Twenty-four hours may not seem like a very long time, but for those participating in the Take Out Theatre Festival this weekend, it’s enough time to pull together an entire show from beginning to end.
The day-long festival will begin on Friday night and run through Saturday evening’s performance at the Roy Bowen Theatre in the Drake Union.
“It’s a crash course in theater,” said Lesley Fisher, a third-year theatre major and vice president of theater honor society Alpha Psi Omega. “It’s a 24-hour theater festival in which we ask people to write, direct and act in a new piece of work.”
Kyler Moor, a second-year theatre major and APO treasurer, has been a part of the quarterly festival since last year and has even served as the event’s master of ceremonies.
“I think some really good stuff comes out of it,” he said. “Some of the pieces are really touching and clever and genius.”
Fisher agreed, adding that Take Out Theatre has been known to showcase a wide range of styles and moods.
“Sometimes, it’s really surreal and not grounded in anything,” she said. “And then we have some that are just very realistic snippets of life. We really do cover anything.”
The process will begin on Friday, the night before the performance, when potential playwrights will arrive at 10:30 p.m. to receive the prompt and to share their ideas before committing them to paper.
“The great part about writing is that because we’re all there together, everyone really helps each other,” Fisher said. “It’s wonderfully creative to have all those people in the same room.”
“The time flies,” she said. “Before you know it, it’s 4 a.m. and the scripts are due.”
From there, the scripts will be reviewed by a panel of judges, distributed to directors and rehearsed all day by actors before the performance that night.
“The pressure is so real and it’s so immediate,” Fisher said. “(As a director or actor,) you have ten hours to put on a show. There’s no getting around it.”
Established in 2000 by a group of OSU students, Take Out Theatre has changed little since its inception. Theatre professor Joy Reilly, who played a part in launching the festival, says that the spirit of the festival is important to its success.
“I ran this festival for about seven years, (but it’s) run now by the students themselves,” she said. “It is great fun.”
“It’s structured like a contest, but we don’t treat it like that,” Moor said. “Everybody works together and helps each other out.”
The new works will premiere at 8 p.m. on Saturday night. The show is free and open to the public.
“Even if you can’t do the acting and directing, we encourage you to come and check it out,” Moor said. “The audience is as important as the directors and the writers and the actors.”
