From 7 PM on the night of Friday, Sept. 13 until around 8 PM on Saturday, Sept. 14, the 24-Hour Theater Project ran. The project culminated in the performance of several short plays, each ten to twenty minutes long, on Saturday evening. From 7 PM on Friday to 7 AM on Saturday, the students who signed up to write worked on their “playlets” (as Dr. Roper called these short plays in his weekly email); from 8 AM on Saturday until 9 AM, the upperclassman directors analyzed the plays which the writers had created; from 9:30 AM until 6 PM, the actors rehearsed. Then they performed.
Benjamin Thomas (‘25) and Alice Forget (‘25) were already planning for this project last spring. Thomas was inspired by a similar event he had attended at Belmont Abbey College, and he suggested the 24-Hour Theater Project to Dr. Novinski. It was Forget, however, who convinced Thomas to take the idea seriously. She joined forces with him to accomplish his idea, and they held conference calls over the summer to discuss the logistics of the project.
Thomas says, “We have so much untapped creativity here, at UD—especially in the English Department … and what we wanted to do is find a way to exploit and use that creativity in a way which usually people only get to do in Lit Trad IV [by writing a short story].” There were five writers: Cecilia Andrews, Joseph Fournier, Brennan Schmiediecke, Margaret Sonne, and Ephraim Robinson. Thomas says that he and Forget, the project’s producers, “… expected everyone [the writers] to just write these funny, goofy things.” The producers were surprised, therefore, by how seriously the writers took their work. “Everybody [the writers] put a piece of themselves into it,” Thomas says.
Allison Peterman (‘26) directed “Three Daughters” by Margaret Sonne. This play is about three daughters in a family split by divorce. They love one another, but their relationships are tested because of allegiances to their different mothers. Peterman says that the play was “amazingly human and dynamic, and fun to direct.”
Many new and unknown talents were discovered through this project, since it was open to anybody, in any year, and of any major. The freshmen, in fact, may have been most represented among those who participated in the project. If anything, this theater project promises well for the new freshman class, since the freshmen, writing and acting, made a formidable show of talent.
Elsa Daley is a freshman who acted in “Wyktoria” by Cecilia Andrews. She found the script particularly interesting since it made reference to texts from the Core Curriculum such as the Iliad, which she is currently reading for class. Daley says that the script “… had a lot of depth to it.” It was a tragedy set in Poland, following World War II. Though the play was a tragedy, Daley says she had a lot of fun acting in it. She especially appreciated this opportunity to be on stage since, otherwise, she would not have time for drama in her schedule.
“The show … [was] … entirely the concept of we did this entire project in twenty-four hours,” says Benjamin Thomas.. And, inevitably, the enormous energy that sustained all the producers, writers, directors, and actors through those twenty-four hours was infectious.