Body of Work

READY OR NOT, HERE IT COMES (excerpt)
May 15, 2005, Brandon Griggs, The Salt Lake Tribune

Let's say you run a theater company and have commissioned a playwright to produce a new play. Once the script is written, you must enlist a director, assemble a cast and rehearse until the play is ready to be seen by an audience. How much time, blank page to opening-night curtain, would you need to do all this? A year? Six months? Eight weeks? How about 24 hours?

This is the idea behind "Slam," Plan-B Theatre's second annual evening of sudden stagecraft, in which artists create, rehearse and perform not one but five 10-minute plays in one crazy day. The project.leaves little room for the overdetermined workshopping that often smooths art's rough edges.

"What I like best about it is the whole 'without a net' thing, the risk factor," says Plan-B founder Cheryl Ann Cluff, one of the creative forces behind "Slam." "You never know what's going to come out of it. It could be fabulous, or it could be crap."

At 8:30 p.m. on Friday, each of the five selected playwrights will draw the title of a soon-to-be-written work from a hat..Each playwright then is assigned a cast of three actors and a list of props and sound cues available to them. By 9 p.m., the playwrights scatter to write. Their only rules: The finished script can't be longer than 10 pages and they can't burden the actors with long monologues. Oh, and no nudity. The completed play is due the next morning, meaning all-nighters are almost a requirement. At 9 a.m. Saturday, the five sleep-deprived playwrights turn in their scripts. At 9:30 a.m., the five directors begin read-throughs with their casts at the Rose Wagner. These give way to rehearsals, which continue all afternoon. Actors, used to having several weeks to learn their lines, were rehearsing last year right up until curtain at 8 p.m.