Spontaneous Combustion

Play Index: [Intro] [The Perfect Hat] [The Revolutionary and the Temp] [Dog Massacre] [The Ineffective Detective]

Spontaneous Combustion is a recurring festival of short plays sponsored by ManhattanTheatreSource, located in the heart of the West Village in New York City. The idea is that writers and actors get together on a Friday evening, at which time the writers pull a couple of actors' names out of a hat, get briefly acquainted with them, and then go write a five-minute play, tailored specifically to their assigned actors, due at noon the next day. Writers are given certain common parameters -- usually the first line of the play and some sort of cultural reference to work in somewhere else -- that give the plays shared elements and lend a certain cohesiveness to the theatrical experience as a whole.

Saturday, the actors and writers re-convene, make sure the play is within the five-minute limit, make any edits that may suddenly seem necessary, and then the actors begin rehearsing and committing the play to memory. On Sunday, each group gets 15 or 20 minutes with a director, there's a dress rehearsal at around 5:30, and at 8:00 the show goes up in front of a real, live, paying audience.

You'd think it would all be complete crap. But no: Somehow it all seems to come out as great big piles of fun every time. Here are the scripts I've done for it thus far.

Play Index: [Intro] [The Perfect Hat] [The Revolutionary and the Temp] [Dog Massacre] [The Ineffective Detective]

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