"Don't Panic" - my 24-hour play festival script for Giving@First 2/19

Here is the script I submitted for this weekend's twenty-four hour charity play festival hosted by Theatre@First! It went really well; I actually think it was overall the strongest program Giving@First has done yet, scripts, acting, and directing.



For previous festivals I wrote about monsters, with "Love Is Dead" about a necromancer trying to online date, and "The Creature From the Backlot Lagoon" about a real-life movie monster. I even joked to my cast when we were paired up, "Knowing me, I will write about either monsters or Victorians."

What I ended up doing wasn't exactly Victorian... but God knows I already am drowning in the costuming, so that's the aesthetic we went with. I pulled an old scene fragment I did in 31 Plays in 31 Days 2016, cut the opening scenario out of it, and improved and expanded it into a ten-or-so-minute sketch. I've been describing it to people as "basically if Noel Coward did Weekend at Bernie's."

I've had an idea for a while for a full length comedy of manners version of that premise called, appropriately enough, "The Body." For me the humor comes primarily not necessarily from the characters trying to conceal the corpse, but from the meta-level of having a full-length play where an actor playing a dead body is onstage THE WHOLE TIME. I love the idea of the audience being like, "Oh, my God. He's just... dead there. He's just going to be dead there and flop around for the entire time." And him laying onstage inert until curtain call, upon which time he rises to take the final bow. So it was fun to do a small test of the idea in this setting.

I had a great cast too! I've worked with Sara before in the Hawking shows and she's always great. Kat was new to me, but demonstrated that she was very talented. I've seen Jason Merrill and Andrew Harrington work before, so I was excited to get to work with them. I was a little sheepish to cast Jason as the corpse, but his physical humor was SO GREAT and was a huge source of comedy for the show. And Maggie French, the director, was thoughtful and amazing; I'm really lucky we got paired up. She brought in the great idea that the con artists were the ones ultimately being conned.

So I'm pleased with how it went! As always, it's very wordy like my first drafts tend to be, and some of the lines are tricky to say because of the weird diction I was going for. But the cast managed to pull it off. The script is behind the cut, if you're curious.

( Don't Panic - Giving@First February 2019 )