All-nighter: Nightingale Theater groups to hammer out full performance in 24 hours
By KAREN SHADE, 7/14/2007
Nightingale Theater owners Sara and John Cruncleton are ready to bar the playhouse doors for "Locked In: The 24-Hour Play Experiment," to be presented Saturday night at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center.
By the time you read this article, a group of people locked in at the Nightingale Theater already will have started working on a new play they intend to hatch before the day is out.
Writers, actors, musicians and other creative types are hammering out all the details -- script, music, direction -- for "Locked In: The 24-Hour Play Experiment," scheduled for Saturday night at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center.
Presented by Theatre Pops and the Nightingale Theater, "Locked In" is a true exercise in creative harmony-on-a-deadline.
A story concept for what eventually will wind up on the PAC Liddy Doenges Theatre stage has been carefully avoided thus far, said John Cruncleton, Nightingale owner and project facilitator.
The goal is not to have a show made up of stand-alone works clustered together under a title.
"We're going to be continually blending the pieces throughout the evening so that we're going to end up with one play derived out of the material," Cruncleton said.
A top-secret, well-known dramaturg will be working with the 26 individuals taking part in this immersion project -- locked in with the whole lot since 8:01 p.m. Friday.
The "Locked In" world will definitely have its own rules and species of logic that, Cruncleton said, will force its participants to break out of an ordinary mindset.
"We want to kick people in the head, basically, and get them out of their daily objectivity, kind of take them into a state of artistic dissociation," he said.
"Locked In" works within a set of parameters that might easily have been drawn up by the Mad Hatter. Similar to the "hive-mind" mentality of Nightingale's regular 50 Swats writers' shows, the immersion experiment has the potential to be unlike anything else showing at this year's SummerStage Festival.
"If people are not willing to play, if they're not willing to come into this environment to see where it leads them, then they're not going to be getting anything out of the process. You have to be willing and able to enter into the process," Cruncleton said. "Essentially, it means being willing to play."
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Liddy Doenges Theatre, Tulsa Performing Arts Center, Second Street and Cincinnati Avenue
Tickets: $10-$12
Tickets are available at the PAC box office, by phone at 596-7111 and online at www.MyTicketOffice.com.