Although many associate the theater with weeks of intense and sometimes tedious rehearsal and preparation, the Ten-Minute Play Festival, being held tonight at 8 p.m. in the Hopkins Center's Bentley Theater, will demonstrate how these low-stress and low-commitment performances can also prove extremely impressive to watch.
After just one or two rehearsals per play over three days, Dartmouth's theater department will present the festival, to highlight five short plays completely written, directed and performed by Dartmouth students. The festival has been an annual event since 2002, the theater department has put it on every term in recent years, according to festival director Serena Nelson '12. Although the festival usually has two directors who share the responsibility of organizing and producing the plays, Nelson is this term's only director.
Nelson, a theater major, has found time to direct the plays even as she completes her culminating experience. She said she is enthusiastic about the festival's return after its Winter term hiatus, as the department was committed to putting on "Hairspray" and could not host the festival.
"[The plays] are all really funny, and I feel like they are really easy for people to connect with," Nelson said. "Sometimes we get plays that are difficult to connect with, so this term we have a good bunch that are also fun for the actors and playwrights."
The plays have been met with enthusiasm from both people participating in the performances as well as their audiences, Nelson said. The five plays featured Wednesday night include "Click" by Elizabeth Southwell '15, "It's the Little Things" by Laura Neill '13, "Dear Diary" by Katherine Kendig '12, "Teenage Scheme" by Jaymes Sanchez '13 and "Vena Cava" by Maria Carolan '12. Southwell, who was involved with the Ten-Minute Play Festival in the fall, is also acting in "Dear Diary."
"Ten-minute plays are always so much fun because you have no idea what you're going to get," Southwell said. "I'm really excited to see how it turns out, and I'm definitely very anxious to see how mine turns out."
The festival features actors who sign up without any auditions on a completely volunteer basis, according to Nelson.
"I cast blindly based on how many females or males I need for specific plays," Nelson said. "There are 11 actors this term."
"Click" is one of the strongest plays to be performed this year and should be very relatable for the audience, according to Nelson.
"It's about a girl who's trying to find herself in the midst of family issues," Nelson said. "It's really challenging because there's an imaginary character called the Cat' that serves as her subconscious."
The maturity and depth of Southwell's play should not come as a surprise to the theater department and audience alike just last year, Southwell penned a play performed by professional actors through a program run by Boston University.
"It was a pretty surreal experience," Southwell said. "There's something that's really freeing about writing [a play] and putting it outside of myself, being able to look at it more objectively and look at it in a different way."
Although Southwell is both acting in a play and seeing her own performed, she also gets to watch the others and see what her peers were able to accomplish in such a short time.
"I think the pace of the show is going to be very different," she said. "It's going to be punctuated by shorter ones. The one I'm in can't be longer than five minutes."
"It's the Little Things" is a comedy set in a New York City Starbucks.
"It's about a guy who's sitting in a Starbucks when a lady comes in and tries to force him to give her his newspaper," Nelson said. "She keeps telling lies until he eventually believes her and gives her the paper. It's a really silly one."
Although the festival will present all of the plays in succession, they were all written for very different reasons and under a variety of circumstances.
"Some of them have written their plays for one of the playwriting classes that professor Joe Sutton teaches," Nelson said. "Others may have just written them for fun."
Most Ten-Minute Play Festivals run around 80 minutes in total, but because there is only one director and five plays, this term's will be most likely be performed in under an hour. Despite its short runtime, students participating in the festival have experienced some of the typical pre-performance anxiety, according to Nelson.
"It's sometimes a time crunch, and nothing was confirmed until late last week, so I had to schedule it all," Nelson said. "It wasn't too bad this time."
