Insomniacs 24 Hour Play Festival
In March of this year, I was able to add my first directing credit in New York onto my resume. Through a job listing I found on Playbill, I applied for a 24 Hour Play festival called “Insomniacs” produced by Grex Group Theatre. This was one of the first times in my creative career that I was going into something completely blind. I did not know the company, anyone else who was participating, and I had not done a 24 hour festival before. While this could have been a detriment, I chose to view this as an opportunity where I had nothing to lose.
One of the reasons, I moved to New York was because in Cincinnati I was always competing against a prior impression of myself. I was John & Karen’s boy when I did community theatre. I was that red-headed kid who hanged around the local Shakespeare theatre. I was that kid who they did shows with at The Drama Workshop when I was trying to break into directing. Since I’d been involved with theatre in Cincinnati from an early age, I never had a clean slate. Now I did.
The festival commenced at 7pm on Friday, March 8th. I was meeting my playwright, actors, and costume designer (surprising for a 24 hour festival) for the first time. Of all of us involved, the playwright (Elizabeth Furrey) was the only one who had participated in this particular festival multiple times. She’s friends with the Artistic Director who is based out of L.A. The theme was announced as “Que Sera Sera.” Once we had our packet and technical info, we went next door to Iguanas to have dinner and discuss some ideas for the piece. We wrapped up our dinner meeting by 10 or so, Elizabeth went to work on writing and I got a few hours of sleep until she finished her draft.
Our first meeting to kick off the 24 Hour Play Festival
Around 2 in the morning, she calls me to let me know that the first draft is complete. She did this by my request as I knew I needed a bit of shut eye in order to make the most of this festival. Once I had the piece, I read over it multiple times to start to get a sense of “Blue Elephant Coffee.” The piece is based around the idea that this one customer keeps returning to torment the barista as the cafe opens. The customer comes in with new pieces of disguise pretending to be new patron. By the end, it’s revealed that she is an agent for the public library to collect on an overdue library book. The barista accepts her fate as it is far better than the everyday torture of working in the service industry.
It had been a while since I had done something as screwball as “Blue Elephant Coffee” so I was excited to flex some comedic muscles once again. The two actresses both considered comedy their specialty and one was training with UCB at the time after 8 years working in the state department. While everyone was game, getting the rhythm and precision required for screwball is hard when you have a limited amount of hours to rehearse. I always compare comedy to watch mechanics. Everything needs to be exact to properly work in a rehearsed piece of comedy. Drama is allowed to be looser and a bit more organic. Comedy requires exactness. I’m particularly hard on myself when it comes to comedy and while I try to encourage a sense of play during rehearsal sometimes that gets jettisoned in these shotgun processes.
The day started to wear on me as we got closer to performance time. We had been working on the piece consistently since 9 in the morning, starting with table work, working 3 hours in a rehearsal studio, and then teching around 1 or 2. After teching, we went to wherever we could to run lines, tighten blocking, and polish what we could. As I was feeling the fatigue, my anxiety started to creep in. No matter the strength of what I’m directing, I always have a point in my process where I go “This is garbage. I am garbage.” Elizabeth and the Artistic Director assuaged me when they could but getting the voice of that weasel on my shoulder is harder than it seems.
As we approached performance time, we were gathering our costumes and props and realized that one of the key props, the customer’s FBI badge, was MIA. I double checked all the pockets and bags as the pieces before us were performing. Susie, the actress playing the customer, starts drawing in her prop notebook, a replica of the badge. My anxiety goes, “This isn’t going to work. This isn’t what was planned. There goes the neighborhood.” However, thanks to her quick thinking and ingenuity, the joke goes over like gangbusters. This is one of my favorite parts of any process: the happy accident. I love being proved wrong or when something I couldn’t possibly think of gets incorporated into the piece. That’s the magic of live theatre right there.
The Customer confronts Evelyn the Barista
And with that, I got to mark off my first directing job in New York. I got to meet new artists, work with a playwright on a new place, and think on my feet. No matter my doubts and anxiety during the process, I consider that an absolute win and it proves that despite my lethargy, I can handle producing a piece in 24 hours (give or take a few power naps).