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Forty Plays in Eighty Minutes

Students in the J-Term course Ensemble and Experimental Acting brought a month of weird and wild work to the stage

For the entire month of January, a group of Carthage students wrote play after play after play. Two-minute plays about romance, religion, nostalgia, escape. About avoidance, attraction, work, love and laundry.

About Carthage.
About conventions.
About breaking conventions.
About parking.

"We had to come to class every day with a new two-minute play," said Steve Horton, '11, one of 20 students in Neil Scharnick's Ensemble and Experimental Acting course this J-Term. At the start of each class, the students cast their plays and performed them, right then and there.

If you're doing the math, that's 20 plays a day for roughly 18 days — or 360 plays over J-Term.

They showed off the best of the bunch in "Bloody Slutty Sloths Present SPACE MAGIC," Carthage's energy-filled take on Neo-Futurism. The students presented 80 plays in two 80-minute shows Feb. 4-5 in Carthage's Studio Theatre.

Taking Neo-Futurism North

Prof. Scharnick launched the Ensemble and Experimental Acting course three years ago, in order to mount a production of The Serpent, which was devised by The Open Theater company in New York in the 1960s. "That was an experimental acting piece that required a certain approach to acting," he said. "We spent the whole class pretending we were The Open Theater company, doing the exercises and work that they did to develop that play."

This year, Prof. Scharnick wanted to focus on Neo-Futurism, an approach to performance that is based on honesty, brevity and a connection with the audience. The Neo-Futurists are an experimental theatre troupe in Chicago that was founded in 1988 and inspired by the Italian Futurist movement of the early 20th century.

"The Neo-Futurists have the longest running play in Chicago, a play called 'Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,' " Prof. Scharnick said. "It's 30 plays in 60 minutes, and every week, some plays get subbed out and some new plays get subbed in. It's almost a competition with themselves to see if they can do it. Some of the plays will be deadly serious; some will be very funny. But it's two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, in rapid sequence. So as an audience member, it's almost overwhelming."

He wanted to bring that rapid pace and explosive energy to Carthage because "it's the sort of topic that could get students writing creatively, not just performing. We're celebrating the short, spontaneous act, and J-Term seemed like the right time to do it."

Every Class, A New Challenge

During the course, Prof. Scharnick led students through exercises devised by avant-garde theatre artists as the students examined theatre conventions from character to curtain.

"A challenge for one class was to condense or distill a novel or movie into a two-minute play. We had the two-minute 'Harry Potter' and the two-minute 'Wizard of Oz.' "

"Each class period, there was a new challenge," he said. "One statement from a Futurist manifesto was, 'It's stupid to say in 100 pages what you can say in one.' So a challenge for one class was to condense or distill a novel or movie into a two-minute play. We had the two-minute 'Harry Potter' and the two-minute 'Wizard of Oz.' They quickly cast and performed them right in the beginning of class."

Another assignment was to take a convention of theatre — think the spotlight or the curtain — and give it new meaning. "Their job was to think about theatre and how it traditionally operates, and turn it on its head," Prof. Scharnick said.

In the third week of the course, students wrote site-specific plays to perform around campus. The class trekked from building to building in the snow, stopping in parking lots, at Einstein's Bagels, in the Fritsch Meditation Chapel, outside the bookstore, near Kissing Rock, in the A. F. Siebert Chapel, and in their residence halls. At each spot, the students in the ad hoc casts staged the plays for the rest of the class — and anyone else who happened to be watching.

Learning the Rules, and Then Breaking Them

Many of the students who took the course are non-theatre majors who wanted to focus on creative writing or improvisation. Steve Horton, a philosophy and history major, is a member of Carthage's Stand-Up Comedy Club and Merely Players improvisational comedy troupe. He had five plays in the final show: "Manipulation," which he co-wrote with student Derek Nelson, '14; "I Love You Barstool," "Variations on the Theme of Eye Contact," "A Two-Minute Reenactment of 'Finding Nemo' with the Juxtaposition of Karl Marx and Captain Ahab," and "Voices."

"Theatre should force itself down the audience's throat."

"I try to have every piece I write reveal some sort of truth about me, but at the same time, I like to make the audience laugh when I do it," Steve said. "In Neo-Futurism, there are no characters. We don't make up stories; everything we say is truthful to us as individuals. So every play reveals something about the actor who wrote it or the actors in it.

"We wanted to affect the audience for hours after the show ended, and give them a new perspective on life," he continued. "Theatre should force itself down the audience's throat."

Prof. Scharnick said it's important that theatre students explore different approaches to performance. "Acting I and Acting II, our standard acting cycle, are chiefly about teaching the established best practices of Stanislavski and realistic acting. Acting III is chiefly about classical acting," he said. "In the 21st century, there have been a lot of plays written and a lot of approaches developed that are not about either good, classical technique or psychological realism. This class is designed to equip our students with the tools they may need in that theatre arena. We like our students to have these experiences to know that different scripts may demand a different approach."