IF YOU GOWhat: Festival of Five-Minute Plays.When: 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday.Where: Mountain Arts Community Center, 809 Kentucky Avenue, Signal Mountain.Admission: $5.Phone: 886-1959.Website: www.signalmountainmacc.org.
When you only have five minutes, there’s not a lot of time to waste.
“You’re really forced as a playwright when you’re writing under these restrictions to focus on the characters and what’s happening between them because you don’t have time to establish scene and mood,” said Steve Disbrow. “You have to get right to it and you have to establish it with the dialogue.”
Disbrow is one of the co-producers of A Festival of Five-Minute Plays, which is exactly like what it sounds: nine plays, all written by local authors, that are five minutes apiece. Because of the time constraint, writers were also forced to create works that did not require large sets or props, costumes, makeup or crowd scenes.
Disbrow and colleague Kevin Bartolomucci, both of whom have a background in improvisational comedy, came up with the idea when they participated in a project, Late Bloomers, at the Chattanooga Theatre Centre, which featured five- and 10-minute plays.
After that, they mused on the idea of doing another series of micro-plays that would “give local playwrights a chance to exercise their brains,” Disbrow said.
They wanted to give some recognition to local playwrights and actors, as well as a chance for them to practice their craft. They put out a call for scripts, selected from among the submissions and recruited local actors and directors.
The Festival of Five-Minute Plays takes place this weekend at the Mountain Arts Community Center on Signal Mountain.
While there were no thematic guidelines, Disbrow said, several of the plays do focus on romantic relationships, including one that features a couple interviewing each other to see if they’re a good match and another that depicts a couple stranded on a roadside and encountering “unsavory types.”
The writers and directors range in age from 20s to 40s.
“We’ve got housewives and moms and dads and folks from every walk of life,” Disbrow said. “Everybody wants to write a play at some point in their lives, and this is a nice simple way for [people] to have that opportunity.”