24 hours of pure theatermaking terror | John Moore

It did not start out as abject terror. That feeling would come 12 hours later, when I was texted the photo of the 2-inch head laceration.

That was abject terror.

Playwriting is not for the squeamish.

When it all began at 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 26, the feeling was more like “hopeful dread.” That’s when 24 invited actors, six directors and six designated playwrights gathered at the Acoma Center for a masochistic – put another way, “exhilaratingly fun!” – creative exercise called the 24-Hour Plays Project. The prevailing notion, founder Mark Armstrong told us, was that if you bring together extraordinary artists and give them both a theater space and a (very) little bit of time, “you have everything you need to create an extraordinary evening of theater,” he said.

Within 24 hours, six 10-minute plays would be conceived, written, memorized, rehearsed and fully staged before a surely impressed and hopefully packed audience.

No pressure!

How I was included alongside five professional playwrights who have published 127 plays between them remains the evening’s most glaringly unresolved plot twist. (I have one.) But because this was to be a fundraiser for Curious Theatre Company, which is in the throes of an existential financial crisis, I gamely said yes.

We circled up on the stage for a meet-and-greet that was kind of like an audition and a round of speed dating all rolled into one. As the now ticking clock relentlessly powered toward Wednesday, the actors slooooowly took turns announcing their special skills (like, say, trapeze) and what kind of role they were jonesing to play (like, say, the misguided soul who asked to be given a big, honking monologue – over the dissenting advice of organizers.)

They each also contributed a prop (like, say, a puppet) and a costume piece (like, say, the head of a panda) that eventually made the stage look like the back room at a Goodwill. All of this was meant to inspire we playwrights, if and when we were ever allowed to, you know – start writing!

The circle represented an astonishing array of talent, as evidenced by a who’s-who of local actors and former DCPA Theatre Company Artistic Director Kent Thompson serving as one of the directors. The playwrights included national bigshots like Eric Coble, who has had three full-length plays fully produced at Curious Theatre; and Benjamin Benne, whose recent mother-daughter drama “Alma” was developed at the Denver Center and later fully produced at Curious. I felt an enormous, if entirely self-imposed, pressure to deliver the goods.

The actors were then dismissed and told to return at 8 the next morning while the playwrights and directors conducted the theatrical equivalent of an NBA Draft. Photos of the 24 actors were spread on a table and we took turns picking them until we each had a team of four actors. I imagine this is how it felt when we chose teams on the grade-school playground – but I was never the one doing the picking; I was always the one being picked (last).

But here, I felt like I won the lottery. My all-star lineup was director GerRee Hinshaw with luminous local actors Emma Messenger, Kenya Fashaw, Candace Joice and Brian Landis Folkins. The directors were then released, and we writers spread out throughout the building to claim our own little writing cubbies. It was already 10:45 at night – for most of us, the very worst time of day to be creative.

Our marching orders were simple: Write a 10-page play, from scratch, by 6 a.m., about anything you want. And this is where I froze. “Anything you want” is just too much freedom. I participated in a similar 24-hour playwriting event a few years ago, and the last thing they told us was that we each were to write a parody of a deleted scene from a famous movie. This was a failsafe way to ensure that none of the writers pre-wrote anything.

Dumb movie parody? That’s my wheelhouse. I whipped out a stupid little skit called “The Exercising” in no time flat. It was about a mom who is desperate to save her possessed daughter – but she’s easily confused and calls not a priest but rather a personal trainer who tries to Richard Simmons the devil out of her potty-mouthed baby girl. (Yes, I just made “Richard Simmons” into a verb.)

Ten minutes of dumb, I can do. But this was the esteemed Curious Theatre, which surely deserved a more sophisticated effort. That’s when I made my biggest mistake of the night. I decided to write a drama – which is death at events like these that clearly call for a more festive approach. But with the clock nearing midnight, I fell back on the “write what you know” trope. I decided to take inspiration from a consequential family memory that, in real life, was a Hallmark moment. But theater demands conflict, so I dumbly decided to transmute this happy story into a bad knockoff of “Long Day’s Journey into Night.”

(Thanks for all the kind words, everyone. But it was dreadful. Those poor actors.)

Reading along through the miracle of Google Docs technology, 24-Hour Plays Artistic Director Madelyn Paquette popped in every two hours to ask helpful and challenging questions that helped turn my slop into a somewhat cohesive story. And within what seemed like mere seconds, the sun peeked above the horizon, and that feeling of hopeful dread had mutated into exhausted delirium.

The scene I turned in at 5:15 a.m. was overwrought and melodramatic – just the kind of play I hate to watch as an audience member. But when Paquette told me, “It’s good,” (or maybe she said “good enough”), I knew I was 15 minutes from home, my indignant cat and a feathery pillow.

