Mignon McLaughlin:
Courage can't see around corners but goes around them anyway.

PRESS: COLUMNIST

No Place Like Home
Columnist: Betty Liedtke
As it appeared in the Chanhassen Villager
February 2, 2006

I was up late on Friday night, and slept in until almost noon on Saturday. It still didn't give me a full night's sleep, but it came close.

The reason I didn't get to bed until the wee hours of the morning is that I was taking part in the 24-Hour Play Project, a fundraiser for Theatre Unbound. I did this once before, three years ago, which is about how often I'm able to do anything that involves staying up and awake for most of the night.

How it works is that a dozen or so playwrights gather at the assigned location at 9 p.m. Friday. They are paired up by lottery drawing - although there was one group of three and I was in it - and they are all given a list of five "ingredients" that have to be included in the 10-minute play that they have until 5 a.m. to write. The ingredients are the same for everybody, and include things like a specific emotion, an action, a prop, and a line of dialogue. Each team also draws a slip of paper telling them the number and gender of their characters, based on the number of actors that are taking part in the project.

After the writers have turned in their scripts and gone home to get some sleep, the actors and directors take over. The directors each choose one of the scripts, select their cast, and rehearse during the day on Saturday. Saturday night is the actual fundraising part, which consists of a benefit featuring live entertainment, refreshments, a live and silent auction and, of course, a performance of the ten-minute plays - which have been written, rehearsed, and performed within a 24-hour period.

It's a little scary, seeing your work up on stage and wondering how it will go over with the audience. Especially if you're also worrying about whether things that seemed funny when you wrote them at 3 a.m. will even make sense once they see the light of day. But that doesn't hold a candle to how scary the experience is before it even starts. When I was worried not only about whether I'd be able to carry my weight in the writing of the script, but whether I'd even be able to stay awake long enough to do it. When I didn't have a clue as to who my writing partner might be, and whether we'd see eye to eye or have totally opposing viewpoints and ideas. And just after we started, when I had no idea how we were ever going to write a cohesive and entertaining script that included, in the course of ten short minutes, such things as a mask, an attempt at the splits, a commercial break, and the line, "We got confirmation of punk activity."

But it did come together, and as I watched the plays being performed on Saturday night, I marveled at how six teams owr writers could come up with such wildly different scenarios, using the same basic "ingredients" as each other. And how a group of actors and directors, after just a few hours of rehearsal, can take words on a page and turn them into a mixture of magic and real life, transforming them into a bright, colorful, lively, and highly entertaining experience. Most of all, though, I marveled at how something so scary can turn into something so exciting and wonderful.

And I felt very lucky to be a part of it.

I guess the secret is to never let being scared about doing something keep us from actually doing it. I've learned many times over - and again last weekend - that the thrill, the exhiliration, and the sense of pride and accomplishment more than make up for the fear, the doubts, and the worry. Not to mention the lack of sleep.

And they last way more than 24 hours.