Stephen's hosts 24 Hour Play Challenge
Participants wrote and performed plays on the topic of energy.
Nov. 18, 2008
It was 10 minutes before the 24 Hour Play Challenge was to start and actor Curt Wohleber frantically studied his script.
Wohleber has been a participant in community theatre for nearly six years and decided it was time try his hand in the event, which was put together by Stephens College sophomores Colleen Grate and Rachel Ellersieck, and was held for the second year in a row.
On Saturday night, Ellersieck and Grate gathered four groups of writers, directors and actors and gave each group one of four different prompts.
The teams were then given 24 hours to write, rehearse, block and put on ten-minute plays for an audience based on those prompts. The topics given to the groups dealt with alternate energy.
Ellersieck and Grate organized the four skits, Ellersieck said, with three tragedies and one satire, like the ancient Greeks.
Ellersieck created the challenge to meet requirements for a global ethics class last year when she was asked to create awareness about an issue that was important to her.
"This challenge educates participants and audiences," Ellersieck said. "It's just seemed like the perfect way to create awareness."
Ellersieck spoke of the difficulties of producing and directing a play in 24 hours.
"This challenges people, they're afraid of it," Ellersieck said. "But if you get them to do it, they get over that fear."
The next day, participants gathered at the Warehouse Theatre at Stephens College for their final rehearsals and blocking.
"I wish we had some more time to rehearse, but that's the nature of the beast," Wohleber said.
Wohleber, a member of 5th Wall Productions, a local theatre group that was responsible for the only comedic act in the series, got two and a half hours of sleep during the production of the troupe's play.
The troupe was asked what they would consider a good solution for man-made alternative energy. The final product considered the implications of a world that got energy from how honest people are.
Emily Quartaro, one of the play's director and sophomore at Stephens, said that the only thing she had trouble with was keeping the play simple enough to fit into ten minutes.
Quartaro directed "Orion's Right Arm", a play that focused on a family's continued battle against "evil" in a post-apocalyptic world, destroyed by continued reliance on fossil fuels.
"One of my best friends wrote the play I had to direct," Quartaro said. "I could see her vision and it was easy to direct. The words were more important than the actual action on the stage."
Quartaro took a directing class and said that she thinks it's important to try to teach the actors as much as she knew about acting.
"Trying to make the actors feel something for 12 minutes is hard," Quartaro said. "It was a task but I really think we conquered it fully."
Stephens student Gillian West, who played the role of Bobby in the play, said the play demonstrated what the world could become if alternative energy methods weren't embraced.
"It was just trying to show people what would happen if we didn't change our ways now," West said.
Emily Peterson directed "The Cost of Energy," which portrayed the difficulties that can occur when two cultures with different views on alternative energy collide.
"We didn't have many props," Peterson said. "It was mostly about the relationship between the two and the contrast. They were absolute opposites, they clashed but they also attracted opposite sides of the spectrum, one was against alternative energy and one was for it."
Rachel Hartmann, an actor in the play who portrayed a scientist striving to get funding for her ethanol development project, said she tried to portray someone who was very goal oriented and driven to achieve her goal.
"The public needs to put more money into finding renewable energy sources," Hartmann said. "There isn't money and the people that are working to make the world a better place won't be able to do that."
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