Body of Work
IT’S SHOW TIME: FROM SCRATCH TO STAGE IN 24 HOURS
May 24, 2006, Ellen Fagg, The Salt Lake Tribune
Five plays are written, cast and performed for a live audience within 24 hours in the Plan-B Theatre Company exercise. By curtain Saturday night, the sold-out audience at the Rose Wagner Center still didn't know what was about to unfold on stage.
After all, the five plays they had paid to see didn't even exist 24 hours earlier, all created for Plan-B Theatre Company's "Slam," an annual event that's partly about artistic creativity, but mostly about the adrenaline-rush of a deadline. "Train wreck" was the term for creative failure tossed around during the day's rehearsals, and now everybody - actors, crew and curious audience members - was waiting. "If one were to happen, I wouldn't close my eyes," said theatergoer Jonathan Sizemore just before the lights went down in the Black Box Theatre.
What the audience didn't see was the panic-fueled creativity of the night and day leading up to the performance. Here's a behind the scenes peek:
8 p.m. Friday: "Slam" begins with a drawing. "Grab what moves you," Plan-B producing director Jerry Rapier instructs five local writers, who select from a bundle of papers printed with a title and a black-and-white image that will provide the projected backdrop for a play. "There will be no trading."
The collection of play-sparking images is as random as the drawing: rubberized skyscrapers bent sideways, a yacht crashing into the ocean, a ladder leading down into a Native American kiva, a massive steam engine pulling into a station, hanging slabs of meat.
Next step in creating 24-hour plays? Casting. Fifteen headshots of local actors, all women, dealt into five casts like a deck of cards.
Set? Two platforms, one slanted left-to-right.
Costumes? Whatever basic black clothing the actors wear.
Lighting? A blue nighttime look, a white daytime look, and three spotlights.
Props? None.
9 p.m.: Writers scatter to their computers to write a 10-minute play. Not an improvisational comedy sketch, but a short play with characters and a narrative arc. Overnight.
The event serves as a talent pool for the small theater company, and as an incubator for longer work; two plays on this season's docket, Aden Ross' "Amerika" and Eric Samuelson's upcoming "Miasma," grew out of "Slam" shorts. Yet while it's unfolding, "Slam" feels like a dramatic stunt, a high-wire act for writers, directors and actors, each paid $100 to produce theater in public without the cushion of time and tinkering. "We'll pay you right now," Rapier says, "but of course, we'll cancel your check if your play sucks."
9 a.m. Saturday: Writers return downtown to drop off scripts, plays now matched to directors through descending order of shoe sizes. Assigning subjects randomly, as well as changing props and sets from previous years, throws a curveball to returning writers and makes it more difficult to pre-write a play, says Cheryl Ann Cluff, company managing director.
Samuelson, a three-year "Slam" veteran, uses the hour drive to his Provo home to think about the title "Blood Pudding" and those slabs of meat, settling into "a comfortable state of complete panic," while playwright Calvin Haul cranks out his absurdest "Inside Out" on a laptop as he rides through the night on TRAX trains.
"I quit writing at 5:45 a.m.," says Kevin Doyle of "Big as a House," a seriocomedy about two women arguing over an ex-husband and the emotional custody of their 16-year-old daughter. "At 3 a.m., I thought it was hilarious. At 4 a.m., I thought it was the dumbest thing ever written."
9:30 a.m.: Rapier briefs actors on the day's schedule. "You should know there will be a train wreck. Pray to God it isn't you," he says, as he introduces a newspaper reporter, photographer and videographer. "If you have a meltdown, a freak-out or a hissy fit, do it in front of one of these people. You don't have the freedom to change the script, unless you panic. Word perfect is our goal."
As scripts are passed out, casts huddle to read and highlight lines, and Andra Harbold tackles her character, Prudence, as she lists the names of her 12 sons. "Memorization's going to suck," she laughs, as directors start talking about blocking stage movements and character development.
12:15 p.m.: "I want to stop everything in this room with these three lines," said Kyle Lewis, while directing Matthew Ivan Bennett's "Mesa Verde," a tightly focused emotional gem about a woman confronting her younger sister who has been diagnosed with cancer. "We're taking them through a tornado. Bam. Bam. Bam. Drive that sucker, push it, keep building it."
1 p.m.: "Man, time flies," says Teresa Sanderson as she commiserates with colleague Yolanda Wood. "I'm at the point. I want to know my lines," Wood says.
1:30 p.m.: Word spreads through the building that the cast of "Inside Out" is the first to go off-book (know their lines). "You guys didn't even look at these scripts, so you might as well chuck 'em," director Susan Dolan tells actors after their first run-through on the main stage.
3:30 p.m.: In the hallway during an Actors' Equity Union-mandated break, Anita Booher confesses she's too nervous to eat. "She's one of my actors," jokes director Kurt Proctor. "What am I doing wrong?"
Over food, actors talk about the range of settings in the created-on-demand plays, from a contemporary polygamy getaway story to a retail crew facing off while locked in a meat locker after a robbery. This year's all-male crew of playwrights wrote for a female cast, which includes 16-year-old Alta High student Sarah Rife and several college students, as well as local veterans. "I thought it would be all periods and boyfriends and 'women's issues,' " actor J.J. Neward laughs.
4:20 p.m.: Sanderson reveals her competitive anxiety. "Everybody else in my group is off-book but me," she says, while Lewis, who had been directing all day with the energy of a melodramatic baseball umpire, pumps it up another notch by switching from coffee to a Rock Star energy drink.
6:10 p.m.: Two hours before curtain comes a roundup of 30-minute tech rehearsals - "I was a deer-in-the-headlights during that run-through," says Lori Rees - while downstairs in the green room, Colleen Lewis seeks advice about cough syrup dosages.
8 p.m.: "Let the games begin," proclaims stage manager [sic] Cory Thorell as he takes his seat and the audience settles in to watch an hour's worth of short, irony-laced world premiere plays, infused during interludes with the antic energy of music from the Claymation video game "Neverhood."
9:15 p.m. With an improvised, ragged bow, "Slam" is all over but the after-party, with none of the promised train wrecks on display; rather, the five scenes unfolded with moments of emotional power and rarely an obviously dropped line.
The year's crop of plays proved uniformly better than in previous years, with more interesting, less obtuse stories, according to veteran Slam-goer Brad Walker, wife of actor Jayceen Craven. "These plays need to be like a really good wedding. Short and to the point."
A day-long adrenaline rush, and then it's time for the crash. "I feel like I've run a marathon," says Neward at the end of the night, after losing her "Slam" virginity as a first-wife character in Cort Brinkerhoff's "Ugly to the Bone." "This is extreme acting, like extreme sports."
