At Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, also known as SIUe, there are plenty of things to do. Most of which are free and non-greek life related. Recently, SIUe's Student Experimental Theatre Organization (SETO) put on a 24 hour play festival. A 24 hour play festival, in this case, is where the actors audition one night, then the writers pull an all-nighter and write the plays and a few hours after that there is an all day rehearsal. Then, an almost full 24 hours after the auditions, the plays are performed and never done again.
The idea of the of the festival came to President of SETO, Summer Baer, as a way to offer more within the department. She states, "Years ago I had done one that was extremely censored and limited but I wanted to give students the chance to be themselves and not censor themselves. Just to simply let the ideas live and go with them." Summer organized and planned the whole thing. She did her best to try and find as many people that wanted to participate in some way, and she did. After is was over I had asked her what the best and worst part of the experience was for her. "The best part has to be the show for me. The process leading up to it was phenomenal but getting to sit in the audience last night and watch what they had accomplished in less than 24 hours was wonderful. Everyone was so happy and proud of themselves and that sense of accomplishment made me happier than words. The worst part for me probably was right before the auditions. I was laying out all the forms and I panicked because of the open ended-ness of the event. I had no idea who was going to show up or if anyone was and that terrified me." No worries, Summer. It was a fabulous show with an amazing group of people.
Later on that night I sat down with a writer, an actor and tech person. What was so amazing to see was they all had similarities within their widely different perspectives. One of the writers, Michael Ezell, talked to me a bit about the writing process. He says, "I collaborated with another one of the writers, Lucas, and we wanted to create something that in the outside was seemingly light but on the inside had a lot of darkness hidden in it. Once we had our actors and props, we really looked at what props we had, and started making decisions based on that. I think we did a really good job, but it was kind of stressful because the first and second deadline came up upon us really quickly. We just kept going on and working as patiently as we needed to in order to create a story the way we wanted it, and I think it turned out really well."
Monica Buschor, an actor, talked about her journey of bringing the character to life in such a short amount of time. She states, "giving our characters a life outside the show and then use that to guide the storyline. To help with my character I just kept yelling at my scene partner like my character would (apologies to him)." A friend of mine and I actually wrote the play Monica acted in. I would say both of us were in fact extremely impressed with how she embodied what we had envisioned. When asked how the experience was for her, she said, "this experience was very successful in my opinion and taught me a lot about how to work with very little time to make something beautiful."
Lastly I asked one of our techies the same questions — I just wanted to see the difference of perspective because without our tech there would not be a show. Nick Harris was the set designer and a member of the floor crew. When asked what he thought of the experience, his answer was most intriguing. Nick states, "I think that this being the first time doing this 24 hour one and done festival it went pretty well. I would have to give it an 8 out of 10. There are definitely some things that need improvement, and that's OK as long as lessons were learned and people do something about the things that went wrong this year to correct them next year. It should be a brilliant show next year. As I mentioned earlier, this being the first one there are going to be issues arise that nobody expected. As long as those are accounted for next year I think this festival will just keep getting better." Couldn't have said it better myself, Nick.
Overall with the success of One and Done, SETO plans for this to now be an annual event. Participating in something like that was truly a wonderful experience. Everyone I asked would not hesitate to do it again. I think I can speak for SETO when I say, thank you all to making it memorable whether you participated or supported.
