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The Dartmouth
July 19, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

10-Minute Play Festival stripped to essentials

This term, the directors of Monday's 10-Minute Play Festival stripped the show down to its essential act: staged reading. Audiences had been used to seeing performances of student-written plays in which actors, with limited rehearsal time, fumbled about on stage. Many usually read from a script while struggling with motion, inflection and props.

The remarkably different structure, which Amber Porter '14 and Diane Chen '14 called "10-Minute Play Festival 2.0," is rather minimalist. On the night of the performance, Bentley Theater was dimly lit, with music stands holding scripts placed on the center of the floor. A single, powerful lamp was positioned on center stage. The theater itself is, of course, entirely black, devoid of costumes and props.

The directors' method of choosing of performers for Monday night's festival differed from that of years past, when actors had rehearsed for just one to three hours. Porter and Chen decided to do away with rehearsal entirely. On Monday night, volunteer actors were selected directly from the audience. In place of props and blocking, Porter read the stage directions aloud, and student playwrights sitting in the audience were encouraged to correct acting and make spontaneous amends to the play.

"That much rehearsal time was straddling an awkward fence," Chen said. "Some of these actors who had never acted before didn't feel like they had had enough rehearsal time. They were also working with props and with the script in one hand and flipping pages and trying to keep track of lines and blocking. It was overwhelming for the actors and got too busy to watch."

The changes provide "a real-time experiment," Chen said, adding that the changes will hopefully increase participation and create a more interactive environment.

Monday's show was intended to be "low-key exploration," Porter said. "In the winter, we're hoping to make it really big."

The plays ranged from heart-wrenching to zany, and the actors, despite never having read the script, expressed strong emotion immediately. With no props or directions to distract them, they focused fully on playing with the dialogue. Even in the minimalist setting, characters were vividly brought to life.

The show opened with the grave and powerful "Ash and Jayda," by Carene Mekertichyan '16, a first-time contributor to the festival. A revised scene taken from a play she had written during a playwriting class, it accentuated the struggles of an interracial couple in the face of a miscarriage.

"Honestly Alice," written by Haley Reicher '17, spotlighted a conversation between two girls, one of whom had recently come out as bisexual. The play expressed the character's pain as she searched for her mother's understanding.

"I liked that it was more about the words than about trying to be somewhat of a production," Reicher said of the festival. "The authors could hear their words without focus on any visuals, which is strange because plays are inherently visual."

"Craig and Guilda," a play by Eva Petzinger '15, lent a bit of comic relief. The play opened with a character uttering "Oh no!" In this piece, two neighbors, one who was convinced she was a psychic, exchanged a charming display of awkward tension.

"Lilies," also by Reicher, focused on the friendships of a high-school teen experiencing a Cotard delusion. The play was pleasantly disorienting and lapsed at times into faux-necrophilia before ending on an affirmation of life.

The darkest play of the evening was "Whispers" by Cristy Altamirano '15. A conversation between a mother and son took a gripping twist when it was revealed that the mother was dead.

The final play, also written by Altamirano, reversed the mood set by "Whispers." "Struggle" focused on two students taking Acting 1 at Dartmouth. The characters took turns acting for one another; the piece as, in essence, actin within acting. With playful musings on the philosophy of acting, the piece ended on the note "Acting is hard!" It was an appropriate end to the show.