The Lumberjack



Students Serving The Cal Poly Humboldt Campus and Community Since 1929

Tag: 24 Hour Play Festival

  • Cal Poly Humboldt Theatre presents the return of the 24 hour play festival

    by Sophia Escudero

    Putting on a play is traditionally no quick process. It takes months to take a script, design the set, costumes, and lights, cast actors, direct it, and have something polished enough to perform. The 24 hour play festival, however, turns that notion on its head. From 7 p.m. Friday night to the same time Saturday, a group of theater students wrote scripts and presented them as a series of short plays before an audience.

    The event was entirely student run and organized, and was produced by Cal Poly Humboldt students Austin Maisler and David Fisher.

    Maisler served as a producer, director, light designer, and stage manager. He had heard about the 24 hour play festival in his first year at Cal Poly Humboldt, but nothing came of it due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When campus reopened, the idea for the festival returned.

    “Spring came along and our department chair, Dr. Troy [Lescher] brought it up, like, ‘hey, does anybody want to run this?’” Maisler said. “I didn’t want to run it, I wanted to act in it, but nobody came forward so I talked to David. David and I decided to step forward and run this thing.”

    The process of organizing the festival was, by its nature, chaotic. Scripts were written overnight, and given to directors at 7 a.m. the next morning. The actors were cast less than twelve hours before they had to be off-book and ready to present the scene, and rehearsals were intermittently interrupted by costume fittings and discussions of the script. Lighting was finalized shortly before the house opened, and many people found themselves taking on roles that they had not previously had experience in.

    “This is the first show I’ve ever designed lights for,” Maisler said. “I’m actually in the lighting class this semester, so I just stepped forward, like, I kind of know how to do this, so I’ll just do it.”

    The four scenes, each about ten minutes long, took on themes of college-aged ennui, failing romance, finding meaning in absurdity, and impending doom. Of the four playwrights, two also participated as actors, and one as a director.

    Actor and writer Ben Wimer had not been involved in a 24 hour play festival before in either capacity. He found writing for a 24 hour play festival to pose a unique challenge. As the script is to be presented less than a day after its completion, certain factors had to be considered.

    “I wanted to write something that was simple, but had an authenticity to it, and had dialogue that was easy for the actors to memorize⁠— hopefully, it was easy to memorize⁠— but still gave them a lot to play around with,” Wimer said.

    Mollie Donaldson had participated in a previous 24 hour play festival at Cal Poly Humboldt in early 2020 as an actor, a role she repeated two years later. She considers the festival to be intense, but rewarding.

    “It’s definitely stressful,” Donaldson said. “You’re handed a script at 8 a.m. and told at 7 p.m. that you’re supposed to perform it and block it and have everything memorized. It’s a stressful thing, but one of my favorite things is kind of shocking myself with how quickly I can memorize things.”

  • A bite of the arts: HSU’s 5th annual 24 Hour Play Festival

    A bite of the arts: HSU’s 5th annual 24 Hour Play Festival

    March 24 marked HSU’s fifth annual 24 Hour Play Festival held in the Studio Theater. The 24 Hour Play Festival is an annual event produced by HSU students and faculty where students are given free reign and agency to direct, write and produce scenes that are then performed for the public 24 hours later.

    The play was organized by HSU senior Madison Glee, featuring original works performed and written by HSU students. The festival was overseen by faculty member and HSU production manager Derek Lane.

    “An Unexpected Visit,” written by Robert Matthews and directed by Irma Gill, was a brief scene focusing on a singular, rather peculiar interaction between characters Saint, played by HSU senior Camille Borrowdale, and her Bulgarian counterpart Sveta, played by HSU freshman Zoe Remund.

    The scene saw both women meet seemingly randomly on a bench of an anonymous college campus and having an increasingly strange conversation. Saint soon realizes that Sveta is a relative from the future and the two share a joint before deciding to just hang out and grab lunch.

    “The overall process for ‘An Unexpected Visit’ began at 7:30 last night,” said Borrowdale, fresh off the stage. “The writers [started] working on their scenes and they wrote all night, their scripts were due at six in the morning and then quickly chose from a group of all us actors who they wanted to cast, and then we just started cramming until right before the performance.”

    Memorizing the blocking, choreography and dialogue of a scene in a 12-hour period is no small feat, especially considering the length of their scene, and that Borrowdale and several of her fellow castmates were in multiple, unrelated scenes.

    “Yeah it was pretty frustrating at first trying to memorize all my lines,” Borrowdale continued, “But it’s really rewarding getting off stage after working all day on this and being done!”

    The whole process seemed to be intentionally very impromptu; with an emphasis on the element of surprise.

    “We didn’t audition for this either,” Remund said, who played Sveta the Bulgarian visitor from the future. “Anyone could have been a part of the festival and we stress that anyone of any level of experience can join us.”