A disappointment

The Theatre Department at my university has a group called 2nd Studio Productions, and every semester this group has what they call the 24-Hour Theatre.  The idea is to write, stage, and memorize a 10-minute play before performing it 24 hours after the writer receives the writing prompt.  Students sign up as writers, the tech crew, directors, or as actors.

Last semester, I signed up to be a writer, and it was a great experience.  Seeing the play performed before an audience that soon after writing it was like instant gratification for a writer.  Most of the mini-plays were  sub-par, as I bet you can imagine.  The writers had grand ideas for what this mini play could be, and they tried to squash a huge, complex plot into this 10-minute play.  The audience was left confused.  I can remember three of the plays from last year which actually worked, one of which was mine.  I'm not saying this because of conceit or anything, because other people mentioned it to me.  I knew a comedy would work best for such a short time frame, and I knew the plot could not be too complicated.  So I wrote a mini-play which had an entire story line and no strange concepts the audience would not understand.

Anyway.  I signed up again this semester because last semester was so fun.  I showed up to the first meeting and they pulled all the writers aside (there were around eight of us) to tell us that they had decided to add a social for everyone after the show.  Cool, right?  This meant they were only going to have five mini-plays, so three of us couldn't be writers.  The guy talking to us asked if any of us could be actors, but none of us said we would.  Then he asked which of us had written a script before.  We all raised our hands.  Props to him for trying to narrow it down, right?  He asked who was a freshman, and none of us were.  Then someone said they "didn't want to have to play this card, but this will be (their) last 24-Hour Theatre," because she will be graduating.  Some other people chimed in with similar comments, and then the guy talking with us picked five writers, randomly but taking into account those who wouldn't be able to do it again.  I was one of the three who was cut.  Another writer caved and said he would act instead, and the third person was asked by another writer to tag-team a mini-play with them.  The guy talking apologized profusely, I said it was fine, and I walked away.

I'm disappointed.  Not devastated, but I was looking forward to doing this.  I was going to write a fun blog post, too, giving updates along the way.  Instead, you get to read this.  One thing that makes me feel better about it is that the guy who chose did not take writing skill into account, so maybe I would have been chosen then; I'm not sure.

Something that tries to improve my mood: I submitted a poem to the university literary journal a while ago.  I have a friend who helps decide which submissions get into the journal.  When they read the submissions and decide, they do not look at the name of the person who submitted it.  The other day, my friend asked me if I had submitted, I said I did, and then she asked what I had submitted.  When I told her, she told me they had all thought a professor had written the poem. :-)