My team was certainly filled with quality actors. I had KC Dill, Nathan Bell, David Strock, and my wife Shelley. These are the kinds of people who could be working professionally as actors under the right circumstances...and by "right circumstances" I don't mean incriminating photos of the management at Paramount. I mean talent.

I felt good going into it as a writer/director this year. I had a full team and could concentrate purely on the writing and directing, whereas last year I lost an actor right before the show and had to fill in myself in addition to doing the writing and directing. (I wanted no fewer than four actors, since I didn't want to burden three actors with memorizing all the lines for the entire show. Trust me, there's a big difference in the number of lines four actors have to memorize as opposed to three.)

The character I ended up playing wore a fur-lined jockstrap, panties, and a nice pair of brown wingtips with long black socks. I learned that when you are writing a play that you're in, you can be pretty hard on yourself. I would never have written such a thing unless I knew I had a fool such as myself to play the part. Of course, Erica Cooperrider still gets points for playing my scantily-clad counterpart. Go Erica!

So this year I was feeling good. I'd done this festival twice before, I knew what to expect. I had complete control over every aspect of the production (which is good because I am a control freak). They even randomly selected my theme for this year's show!

"Death."

Love it! So I went home and sat down in front of a blank screen and felt no pressure. I had ideas. I was set. But there was a problem. Earlier that morning I'd gathered some helpers and drove up to Greenfield Ranch to help a friend clear brush from around her fire-threatened house. We worked hard for about three hours and the smoke was thick, making breathing difficult at times. By the time I was finished I wasn't exhausted, but the smoke and the manual labor had significantly drained my battery. And this is the first year I've helped to run the festival, so after I finished clearing brush I headed into UPT where I worked up until the teams started arriving.

As I sat before the screen, the ideas kept swirling about in my head and I found myself getting sleepier, and sleepier. Then Ten o'clock approached and I knew I was in trouble. Writing these plays takes at least four hours and I hadn't even started yet.

I rarely get to bed before 2am usually, so when I found myself wanting to nod off at 10...well, oh dear. But I battled it. I played loud music in my headphones for a while but that wasn't exactly conducive to the creative process. I stepped outside for a breath of cold air, but the smoke had crept down from the hills to rest itself in my back yard, sending me back into my muggy home.

So I stayed there, bouncing ideas around with Shelley...just waiting for inspiration to take me by the nose and lead me to success. But I kept falling asleep. I hadn't written one word yet and I kept wanting to fall asleep. So I did what anyone else would do in that situation. I grabbed a Ouija board and played with that for about an hour with our friend Kelly.

My father had recently discovered the Ouija board along with a bunch of my belongings in his basement and it had been years since I'd used it. It worked like a charm. Within a couple minutes I was communicating with the spirit realm. And NO long distance charges applied.

Anyway, we finished with that, and I started to have an inkling of an idea on how to incorporate the use of a Ouija board into a show with the theme of death. I started to wonder what it must be like for the spirit...just floating around somewhere...waiting...hoping someone somewhere will whip out a Ouija board so they can chat. There was something to this line of thought. It felt right. I was pretty sure this was the direction I wanted to move in.

But just having a vague idea does not help the fact that the computer screen was still completely blank. I started to panic. This had never happened before. I was always able to go to the well. It was always full. But I was so sleepy I couldn't think straight.

Then I fell asleep at 11. For 45 minutes. I had an alarm set. I woke up and started writing...hoping the 45 minute power-nap might invigorate me. And it did...just enough to give me the energy to write the first few lines. I wasn't sure where the story was headed, but I saw a spirit hanging around a Ouija board session in which a guy who was passing himself off as a psychic was trying to seduce his not-so-bright date through his Ouija board.

This is all very well, but what would the story be? It can't just be a scene. When you're writing a one-act play (even if it's no longer than 13 minutes) you still have to have a beginning, middle, and and end. It still needs to be a real story. It's not a sketch comedy show like Saturday Night Live (which seems to revel in finding one joke and repeating it over and over and over and over again until the next commercial break).

It was now 2am. I decided I needed to take a drive. So I headed over to the USA Mini-Mart on North State Street where I bought very bad things. Little chocolate donuts, a fruit pie, a bag of sunflower seeds, and a giant cup of toffee-flavored coffee. Enough sugar and caffeine and salt and chemicals to make my heart jump...in anticipation. On the drive the rest of the story started to fall into place. It was working. The coffee was starting to take hold. The sugar was making my fingers twitch but that didn't matter because soon they were striking the keyboard.

I wrote until the sun came up. I finished just before 7am. I had pulled an "all-nighter". Something I hadn't done in well over a decade. And when I had finished I was pleased. My play, "Whee! Gee!" made sense. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And I thought it was pretty funny. But would anyone else like it?

Next time...DIRECTING in a DAY!