14/48 [Day2]: Jailed Billionaires, a Bullhorn, and Brazilian Facials

(posted at 11:21 AM)

I spent the afternoon fetching props for 14/48: a bullhorn, batteries, rubbing alcohol (to clean the Burning Man ash from the Bullhorn), cherry slushee, an old fashined shaving kit, and beer bottles (that had to be emptied...somehow...). At showtime, I sat behind the row of writers in the almost-full house, and spent two solid hours laughing my kidneys out watching 7 ten-minute plays around the theme of 'power vacuum'.

Props to Sarah Rudinoff for her billionaires-in-jail play "The Big House", in which Tina LaPadula, playing a bored guard, torments two caviar-starved executive prisoners by shouting "Give me my bonus BITCH!"

Becky Hellyer's hilarious three-man play "Porn" brought us the anguish of guys outside a 7-11 desperately trying to spin up their nerve to go inside and buy a porn magazine. A classic suburban trope with a twist: these weren't teenagers but divorced dads. "I can't buy a porn magazine from a guy who lives down the street! What if we see each other mowing the lawn at the same time?"

Keri Healey's play "Jimmy Juarez' Brazilian Facial Parlor and Taqueria" explored the existence of heaven through a lost traveller, played by Mark Diaz, looking for Death Valley but who finds a "service oriented" joint instead. Funniest scene of the night was Diaz, reclining in a salon chair, marguerita in hand, with Jennifer Pratt's head in his lap and Julie Briskman massaging his scalp. "Man, I must have died and gone to some wierd fucking kind of heaven," he says. But then realising the truth in his own words, he sits up and shouts "Blowjobs aren't free..."

I'm headed back today for another long afternoon of fetching random objects from the 99cent Store, and eager to see what Wayne Rawley, Bret Fetzer, Carl, Sander, Greg Loughridge, and the rest of the crew have dreamed up for tonight's show. Tonight's theme, chosen by an audience member last night, is 'forbidden fruit'. Rudinoff's already whet my appetite, emailing this morning that her play is about an organic cannibal.

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14/48 - the world's quickest theater festival

(posted at 4:01 PM)

I'm volunteering this weekend at Seattle's 14/48. If you like theater, and want to see Seattle's top local theateristas conceive, write, rehearse, and stage 14 new plays in 48 hours, this is the festival for you.

Last night's opening event included picking the theme out of a bucket ('power vaccuum'), and writers picking the random envelopes that tell them how many actors they get and the sequence in which their play will be performed. It's not until this morning, after the writers stayed up late writing their plays, that the actual actors for each play are selected, again at random.

As a 14/48 newbie, I also had to pump the keg and serve beer to the gang, which fortunately I knew how to do ;-) Be sure to check it out, or next weekend, when they do the whole thing all over with a completely new set of writers, directors, actors, and crew.

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