BY SHELBY LOOCK | PHOTO BY YASIR ALHUMAIDAN
It took only 24 hours for the Edgewood College Theatre Assembly to create two student productions this month start to finish. Most productions take months, if not years, to complete.
On Saturday, October 15, the Theatre Assembly hosted its second-annual 24-Hour Theatre Blitz. A group of Edgewood students and community members spent a day laboring over script-writing, casting, and directing. At the end, the group performed two one-act plays in the Diane Ballweg Theatre in the Stream.
Mikayla Mrochek, an Edgewood College junior and Theatre Arts minor, organized the event. As coordinator, she recruited playwrights and directors, helped to cast shows, and kept the rehearsals on schedule.
“The 24 Hour Theatre event is exactly what is sounds like,” Mrochek explained. “Student playwrights turn in one-act plays. On Friday evening, actors audition for student directors and spend all day Saturday rehearsing for the performance Saturday night.”
She said that the event is meant to introduce students to the theatre program at Edgewood. “It’s an event for anybody who wants to participate in theatre but doesn’t necessarily want to put all of the time into a production. It also helps to recruit freshmen who are thinking about becoming involved,” Mrochek said.
Many of the student actors involved were freshmen. Sophomore actor David Colling said the event was, “a great way to work with freshmen and new students.
Two works from student playwrights were presented. The first was titled, “Basic Millennials,” written by Taran Lancaster and directed by Laura Meinders.
The play at first pokes fun at the typical lifestyle of Millennials. It focuses on a group of college-aged friends who look only at their smartphones and not at each other. The group sips pumpkin spice lattes, wears Victoria Secret leggings with UGG boots, and posts selfies to Snapchat and Instagram. Through their dialogue, they make cultural references from Kim Kardashian to Pretty Little Liars to Harambe.
The second play, called “The Greenroom,” was written by Clarice Lafayette and directed by Miranda Beadle. It centers around a group of theatre students, in which one student admits that she is an alien. Conflict emerges when the students learn that she has to suck souls from humans in order to stay alive.
The contrast between the two plays allowed the audience to experience a variety of genres in one evening. It also gave students different opportunities to play roles that were more humorous compared to others that were more dramatic. Both shows, however, referenced other productions from the Edgewood College theatre season.
Student playwright Taran Lancaster said, “I have been writing novels and poetry since elementary school but had never written a script. Twenty-four-hour theatre gave me the opportunity to see my work performed on stage, and I loved every minute of it.”
The next Edgewood College theatre production will be Calamity Jane, opening Friday, November, 11 at 7:30 p.m.
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