The Salt Lake Community College Drama Club performed five separate productions as part of the 24-Hour Theatre & Arts Festival on Jan. 12 in the Black Box Theatre.
All five productions performed were created in a span of 24 hours and each featured a different director as well as different cast members. Each group was given a unique challenge to incorporate into their stories as well as a prop to be used within their context.
The SLCC Fashion Institute was also involved in costume design. Fashion students were provided with a painting and told to create a single piece of clothing inspired by that painting for the actors to wear.
SLCC alumnus Taylor Brown participated in the festival as a ‘wanderer’ in the production “Goodbye. Tucson. Goodbye.”
“About two months ago, Zac Curtis [the artistic director of the production team] sent out messages to a couple of alumni from the theatre department and asked if they’d like to come out and be a part of the performance,” says Brown. “We were told to show up at 7 p.m. the night of the performance, given the script and our queue lines to memorize, then we were to go out and perform it with actors and directors we had never met, with no direction or anything told to us, and then just see how the actors reacted to it.”
The production “The Earlier Than Breakfast Club” was a modern take on the classic film from the 1980s. It revolved around several teenagers from notably different backgrounds brought together in a detention center to discuss the details of their transgressions at school. The modern twist was a commentary on the school shooting epidemic in America, ending with all but one of the characters being slain by an unnamed and unseen gunman.
“We had so much freedom, we were told to go out and take it as we would and then it’s up to the actors to figure it out,” says Brown. “I don’t know what their process was on how to figure that out, because as an actor myself, you know, I don’t know how I’d react to that.”
