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Photos courtesy of UAB.
Lee Shackleford, far right, with students Andrew Taylor and Kara Ward-Tobin.
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Photos courtesy of UAB.
Students in a UAB 10-minute play. The festival is for mature audiences only.
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Photos courtesy of UAB.
Students in a UAB 10-minute play. The festival is for mature audiences only.
Theatre UAB’s annual Festival of 10-Minute Plays, now in its 14th year, is an opportunity for audiences to enjoy an evening of innovative short plays written by UAB students, faculty and staff.
The event usually offers a wide variety of emotion and a wild ride through every genre from drama to romance to slapstick.
And audiences should find themselves moved by the work of these young playwrights, said UAB assistant professor Lee Shackleford, the event’s founder. “There aren’t going to be a lot of depictions of ho-hum everyday life, but rather passionate journeys through the hearts of people experiencing joy, pain, fear and love,” he said.
Audiences can join the playwrights and actors in these passionate journeys when the Festival of 10-Minute Plays comes to the Odess Theatre at UAB March 6-10 at 7:30 p.m.
The plays and playwrights include: “An Absolute Rose,” by Ella Grace Smitherman; “Knock, Knock,” by Michael Cooper; “To Make Love Known,” by Benjamin Lundy; “The Deal,” by Pierce Alexander Edwards; “Visual Art 101,” by Brady Grimm; “Gratitude for Disservice,” by Bliss Bailey; and “The Vase,” by J. Marc Quattlebaum.
All the playwrights are students except for Quattlebaum, the theater’s prop master. The productions are helmed by Shackleford and four other directors.
Shackleford started the festival in 2003, inspired by a similar festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville.
The festival begins each spring in Shackleford’s playwriting class, where students write as many as 25 pieces.
By the following January, the plays are chosen and cast and actors, directors and designers begin work.
“It’s the greatest laboratory for playwriting imaginable,” Shackleford said. “A playwright can toss out an idea, however wild, and if it seems like there is any hope for its growth at all, they’re encouraged to write a draft. Then each writer gets feedback from the other writers in the class, and eventually a few of these scripts emerge as the ones we’ll produce for the festival.”
With rare exceptions, the plays — even at 10 minutes — follow a classical structure of setup, complication and resolution, according to Shackleford.
“A 10-minute play has to do everything a full-length play would do, only without the luxury of time,” he said.
Ten-minute plays are easier to write than full-length plays, according to Daniel Martin — artistic director of Theatre Downtown and a former UAB student — who presented his comedy, “Bag Boy,” in the 2009 festival. “You have to be precise,” Martin said. “There isn’t any time to waste on subplots or filler.”
Martin calls the festival “a fantastic staple” in local theater and “incredibly important in training new playwrights.”
Smitherman said playwrights can “get their work out there and maybe see if they have what it takes to write a [full-length] play.”
Cooper, whose “Knock, Knock” is a horror/thriller, said the festival “shines a light on the immense pool of talent that we have at UAB.”
The festival is for mature audiences only. Admission is $5. For information, call 975-2787 or go to uab.edu/cas/theatre.
Need more short plays?
The Festival of 10-Minute Plays at UAB isn’t the only opportunity Birmingham theater patrons have in March to enjoy a program of short plays.
Theatre Downtown at 2410 Fifth Ave. S. will host from March 8-25 a program of original shorts, all written by Artistic Director Daniel Martin and staged by up-and-coming local directors.
This is the second year Theatre Downtown has hosted the event, which was called “All in the Timing” and featured works by famed American playwright David Ives in 2016, according to Martin.
Martin created the festival “as a way of training directors, and for allowing people in the Birmingham community who might be interested in theater to give it a try for the first time,” he said. “A role in a short play is much less intimidating than one in, say, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’”
Last year, “audiences seemed to respond really well to the variety that the evening presents,” Martin said.
For details on the event, many of which are TBA at press time, call 565-8838 or go to theatredowntown.org.
– JESSE CHAMBERS
