"Late Night Fast and Loose"

What do you get when you take four writers, four directors and twelve actors and give them just 24 hours to create and produce four totally new one-act plays?  The most upbeat and lively late night show on (or off, as the case may be) Melrose Avenue.

The equation all adds up to Late Night Fast and Loose at the Sacred Fools Theater.

Here's how it works: at 11:00pm on Friday night, four writers congregate and some suggestions are thrown into a hat.  These "variables" are drawn from the hat by the writers and become the basis for the plays they will compose overnight.  How they do it, exactly, is anyone's guess.  But the result is four completely original theater pieces.

Twelve hours, the writers reconvene with their finished scripts and each is given to a different director.  Then the four directors "cast" the plays by pulling actors' names from the hat.

In the following hours, each team gets all of 45 minutes of actual stage time to rehearse. The rest of the time, they are rehearsing in their cars, their living room, the parking lot or anywhere else they're not going to get kicked out of. There is no "time to prepare."  No getting with The Method.   Because twelve hours later, the curtain goes up and the result, whatever it is, is performed... Ladies and gentlemen, it's both opening and closing night!  This process repeats itself every weekend.

The result was not only fast and loose, but fun, unpredictable, and impressive.

First, you would have to have a lot of confidence and a strong stomach to even undertake such a project.  As there is no time for writer's block and certainly no time to relearn forgotten lines, these folks are sharp.  The mere thought of composing a totally original script -- idea, story, characters, and lines having nothing more to go on than two suggestions (in one case these were "snow" and "lunch lady") -- is enough to make a less adventurous writer pull the covers over his head, especially when the writer couldn't possibly write for a certain director with one or two certain cast members in mind since he doesn't even know who these folks will be!

Further, for a script never read by the director and then shoved in his hands to produce for performance, is a task most directors would never volunteer for.  And then to have it blocked, rehearsed and performance-ready in just half a day is almost masochistic.

Finally, consider the actors who were out there in the hotseat with everything riding on them.  You don't forget a line (you just learned that day). You cannot forget a step or miss an entrance... there is no time.

Now Playing Saturdays @ 11pm Sept 18 - Oct 16, 2004 at the Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive, Hollywood. Between Normandie and Vermont and east of (310) 281-8337

For more information go to http://www.sacredfools.org/Misc/FastandLoose/Main.htm