My 24-hour festival script, "The Creature From the Backlot Lagoon"

This weekend I participated in Theatre@First's second charity twenty-four-hour play festival. Just like back in October, at 9pm Friday night we were given a line and a set piece and had to rush home and write a ten-minute play from scratch due to our production team by 8am the next day. It's a cool project; I'm really impressed by the actors and directors who stage it and get off book in less than a day, and all the proceeds were donated to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.

Full disclosure: this one is based on an idea I'd already had, and explored a bit in prose form back in grad school, which in turn grew out of a joke I remembered from a fan fic I read when I was a kid. But I was very, very tired— it's been a long week —and I thought it would be easy to rework the idea into the short play form.

I'm reasonably happy with it, though it has my typical first-draft problem of being way, way too wordy. And if I'm honest, I think I liked the one I wrote last time, "Love is Dead," about the necromancer going on a date and her sad zombie friend. But it is very funny still. It's got some clever ideas. And it amuses me that apparently I always write about monsters when I have to slap something together on very short notice. Zombies last time, fish people this.

( The Creature from the Backlot Lagoon by Phoebe Roberts )