FEST 24: 5 playwrights, 5 directors, and 20 actors create and perform 5 new 10-minute plays in 24 hours. Always entertaining, always a whirlwind – and not to be missed! You’ll truly have a unique experience at this one-night only performance!
This is how it works —
- 7 pm – Saturday evening (August 23rd): 5 directors show up at Trustus Theatre and pick (from a hat, we can only assume) one of 5 playwrights and 5 casts of 4 actors. A matter of minutes later, the playwrights (not all currently in SC, but all with ties to SC) each receive an email with instructions that they have until 7 am Sunday morning to create an original, 10 minute play that includes 1 specific prop and 1 specific line of dialogue, (which will be announced to the public just before 8 pm on Saturday evening.)
- Night falls, playwrights write, actors and directors sleep – restlessly.
- 7:30 am Sunday morning (August 24th): directors and casts show up once again and meet with artistic/criminal mastermind Chad Henderson who delivers unto them brand new, never performed plays, fresh from the printer and the exhausted imaginations of the now sleeping playwrights.
- 8 am until 7:59 pm Sunday — directors and casts rehearse tirelessly
- 8 pm Sunday — YOU show up to Trustus theatre (there are a few seats left, but not many) as the 5 brand new world premiere plays are performed to witness the kind of innovative, cutting edge theatre arts Columbia can now get accustomed to.
BOOM!
This is how we do it now.
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Introducing the actors:
and the directors:
And the playwrights:
A resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2007, Sarah’s plays are Green Girl, The Extinction of Felix Garden, Circus Tracks, Kudzu, and House on Stilts. Honors include the Lippmann Family “New Frontier” Award, Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Award, commissions from South Coast Repertory and Broadway Across America, and a residency at The Royal National Theatre in London. String, her musical with Adam Gwon, won the Frederick Loewe Award at New Dramatists, a NAMT residency grant, the Weston Playhouse New Musicals Award, and was chosen for the Eugene O’Neill National Music Theatre Conference. Her plays have been produced at the Summer Play Festival at The Public, Trustus Theatre, Hangar Lab, City Theatre Summer Shorts, Live Girls! Theater, Collaboraction, Tulsa New Works for Women, and several universities. Her short plays are published in Ten-Minute Plays for 2 Actors: The Best of 2004 (Smith and Kraus) and Great Short Plays: Volume 6 (Playscripts, Inc.).
A New York-based playwright who originally hails from South Carolina. In recent years he’s had two plays premiere Off-Broadway: in 2007, Fate’s Imagination opened at the Players Theatre (Entertaining…Tasty plot twists and some very funny lines, The New York Times), and in 2006 Sake with the Haiku Geisha opened at the Perry Street Theatre (Witty, Observant, The New York Times) and was chosen as one of Backstage magazine’s Picks of the Week. His one-act play Sushi and Scones was broadcast by the BBC, and his two screenplays (Quintet and Revelation) were both finalists for the Sundance Filmmakers Lab. He is the Resident Playwright of Gotham Stage Company, the writer of the annual Fred and Adele Astaire Awards (for best of dance on Broadway and in film) and an active member of the Dramatists Guild.
A playwright, screenwriter and a graduate of the University of South
Carolina and UCLA’s professional screenwriting
program. Robbie’s first play, Mina Tonight!, was published by Samuel
French Inc. and has been produced in regional theatres across the nation. He is
also the writer/director of the musical theatrical production, The Twitty
Triplets, which has been produced at Trustus and other local venues over
the last two decades years (and set to return in 2015). Robbie’s screenplays
have placed in several national contests, and his latest, Sweet Child of
Mine, was named one of the top 12 comedy scripts in the Austin Film
Festival’s Screenwriting Competition. Last year in NYC, Robertson staged a sold
out run of his staged adaptation of the film Satan in High Heels, a work
that received its first staged reading at Trustus. In 2013, he was awarded the
SC Arts Commission Fellowship in Screenwriting. Robbie
thanks Larry Hembree and Chad Henderson for their sincere interest and courage
in mounting new works.
An emerging playwright, Dean was selected as a Kennedy Center / ACTF Core Member Apprentice at the Playwrights’ Center (Minneapolis, MN) for the 2010 / 2011 season. His plays include: THE MORE BEYOND (developed with Playwrights’ Center, Kennedy Center, The Puzzle Festival NYC, The Flea, Semi-Finalist for the 2011 Princess Grace Award), BELLHAMMER, a modern allegory set in the world of Christian Professional Wrestling (developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Semi-Finalist for the O’Neill Theatre Conference), the full-length drama PARADISE KEY (Winner of the 2010 Trustus Theatre Playwrights’ Festival, produced at Arena Players Repertory Theatre in NY, Trustus Theatre, Hyde Park Theatre), the Zombie-thriller H apocalyptus (produced by The Salvage Company at the Cairns Festival, Queensland Australia, and at Piccolo Spoleto Festival, developed at The Garage Theatre in San Francisco, and in residency at The Studios of Key West), the full-length drama, LOSING SLEEP (Winner of the 2008 Helford Prize in Drama, and produced Off-Off Broadway at the American Theatre of Actors), and the full-length, two-person comedy, COMPANY TIME (developed under luxurious circumstances at the Players Theatre, NYC.)Dean’s screenplay SALK, the true story of the discovery of the vaccine against Polio, won the 2009 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation student screenplay award. Dean graduated from WheatonCollege, Wheaton, IL, with degrees in Philosophy and Communications, and received his MFA in Dramatic Writing at CarnegieMellonUniversity where he was a two-time recipient of the Shubert Foundation Fellowship. He is a Principle Artist with The Salvage Company (NYC), and a proud member the Playwrights’ Center and the Dramatists Guild of America.
Downey has written plays before and he hopes the
knowledge of that makes you feel like the two hundred bucks you’re shelling out
for a celebrity impersonator to join you at the “legitimate theater”
tonight isn’t going to waste. The important thing to remember is that Mike is
getting out there and is no longer aware of his grotesque limitations. Mr. Downey
(Janet if you’re nasty) likes huffing gin, shouting at cars, and collecting
wall hangings that have printings of that footprint dealie about Jesus. He’s
six foot one inch tall and would love to talk about the 1984 film “2010:
The Year We Make Contact” with you over tea and Bavarian sage rugelach.
His wife and children tolerate his frequent Finish Jenkka dancing…barely.
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