Watching Hair Grow
Tomorrow I'll be participating in an unusual event for Ojai's WordFest in Ojai, CA. It's called Ojai-5. Five writers (I'm not one of them) will have five hours to write five original short plays, followed by five directors (I'm one of them!) directing actors for five hours of rehearsal, culminating in a performance of all five plays that evening at Theater 150, one of the two local theater companies in town. The concept is fascinating, since writing and rehearsing is a slow process.
What's more, there will be an audience. For the writing. For the rehearsal. And it's a contest. Yep. Not only does each production team (writer/director/actors) have to create an entire play, learn the lines and blocking, and then polish it to performance level in just two 5-hour sessions, but the audience will vote for the best of the five plays.
I'm glad I'm directing. Writing the play or learning the lines and blocking, and then performing it, is the tough part. Or is it?
Let me explain something about directing. If the play is excellent, the actors and writer get the credit. If the play is bad, typically the director is blamed. On occasion the writer will be blamed for a bad script, but that's usually by the actors and the director, who, before the reviews were in, thought it was a wonderful piece of theater.
But I'm off track.
This audience "participation" in the writing process intrigues me. Okay. I meant "confuse." I can understand the interest in sitting and watching a director working with the actors (although it's much like watching a movie being made: stop, go, stop, go), but paying to watch five writers sitting and thinking and scribbling? What exactly are they going to see? Nose-picking perhaps. Head-scratching, for sure. Glazed eyes looking into the near-distance of the room. And maybe even some sudden bursts of eyebrow-raising when a light bulb goes on inside a head.
It's kind of like watching a chess match. Without all the two-inch action.
I suspect it will be more like watching hair grow.
The Website for Ojai WordFest offers tickets to the 8 p.m. performance of all five plays for. . .five bucks. But if someone wants to come at 7 a.m. and watch for the whole day, beginning with the writing from 7 a.m. to 12 noon, it's $30. So do the math. Thirty dollars minus five leaves $25 for the ten hours of writing and rehearsal; split equally in half, that computes to paying $12.50 to watch hair grow.
Is that a bargain? I don't know. I've never attended a hair-growing event. Now, wait. If even one of these writers is bald. . . .
Categories: Author! Author!, It's Genius, The Play's the Thing
Tags: Essay Just for Laughs Out of the Shoot
First of all, read my mine, buddy.
The $5 for 5 plays? What a deal, and a totally different night out. Sounds fun.
$25 for the rest? Someone violated the no drinkin' before work's done rule.
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You got it right! Give me five!
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