Andrew Hungerford, producing artistic director at Know Theatre, refers to the upcoming three-day One-Minute Play Festival there as “this fantastic machine.”
That’s because it has to be finely tooled to allow for nine directors and more than 70 actors to rehearse and perform 60 one-minute plays written just for Cincinnati. It sounds like chaos. But Know Theatre, presenting this event for the fourth year, knows how to transform it into a celebration of local talent. And it will indeed be that when it occurs Sunday-Tuesday (Aug. 5-7).
Nationally, the festival is now in its 10th year. But even though it tours, each presentation is locally crafted. Founded by its artistic producing director, Dominic D’Andrea, it has its roots in New York City. Its mission is to “act as a catalyst for building community and to provide local artists with an artistic and theatrical outlet to explore the world around them and to build a body of work,” says Caitlin Wees, the festival’s associate producer.
The “fantastic machine” to which Hungerford refers describes the way the festival operates in over 25 cities nationally, creating an instant collaboration with an arts group in each one.
The collaboration here began with Know Theatre compiling a list of local playwrights and directors to send to the festival team. This year’s list includes over 30 playwrights, each of whom wrote two one-minute plays. The festival team then curated the play submissions and clumped them in groups of six to eight one-minute plays.
“It’s kind of like 60 heartbeats of storytelling,” Wees says.
It can seem inconceivable that the plays could be performed back-to-back and have any coherence as a whole. But they do.
“When you put it together, there usually seems to be a rising theme that goes through all of them, which is super-fascinating,” Hungerford says.
“When they say one minute, they really do mean one minute,” says Tamara Winters, associate artistic director for Know Theatre. She describes the clumps as rapid-fire shots of theater that come together to form an hour-long performance.
“You have a moment to catch up every time the clumps change,” she says.
As for what audiences can expect to feel after the performance, Winters describes it as a party-like atmosphere. “There’s just this sort of electric vibe to it,” she says.
To be clear, these thematic clumps for one-minute plays are not assigned or suggested by the festival in advance. They come from local voices.
“It’s more interesting and more fun for our directors and our actors to draw their own inferences from the work,” Wees says.
The week of the festival, Wees lands in each city to coordinate and shepherd the event into existence. The day before the festival opens, all of the directors, actors and technicians meet with Wees in the performance space to go through the entire show.
“Because they’re only one minute, it happens crazy fast,” Hungerford says. “At the end of the day, you have a show.”
This rehearsal acts as the first and only run-through, but according to Wees, it offers much more than that. The rehearsals provide the opportunity for all of the directors and actors to network, swap stories and bond as a community.
“It’s such a fun day,” Wees says.
This year’s festival will see a small but impactful change as it moves from the Know Theatre’s MainStage space to the SecondStage. There were several reasons for this, Hungerford says. The current MainStage presentation, Whisper House, has a set that needs to stay in place during its nights off. But the change is also an effort to bring viewers more into the action.
“Whenever we do shows in the downstairs space, it automatically feels like a party,” Hungerford says. “You get into the space and it’s instant community. The community aspect that comes out of it is really lovely.”
As a result, he describes the One-Minute Play Festival as a sort of “barn raising” in which each play comes together for just a short, intense period, “and then it lives gloriously for just three short performances.”
“You know, theater is ephemeral,” Hungerford jokes.
The One-Minute Play Festival takes place Aug. 5-7 at Know Theatre in Over-the-Rhine. Shows are at 8 p.m. each night. Tickets/more info: knowtheatre.com
