MIA Drama Students Race the Clock

When Chris Dayett signed up his Marco Island Academy drama students for the 24 Hour Plays, he had no way of knowing what they might be able to do in one day. On Saturday night, October 3, on the Rhine Stage in the school gymnasium, Dayett and an appreciative audience found out his students are quite capable of working under pressure.

The 24 Hour Plays is a theater process where all of the writing, rehearsing, and performing takes place in 24 hours. 

“The 24 Hour Plays is an organization that does this all over the country, all over the world,” Dayett said. “You buy into the program just like you would get the license to do a show and you get to call it whatever you want. We called it The 24 Hour Plays, Marco Island Academy. Your writers have 24 hours to write, cast, rehearse, tech, and then perform their brand new plays. Nobody knows what these plays are going to be about. You can’t even come with an idea of what you want the play to be because you haven’t met your actors yet. This was kind of fun for them to have the opportunity.”

Dayett’s students responded to the challenge by putting together four plays that ran about five minutes each: The Art of Distraction, by Joaquin Perez, Cake of the Century, by Camryn Bland, 20$ an Hour, by Ayla Vatansever, and The Gift of Giving, by Colin Hinton.

“The writers went into the writers’ writing room and they wrote till 11:00 last night,” Dayett said. “I sent them home. They could write at home, but they had to be out of the school by 11. And then they all came back about 9:45 this morning with their scripts finished and then started rehearsing. It’s a long, long day, but it’s fun. It was really fun to see the kids bonding with each other and taking ownership of this. I’m usually the one here working on all the things behind the scenes. I let them do all this themselves so they could see exactly what goes into working into a production and taking ownership of this and really making this their production.”

Dayett was proud of his young thespians as they took their curtain call.

“I’m really impressed with all that they were able to do,” he said. “It was very weird for me to be sitting out in the lobby all day. I’m so proud of them because what you saw tonight was my first time seeing this. I would peek in and just make sure everything was working and I would get the thumbs up.”

Dayett said the student experience was a good one.

“This morning,” Dayett said, “within an hour into it, they were saying, ‘Can we do this again next year?’ So I knew it was something that I was hoping it would be. Something that they would want to continue to do.”

And the community support was there, too.

“I was really excited to see so many supporters,” Dayett said, “everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.”