The Grand Center Theatre Crawl has become one of my favorite theatre gigs. Two dozen theatre companies offering 20 minute presentations every half-hour (giving audiences time to traipse to one of the other spaces in the Grand Center area to see another one), running three hours on Friday and Saturday nights (and a Saturday afternoon). What I most love about it is the discipline it requires to write a 20 minute play. Now it doesn’t have to be that - many companies do excerpts of past or upcoming plays, or something else altogether. But I have taken on (this the third year in a row I’ve done this) the challenge of writing a real 20 minute play - something that can happen, realistically, in 20 minutes. The first year was TONIGHT’S SPECIAL, then came AUDITION, and now PATIENT #47. The first two were a bit lighter, entertainments that seemed to fit the breezy atmosphere of the Crawl. But this one took a different turn.
I was pleased with the script, the production, and the response. Colleen Backer (who worked with Midnight on AUDITION, was my partner in the scene, and we worked to catch the audience with a few surprises. As with Midnight’s first two Crawl shows, audiences strongly appreciated the chance to see a complete play, a real story. And we had fun.
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