BWW Blog: 24 Hours of Power, Influence, and Handcuffs

My personal writing life is sometimes lost in the flashes of time between a day job, a night job with Out of the Box Theatre, and this reviewing gig (writing, sure, but analytical writing more than creative writing). Without the help of amphetamines, there are too few hours in the day to fully explore my writing hobby in the luxuriously creative way that I'd like. In no way is this a complaint--ultimately I prefer to be illustrious than whimsical--yet the inspiration to focus on my own writing projects lingers.

In need of a creative fix, I signed up for Elements' 24-hour play festival as a writer: with it's flurried and truncated creative process, the expectations of the festival gave me literally no excuse not to produce and deliver new work. The Collective's 24-hour play festival was my first experience with an event of the sort; it was fairly exhausting, but barring any sort of heinous disaster, I'm enthusiastic enough about the process to participate in the festival next year. Elements gives their personal twist to the 24-hour festival idea, one which offered an extra challenge: each piece had to emphasize thematic aspects of Elements' season: "Power and Influence." Each group (one writer, one director, two actors) was also given a prop to incorporate into their scene. I was assigned a director and two actresses. Then we were assigned a pair of handcuffs as a prop.

I was lucky enough to be paired with two very talented performers: Sarah Minnis, who I'd never met, but who's name I'd heard around town; and Kaitlyn Tustin, whom I'd seen in Kate Bergstrom's Five Women Wearing the Same Dress last summer, so I knew her to be an actress with a particular flare for physical comedy. Her style is not akin to the Chris-Farley-van-down-by-the-river-destroy-a-coffee-table type of humor; more specifically, her combination of confident line delivery and fervent stage presence has the capacity to be simultaneously campy and genuine.

I brought the handcuffs home, and sat out on the deck in the middle of the night. I thought about power and influence and handcuffs and how that's applicable to an interaction between two women. And somewhere between 11pm and 4am, I wrote a one-act play about a hypochondriac, constantly convinced of swollen glands (Sarah Minnis), in deep depression about the recent death of her cat. Her wife (Kaitlyn Tustin) can't be bothered with her imagined illness, and is happy the cat is gone. Kaitlyn spends the play trying in vain to find the location of a chirping smoke alarm with a dying battery. I wanted to use the handcuffs in a symbolic way rather than an obvious allusion to sex and/or violence, so I used them as a suitcase handle.

Not really. The couple momentarily forgets their petty annoyances with the other's perceived insensitivities when they see an obituary for a woman neither of them knew personally, a "local character"--a one-eyed, body painting cashier at a sex shop. The couple had met her a few years back when they ducked into the shop to escape the heat. They'd bought a pair of handcuffs.

"It has to be her," Sarah says. "This is a small town. How many one-eyed, artsy porn shop girls could there be?"

They bring out the handcuffs to honor the deceased. Kaitlyn handcuffs Sarah to the chair, and dims the lights ... but Sarah's hypochondria flares and her glands swell and she can't maintain the bound position.

"I feel powerless," she says. "And not in a good way."

So Kaitlyn, trying like hell to be as good of a partner to her wife as the late cat was, handcuffs Sarah's wrist to her own.

"Now we're both powerless."

Jenny Mercein, who I will shamelessly plug as an astute and focused directorial presence (and then immediately poach to direct for Out of the Box), had impressive skill with weighting subtext and finding subtle beats of comedy in the text. Kaitlyn stalked the stage with the fixated intention of seeking and destroying the errant beeping from the smoke alarm, and Sarah was a delightfully disheveled mess of a girl who couldn't quite manage the loss of her cat and her swelling glands with dignity. I'm very pleased that I was given the benefit of working with two performers and a director who were so well suited to the task of turning my fluffy one-act about a dissatisfied couple into an entertaining scene about the subtle influence people have over each other in intimate situations.

Despite the fact that it was an exhausting process (for the midnight writers as well as the performers who had to memorize 8-10 pages of dialogue in six hours and the directors who had to pair the script with appropriate intention, as well as stage the scene), I was impressed with the final product. The pieces were amusing and poignant--quite a feat, considering the short amount of time available for the creation of the scenes. Congratulations to all the actors, writers, and directors on a successful showcase--and congratulations to Elements on a successful event!

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