14/48: The World's Quickest Theatre Festival

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14/48 will be at On the Boards
7100 W Roy St

July 31 & Aug 1; Aug 7 & 8

Friday and Saturday nights. Two shows nightly: 8:00pm and 10:30pm.

Tickets $18 online / $20 door / $35 All-Fest Pass

See you all there!!

14/48: The World's Quickest Theater Festival is fourteen plays conceived, written, designed, scored, rehearsed, and performed in forty-eight hours.

14/48 debuted November 1997 in Seattle to praise from audiences, performers, and critics. The combination of deadline, talent, speed, nerves, and genius inspiration served to strip away the creative inhibitions from more traditional theater, proving that, contrary to popular opinion, sometimes the first idea is the best.

Thursday, at 7:30pm: 7 writers, 7 directors, 7 musicians, 7 designers and about 30 actors will meet at On the Boards. They all have pencil, paper and an instruction to complete this sentence: "Theatre would be a lot better if there were 7 plays about ________."

The scraps of paper are put into a hat and a theme is chosen at random. The 7 writers get character parameters (2 men and 1 woman, or 2 women and 1 man); they are sent home to each write a 10 minute play about the theme. Everybody else drinks beer.

Friday, at 8:30am: Writers show up with scripts in envelopes numbered 1 through 7. Directors pick envelopes at random and read the scripts they have blindly chosen. Everybody drinks coffee.

9:00am: Actors show up or wake up. Actors' and actresses' names are in two separate hats. Directors blindly select actors depending on the script's character parameters. Casts are sent to rehearsal rooms.

10:30am: Writers go home and catch up on sleep. The band shows up. They create a theme song for the evening and create sound designs as needed for each script. Everyone keeps rehearsing.

Throughout the day are lunch, band rehearsal, costume and prop runs. That's right. A band. The 14/48 band. The greatest band of all time. Bow before them.

3:30 - 6:00pm: Tech rehearsal. Each play gets 20 minutes of tech rehearsal. A run thru? Those are for wimps and perfectionists.

8:00pm: The shows are performed in front of a live and paying audience. The audience receives pencil, paper and an instruction to complete this sentence: "Theatre would be a lot better if there were 7 plays about ________."

At the end of the show, the new themes are in the hat and one is randomly chosen. The seven writers go home and each writes a new 10-minute play with new character parameters. Everybody else gets ready for the 10:30pm show and wishes for a beer.

12:00am: Everybody has a beer and then goes home to do it all over again in 9 hours.

9:00am Saturday, January 10: The process restarts with the same talented bunch of folks and 7 brand new plays.

NOW: You go HERE and get your tickets. These shows sell out fast.

"Of course its entirely impossible for artists to work like this which is a really good reason for them to do so. It was some of the most fun Ive ever had in the theater."
-Seattle Weekly

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