24HPP '08 - "The Order of the Four Legs." Part I: "Thank you for disambiguating."
By nature, Theatre Unbound's 24-Hour Play Project is prone to disaster. If an actor in a month-long run gets sick, her understudy steps in. If a writer in a 1-day event wakes up sick as a dog on writing day, you're screwed. This is why Matthew Everett, 24HPP playwright wrangler, was in something of a panic when he told me that my partner was down for count. After much scrambling, he recruited Ben Layne when one of the writers said, "My fiance's done some playwriting." Not the rousing endorsement we were hoping for, but desperate times call for desperate playwrights.
Any misgivings I had about Ben were dispelled when he sidled up to me during introductions and said, "We're closest to the good room. Want to run for it?" Epworth United Methodist lets us write in their church, but they don't love us enough to reprogram their thermostat for us. Since we write from 9 at night until 5 in the morning, you can imagine what that feels like. One of the few tolerable rooms is off the fellowship hall. I've never written in that room, but Ben "runs for it" like a pro, and the groans of 3 other teams followed us to our victory.
Ben took a different approach to this process than anyone else I've worked with. Usually, we assign character names and relationships, sketch a general scenario, and steamroll on, trusting elements to fall into place as we go. This year, the elements were:
- a large red button
- the line of dialogue: "You can give me two; I don't know what the hell I'm doing."
- the emotion schadenfreude
- the stage direction: stops, removes pants, continues
Ben's approach was to outline the majority of the plot first. I grew increasingly nervous as the minutes ticked past and our laptop screens continued to be blank, but it turns out to have been a brilliant scheme. We started writing at 11. We were done at 3. And unlike past years where fast writing begat script catastrophe, "The Order of the Four Legs" is pretty damned funny.
The Order of the Four Legs worships a crazy guy with a chair fetish, but the Order treats his observations about chairs ("The chair has four legs, like the blue-footed boobie...of myth.") as profound wisdoms. They believe he has instructed them to cleanse the Earth, so they've built a Doomsday device. Today is The Day of the Red Button - the day they activate the device and begin the Reupholstering. To pass the time 'til Armageddon, cult founder Charlotte and her sister Haley play Uno. When Haley, who thinks it's strip Uno ("Aren't all card games strip games?"), takes off her pants, she catches the attention of The Sacred One, who takes off his own pants and declares, "This man wears no pants, because freedom wears no pants." Charlotte realizes they've gotten it wrong: they're not supposed to cleanse the Earth; they're supposed to free it. Haley, who had trouble understanding what kind of red button they've been talking about, says, "Oh, I get it - a pushy button!" She pushes the red button. Blackout.
I've killed off characters during this event before, but this is the first play of mine to include the end of the world. It feels nice.