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PAST PHOTOS |
DEWEY'S
NIGHTMARE:
The Library Play Challenge Seven playwrights. At the Gene Frankel Theatre,
New York, NY Seven playwrights and five artists met at Brooklyn’s Reanimation Library on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 to pick books AT RANDOM from the shelves:
After selecting their books, the playwrights and artists had exactly ONE WEEK to create a play, piece of art, or song based on their book. The day before the show, directors and actors were given randomly-selected, anonymous scripts to look over. The day of the show, each play was given ONE HOUR to rehearse in the theatre. After the show, the audience voted for their favorite play, at which point everyone found out who wrote which play. The running-order for the show was also random. Nice, eh?
All of the profits from the
event (over $350) were donated to 826NYC (www.826NYC.org),
a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting
students ages 6-18 with their creative and expository writing skills.
Does it get any better than that?
*** "The latter was part of a project
called Dewey's
Nightmare wherein seven playwrights were blindfolded and
led into Beccone's library with the assignment of picking a book at
random. With whatever they selected they had seven days to write a
short play to be performed together at a fund raiser for the
McSweeney's affiliated youth-writing center 826NYC. When Eric Sanders, the project's
creative director, met with Beccone about the project, Beccone warned
him: 'You realize there aren't any novels here?' he said. 'And you
realize that you might end up with a play called Atlas of the Human
Brain in Section, right?' Exactly, came Sanders' response."
- Jeff Severns Guntzel, Minneapolis City Pages "Dewey's Nightmare
was a library play challenge with seven playwrights, seven random
library books, seven days to write a 10-minute play, a director and two
actors with an hour's rehearsal. It could have been stupid or banal or
... well, it was
wonderful." "...A highly compelling
multi-disciplinary event."
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DEWEY'S
NIGHTMARE: With: |
