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In June, Dramatists Guild members Ross Peter Nelson and Brian Sands participated in Skin Horse Theater’s Twenty Four Hour Theater Festival. This festival is the brainchild of a group of Bard College Theater and Performance alumni who after graduating in 2009 sought a new creative locale. Their final choice was between Chicago and New Orleans. They opted for the latter because they felt New Orleans was more compatible with their mixed media, cross-disciplinary approach. Skin Horse Theater’s mission statement states: “Our work is not bound by genre, or by any particular dogma or mode of performance… Our purpose is simply to do what we have not done before, to try something new and vastly different with each project.”

Upon arriving in New Orleans, Skin Horse Theater (whose core consists of Evan Spigelman, Veronica Hunsinger-Loe, Anna Henschel, Brian Fabry Dorsam, and Nat Kusinitz) joined a wave of post-Katrina theatre-artist transplants including The NOLA Project, New Noise, and Goat in the Road who have injected new energy into the city’s performance scene. They already had a connection with the post-Katrina landscape because many Bard students had participated in recovery service projects. And in the spirit of their mission statement, they cultivated collaboration with the city’s abundant musical, literary, and visual artists.

Skin Horse Theater’s Twenty Four Hour Theater Festival was a tradition created at Bard to combat the stress of final exams. Anna Henschel explains that the purpose is to see an idea fully realized in twenty-four hours. “It forces the gut instinct into the performance. Your first idea is how you direct the show because you don’t have time to rethink it.”

The festival involves seven playwrights, seven directors, and thirty-five actors. They all meet on Friday at 8 PM to choose a theme (last year’s was “Request Denied”). The writers draw a number from two to seven out of a hat to determine their cast size. The playwrights then go home to write as their piece is due at 5:30 AM. At 7AM the playwrights deliver the script and meet with the directors for one hour over strong coffee. Armed with nothing more than a 45-minute tech and a $25 budget, the director blindly selects the cast out of a hat. The ensemble then convenes at the rehearsal space and everyone meets at the theater for 6:30PM. At 7:30 there’s a production meeting and the doors open at 7:45. The curtain rises at 8:00. As Anna Henschel characterizes their process: “It’s insane, but it achieves our objective of objective of bringing people together, alongside the challenge of gut instinct performance.”

Brian Sands comments: “Skin Horse’s 24 Hour Theater Fest gives playwrights the fun and challenging opportunity to create a ten minute playlet overnight that is guaranteed to be seen by dozens of people the next evening. I prefer to have a little more time to let inspiration percolate, so have chosen to act in the Fest each year. I’ve been tremendously impressed by the overall quality of the writing and fortunate to wind up with four well-written roles in four great short plays.”

Ross Peter Nelson writes: “I enjoyed how the theme for the festival was created, a multi-pass balloting process based on suggestions from the actors, writers, and directors. The final step before we left to begin writing was to select a number from a hat which would be the number of actors assigned. That process triggered my writing process almost as much as the theme. I got five actors, and as I was bicycling home to spend the next several hours writing I thought to myself, “What will I write for a crew that size?” The word ‘crew’ stuck in my head, and I ended up writing about a starship crew whose mission is to sample the cuisine of every species in the galaxy.” For more information, visit www.skinhorsetheater.org.

rflorence@dramatistsguild.com

Request Denied at Skin Horse Theater’s Twenty Four Hour Theater Festival