Bare Bodkin hosts first ever marathon theater festival

To put on a play takes weeks of rehearsal and meticulous planning, right? Well, not necessarily: last Friday night, I gathered in Alumni Lounge with 16 other people to begin the Bare Bodkin Theater Company's first ever 24 Hour Theater Festival.

Starting with only our loopy imaginations on Friday night, we participants were then divided into three groups each having to create a 22 minute play to perform the following evening. It was as crazy as it sounds.

The only requirement, besides the time limit, was that all three plays would have the same opening line that was picked out of a hat filled with suggested lines.

After dividing up and receiving the opening quote of "Don't Provoke me. Don't you dare provoke me," the groups then went off to various locations around campus to begin writing their scripts. At first this seemed like a tremendously daunting task for my group as we sat around my living room staring at blank notebooks. However, as soon as some ideas were thrown on the table, we eventually decided on a concept and forged ahead bravely into the night.

In accordance with the rules of the "24-Hour Theater Festival," by noon the next day, each group had to turn in a finished script with technical cues. After this deadline, neither additional lighting nor sound elements could be added to any show. Other than that, anything could be changed right up until the performance at 9pm on Saturday when the groups would present their final product.

For our group, the most difficult aspect of the experience was incorporating everybody's ideas while at the same time not devoting too much effort on one section of the script. As the night wore on and the pressure to finish became stronger, our beds seemed more and more enticing. Fellow group member senior Jenn Henriksson commented that the hardest part of the evening was, "staying awake at 4am."

Other groups encountered similar problems. Junior drama major Dan Balkin said that his group had trouble tying the show together and that "with more time we could have gotten the concept to make more sense to the audience".

However, the intense process proved to be both wacky and fun. All three groups chose to write comedies, so the processes mainly consisted of churning out funny situations. One of the more astounding aspects of the 24-Hour Theater Festival was that through the element of collaboration, the melding of everyone's ideas resulted in an end product that was better than anyone could have written on their own.

The plays were judged on Saturday night by a panel of celebrity judges including: Tyler Duckworth, self-proclaimed "homecoming queen;" Amber Madison, Tufts Daily sex columnist and cast member of MTV's The Real Cancun; Barbara Grossman, chair of the Department of Drama and Dance; Virginia Johnson, costume design faculty; and Allan Rice, director of Cheap Sox.

The celebrity panel judged the three plays by criteria such as originality and artistic merit and declared a winner at the end of the evening. However, the real winner of the night was the Bare Bodkin, for successfully getting both cast and audience members to celebrate theatre at its grassroots.

In spite of the participants' fatigue, the end results were outstanding, mostly because of the amount of energy generated by an energetic and enthusiastic audience. The unrehearsed nature of the shows also gave it an innate excitement The performance really illustrated that one of the key ingredients for successful theater is spontaneity, freshness, and collaboration. Each bitingly witty play had a unique style and concept.

The Bare Bodkin Theater Company hopes to continue the precedent it set this semester and make the 24-Hour Theater Festival one of its trademark events.

As Balkin put it, "it was bare bodtastic!"