Murray-Dodge Bacchanal
24-Hour Play Festival
Plays written and directed by various students
Produced by Theater Intime
Oct. 13th at Murray-Dodge
Free admission
As most Princeton students are taught in the first two semesters of their college career, some of the finest creative and academic literature can be drafted and perfected with little preparation during the wee hours of the night. Now Princeton’s very own Theater Intime recently displayed the literary magic that can be generated in one all-nighter — even outside of that horror colloquially known as Writing Sem — as part of its annual 24-Hour Play Festival. The premise was simple; given eight hours and ten of the most bizarre prompts known to man, seven teams of budding playwrights were challenged to compose a script for a short theatrical piece. After a brief meeting and discussion period with the writers, the baton was then passed to seven directors, who were given until 8 PM to cast, rehearse, and bring these starry-eyed visions to stage.
A few plays stuck out as remarkably well conceived. Senior Daniel Rattner’s “Jesus is my Hombre,” a raunchy comedy about a nun longing to perform her “wifely duty” with the Son of God, kicked off the night on a stellar note and worked wonders to get the somewhat antsy audience of performers, writers, and directors loose and engaged in the action on stage. Actresses Emi Nakamura and Holly Linneman’s comedic and commendably sincere performances combined with Molly O’Neil’s tasteful direction worked together to produce an especially impressive piece.
Overall, the plays were good. What stuck out most was the incredible creative ability of the participants; how one can draft even a semi-cohesive piece about a closeted lesbian on the eve of her wedding night when given mandatory prompts such as “Awkward song and a cappella dance number” and “because science” will forever be an enigma. But really, it wasn’t about the plays. The 24 Hour Play Festival was not about critiquing each artist for whether that particular je ne sais quoi was present in his or her performance, or lauding the finesse with which certain directors handled scenes of extended narwhal necrophilia (of which, might I add, there were several.) More than anything, the Festival was a celebration like no other on campus of the bizarre, of artistic passion and spontaneous delight — a celebration that attracted hordes of slightly inebriated students drawn together by a love of theater, creation, and sexually explicit situations depicted on stage. It was about those moments like in “The Moist Masticacy” (written by Andrew Hanna and Jeffrey Z. Liu, directed by Emma Watt) where freshman Matt Volpe led a spellbound audience in a melodramatic, minute-long falsetto ridden rendition of Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain.” It was about my own daring journey during Intermission to compensate for a tragic dearth of pregame, thus making the second half of the Festival exponentially more scintillating…though perhaps that was just one viewer’s experience.
Nevertheless, the near orgiastic enthusiasm of the audience as they shouted lines at the characters and insisted on reading the prompts aloud before every performance palpably grew as the show went on. From this clamorous, enthralled crowd arose the feeling not that we were there to see seven plays composed in a sinfully small amount of time but that we were participating in a primal exaltation of the art of theater. In a sense, it was a necessity that each play contained an ensemble of such bizarre characters (Siamese twin middle schoolers addicted to hand sanitizer shots, say) because perhaps the most significant result of participating in the Festival was a new-found understanding and appreciation of unbounded imagination and society’s fringe. Make no mistake, there was a certain boisterous mood and fluid attitude essential to enjoying the show and learning to embrace the bizarre. But those plays served as a catalyst to allow me, a Chemical Engineering major with the acting talent of a sack of potatoes, into a world I formerly thought was reserved for those Princetonians whose every breath contains foreshadowing, figurative language or falling action. And in that respect, whether they involved narwhal necrophilia, awkward scarves, or a flashback to “that time in Chuck E. Cheese’s,” they were magnificent.