When I rolled over in my bed at just past 9 a.m., I groggily grabbed the phone I had dropped next to my ear. And the first thing I saw was “the photo.” One of my actors had been hit on the head by the hatchback of the van that was to take them to their rehearsal space. Her gorgeous blonde hair was now a big blotch of red. But she refused treatment and was soldiering on – despite my protest.

Cue the abject terror.

It really is astonishing what actors will endure for art – especially my bad art. I have long been a proponent of a post-pandemic mantra that goes like this: “Actually, the show does NOT have to go on.” The health and safety of artists should come first. But within my own cast, I had another actor who had undergone surgery to remove two intestinal tumors just ONE WEEK before this grueling creative exercise. A third actor had surgery scheduled for the following Monday to have two lumpectomies to (hopefully) remove the presence of breast cancer. None of them had any business participating in this fundraiser. But they each soldiered on.

The rest of the day was a blur of blocking and run-throughs and technical rehearsals, followed by what turned out to be, yes, a remarkable display of collective, collaborative artmaking – with no net. But it was physically and emotionally draining on just about everyone. I’m still a bit wobbly.

I had to know what the other playwrights’ stories were from the night.

• Jeff Neuman, who just had world-premiere plays staged at both the Cherry Creek and Benchmark theaters, is a creature of habit whose routine is writing each morning from 4-8 a.m., working his day job and being home and in bed by the end of the “Murder She Wrote” re-run. For him, writing effectively at midnight is a non-starter.

“By about 2 a.m., I was really hitting a wall and truly didn’t know if I’d be able to finish,” he said. So he went out for a run to jump-start his brain – not always the best idea in the Golden Triangle neighborhood. When he got back, the first, friendly, exhausted face he saw was that of fellow playwright Edith Weiss. And that made all the difference.

“As a playwright, I never have the opportunity to engage with another writer who is feverishly going through the same exact thing at the same exact time,” Neuman said. “For those 10 minutes, we visited, we laughed and we might have even hugged. That was the final burst of energy I needed, and it was fueled by Edith’s kind smile and warm conversation. I didn’t realize how camaraderie can be such a vital creative force for a writer.” (Wait, why didn’t I think of a hug?”)

• Eric Coble: “It was 10 p.m. on Tuesday, and I was looking at that big pile of potential props on the stage. I saw a foot-tall plastic T-rex doll. Next to it was a cloth duck and a unicorn hot-water bottle. I turned to my director and asked, ‘How do you feel about puppets?’” (A. Director Christy Montour-Larson loves puppets. B. Why didn’t I think of puppets?)

• Edith Weiss: “As that pile of props grew into a mountain, I was terrified,” she said. “And then Abner Genece, a big, Black man, told us he’d been playing villains and would love to be more of a ‘gentle giant.’ So an idea took hold, even though I had no idea if I could get Abner in my cast. But I did get him. It just takes an idea and some goofy props – an accordion too small for the wearer, for one – to hone the choices from infinite to specific. My epiphany: Trust the process. Trust yourself.” (Wait, why didn’t I think to use that damned accordion?!)

• Benjamin Benne: “I included this children’s hand-clapping playground song in my piece, and at the first readthrough the next morning, of course I was asked, ‘How does this go?’ So, I stood up and performed it for the first time in a couple decades, and there was this instant realization that this moment was going to have the theatrical impact I’d hoped it would. Sure enough, it turned out to be one of my favorite moments in the play later that night.” (Wait, why didn’t I think of a hand-clapping playground song?)

• Josh Hartwell, more than any of us, really took his actors’ wish lists into account. One wanted to rap. “Music to my ears,” he said. Another wanted to “bring joy,” but he said it with a question mark in his voice. “So I thought: ‘Awkward clown.’ Bam!” Another wanted to play a villain. “Done.” A fourth claimed to be willing to get naked. “I knew I didn’t want to write a nude moment, but I could definitely work with ‘willing to get naked.’ ”

What might all that add up to? “It just suddenly occurred to me,” Hartwell said: “Reality television!” (Wait, why didn’t I think of reality television?)

Wednesday night played out not as an ordinary evening of scenes but more like an energy-infused theatrical event. A walk on the creative high-wire. Audiences could tangibly see and appreciate the creative process in a new light. There was a kind of infectious energy among the creators, actors and crew that transferred directly to the audience at the 7:30 curtain.

(Yes, I said 7:30 p.m. And if you are doing the math along with me, that is only 23½ hours, not 24. So that’s my new excuse. I didn’t get a full day.)

Coble best summed up the whole experience when he put the emphasis not on the “24 Hours” but on the word “play.”

“This exercise forced us into a mode of childlike creativity,” he said. “Because when you think about it, kids don’t spend a month working out what they’re going to play that afternoon. They just get together, and one of them is the horse, and one of them is the rocket man. And that’s what we had to do. We had to go with our first instinct and just run, and then see where it took us. And I think there can be great power in doing that.”

Donate to the Curious Theatre Fund the Future campaign