Hobnob’s 24-Hour Play Project a fun challenge
Sentiment, aliens from outer space, the Three Fates and a funeral. The audience at Hobnob Theatre Company on Saturday night, Aug. 23, saw a 10-minute story based on each of these topics written by four writers who spent less than a day preparing them.
The result brought a little bit of tonal whiplash, but overall a lot of entertainment, according to Hobnob co-founder Ken Smith, who said the company’s second annual 24-Hour Play Project is an exercise in originality for its writers and actors.
“It’s really just a neat time for writers and actors to use basic elements they have to tell great stories,” Smith said. “I'm always impressed. It forces them to make their plays as spontaneous and original as possible.”
Hobnob hosted its first 24-Hour Play Project last year, inviting four writers to write one play each that would be presented by a cast of up to four actors 24 hours after casting. The writers again met at Hobnob’s studio in Butler on Friday, Aug. 22, to randomly choose their actors before getting to work on a script that worked with the people in their cast.
Aside from Casey Bowser, who wrote a play in last year’s project, the other three writers — Eric Cook, Joe Szalinski and Kevin Vespaziani — were all new to the project this year. Smith said they each used their actors to construct a story, and like last year, they had to incorporate the same prop and a particular line of dialogue into their scripts, to add to the challenge. This year, each play had to include a banana and the phrase, “Where are you going to put that?”
Smith said the writers were up from dusk until dawn writing the plays — one going to sleep at around 6 a.m. Saturday — before meeting at the studio around 9 a.m. to start rehearsals.
The show itself, which began at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in Hobnob’s Main Street studio, was hosted by Justin Anderson, who introduced each play and its writer and actors before debuting it for the audience. Smith said the plays ended up being wildly different — Bowser’s a quirky play about aliens invading to Cook’s being about the Three Fates in an academic setting — but the audience was on board with all of them.
“The audience, they really like it, I think understanding of the process,” Smith said. “Some of these plays they come up with in 24 hours are more interesting than what took weeks and weeks.”
