10 minutes of fame

The curtain will rise on the School of Drama's third annual 10-Minute Play Festival tonight.

This year's festival consists of seven short plays directed by associate professor Shanga Parker and graduate students Lydia Fort and Justin Emeka.

Every play will be performed in each of the festival's eight nights. The show's running time should be about an hour and 45 minutes, including intermission, according to Parker. This year's plays also don't have any unifying theme, he said.

"They're all different," he said. "There isn't really anything that ties them together thematically."

He added that the plays are tied together in style, if not substance.

"Most of them are funny," he said. "[They're about the human condition as we face it in 2004."

Not all the plays will clock in at exactly 10 minutes, though.

"The 10-minute play form usually is more of a form than a description," Parker said. "It's called a 10-minute play, and it's usually longer than that. These, for the most part, I think they average out to be about 10 minutes."

The plays that will be closest to that time limit will be this year's four original plays, written by students and professional writers.

"We really -- particularly with the original plays -- tried to keep them as close to that limit as possible," Parker said. "It's more difficult, I think, to write a play that comes in at 10 minutes than one that comes in at 15 or 16 minutes."

Graduate student Dawson Nichols wrote two of the original plays, undergraduate Nicholas Hoover wrote a third and professional writer Steven Deitz wrote the last.

Besides Nichols and Hoover, more than 35 students assist in the festival, including crew and actors. Parker said the large number of people involved made the process hectic at times.

"It's a bit like wrangling cats, trying to put this thing together," Parker said.

Despite the production's 25 crew members, most of the plays will feature minimal sets to better fit the stories, Parker said.

"What we tried to do is match what happens on the stage, in terms of scenery and props, with the brevity of the play," he said. "The world can only be created so much in a short story; so much more of it has to do with the narrative."