48 Hour Play Festival produced an hour that drove you crazy

Photo by Katherine Rountree

This past weekend 3rd Act put on the 48 Hour Play Festival at the Mondanaro Theater in Crites Hall. The competition consisted of two days of intense work for writers, directors and cast in order to produce a play from start to finish within 48 hours. A prompt for the scripts was released at 5 p.m. on Thursday to writers who were given 24 hours to submit a 10 minute play under 10 pages with the following prompt: a specific location in Savannah with an unresolved conflict and containing the line “I want so many things that they are driving me crazy,” from “A Raisin in the Sun.”

From the plays submitted, five were anonymously chosen by a board from 3rd Act and sent out to actors who had auditioned earlier in the week by Friday night at 8 p.m. Actors and company arrived on Saturday morning and had one day to memorize and rehearse the plays before the performances on Saturday night at 8 p.m.

The five plays chosen — “Museum,” “563 Miles,” “Superwoman Don’t Live on MLK,” “Tag Along Tess” and “Picnic at the Park”— were all beautifully performed regardless of the intense time limits set for them. With the exception of “Tag Along Tess,” the plays were set in present day Savannah and focused on themes relating to students and young adults almost exclusively.

“Museum” highlighted the difficulty that many SCAD students face in explaining their artwork to others. This play showed the humor of explaining a graphic subject while also exploring the deeper meanings of conveying emotion through art. “563 Miles“ touched on the heartbreak of long-distance relationships in college. Outside of student life, “Superwoman Don’t Live on MLK” dealt with the current changes happening on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and surrounding areas under urbanization.

“Tag Along Tess“ was the only play set outside of the modern day and focused on Savannah in a post-apocalyptic time. The most humorous of the shows, it was both comical and real as it dealt with social issues in a world in turmoil. Closing out the evening, “Picnic in the Park” also explored college relationships but mostly dealt with the confusing aspects of love and lust.

Second-year performing arts major Zach Bolla from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania was part of the cast of “563 Miles.”

“We walked in fresh this morning,” said Bolla. With only a little break during the day’s rehearsals most cast and crew worked nonstop in order to put on the event.

The productions of the festival ran like ones that had been performed dozens of times and without a single discernible error or hiccup.