{"id":11302,"date":"2022-08-29T18:36:06","date_gmt":"2022-08-29T22:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/?p=11302"},"modified":"2022-08-30T06:33:35","modified_gmt":"2022-08-30T10:33:35","slug":"overnight-sensations-lasting-partnerships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/overnight-sensations-lasting-partnerships\/","title":{"rendered":"Overnight Sensations, Lasting Partnerships"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\n\tS<\/span>ometimes the best ideas take shape under a little pressure. Cue Todd Ristau, who designed and founded the Playwright\u2019s Lab at Hollins University, Hollins\u2019 playwriting M.F.A. program, and has served as program director since its launch in 2007. Back in 2006, however, Ristau was still working as a literary associate at Mill Mountain Theatre (MMT) and was tasked with a last-minute creative quandary.<\/p>\n

\"Overnight\u201cMill Mountain Theatre was trying to figure out some kind of fun event to get community members and donors involved in new, nontraditional ways,\u201d said Ristau. \u201cThey were going to do something like a talent show, and I was asked to come up with something different.\u201d At the same time, Ristau was forming the playwriting master\u2019s program at Hollins, an intensive three-year degree emphasizing new-play development. \u201cI wanted to steer [this new event] in the direction of everything that Mill Mountain wanted involving lifting up and celebrating new plays.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Ristau took a little inspiration from some other theatre projects and came up with the concept of Overnight Sensations, a festival of original \u201ctimed\u201d plays, all written, rehearsed, and staged within a single day. \u201cI was under the gun to come up with an inventive idea,\u201d said Ristau. \u201cSo I took that feeling of being under the gun and incorporated that into our event.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every summer since, six playwrights are randomly paired with six directors. The writers and directors then draw from a hat different prompts and pre-selected casts, and the playwrights have to come up with ten-minute plays overnight, which the theatre troupes, composed of actors and non-actors alike, present the following evening. These Overnight Sensations have become a must for the Blue Ridge summer theatre crowd. \u201cIt\u2019s a great immersion into the madcap mania that is any theatrical festival,\u201d said Ristau. \u201cWe just do it in a micro-brewed way.\u201d<\/p>\n

“It’s a terrific thing to have a collaboration between an academic theatre and a professional theatre so we can both contribute to the ongoing development of new work and each other\u2019s success.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps best of all, Overnight Sensations is completely free, \u201cfriend-raising not fund-raising,\u201d as Ristau puts it. The festival of mini-plays also serves as community outreach by casting Hollins students, faculty, and guest artists as well as lots of local talent and public figures such as former Roanoke Mayor Nelson Harris, local TV personalities Keith Humphry and Natalie Faunce Soucie, and even Mark Armstrong, artistic director of New York City\u2019s The 24 Hour Plays, one of the original timed theatre projects.<\/p>\n

The creative collaboration didn\u2019t stop there, however. In 2013, Ristau worked with Producing Artistic Director Ginger Poole to launch the Hollins-Mill Mountain Winter Festival of New Works, which, true to its name, produces new, compelling works every January at MMT. (The last two years were held online because of the pandemic.) Many of the plays are selected from the Playwright\u2019s Lab, and a dozen or so guest professionals are invited to watch the staged readings and offer feedback to the student writers, directors, and performers. \u201cOne of the great things about the partnership is that it allows our students to get some experience in a professional theatre space,\u201d said Ristau.<\/p>\n

\"OvernightThe Winter Festival of New Works actually evolved out of the sudden success of one work from the Playwright\u2019s Lab: Samantha Macher\u2019s Brechtian comedy The Arctic Circle (and a recipe for Swedish pancakes)<\/em>. \u201cJason Goldberg, founder of Original Works Publishing, was one of the guest artists,\u201d recalled Ristau. \u201cHe was so impressed by the play that he pledged to publish it as soon as it got at least six performances in a real theatre with a review in a legitimate paper.\u201d So Ristau approached his old friends at MMT and produced the play on the Waldron Stage. Famed Off-Broadway director Robert Moss, who was Hollins faculty at the time, volunteered to direct. Moss was equally bowled over. Renowned for having debuted numerous now-famous plays at his Playwrights Horizons Theatre in NYC, including Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine\u2019s smash hit musical Sunday in the Park<\/em> and George and Alfred Uhry\u2019s classic comedy-drama Driving Miss Daisy<\/em>, Moss brought The Arctic Circle<\/em> to the Playwright\u2019s Horizon Theatre School in a space they call The White Box.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think of The Arctic Circle<\/em> as the first Winter Festival, even though we didn\u2019t call it that then,\u201d said Ristau. \u201cBased on that initial success and partnership between MMT and the Playwright\u2019s Lab, we decided why don\u2019t we just make this an ongoing thing, and we started doing a few shows at Mill Mountain every winter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since then, the Winter Festival of New Works has fostered other plays that have won awards and commendations and gone on to have successful runs in New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. In all, the Hollins-MMT collaboration has staged more than 120 individual works in the last 17 years. And even though Ristau is currently immersed in this summer\u2019s Overnight Sensations, he\u2019s already looking ahead to the next Winter Festival, which for the first time in two years will take place in person and also at Hollins Theatre.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just a deeply meaningful and naturally evolving partnership,\u201d said Ristau about the relationship between MMT and Hollins. \u201cAnd it\u2019s a terrific thing to have a collaboration between an academic theatre and a professional theatre so we can both contribute to the ongoing development of new work and each other\u2019s success.\u201d<\/p>\n

By Jeff Dingler M.F.A. ’22, a recent graduate of the M.F.A. in creative writing program.<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ometimes the best ideas take shape under a little pressure. Cue Todd Ristau, who designed and founded the Playwright\u2019s Lab at Hollins University, Hollins\u2019 playwriting M.F.A. program, and has served as program director since its launch in 2007. Back in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11311,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[133],"class_list":["post-11302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-summer-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11302"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11529,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11302\/revisions\/11529"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}