Aliens in the Ice Cream Parlor

Last month I participated in the All in a Day 24-Hour Play Festival at the new Coralville Performing Arts Center.  It was cosponsored by

City Circle

and Dreamwell Theatre companies and was the fourth time I’ve been involved.  Here’s how it worked:  seven writers, seven directors, and almost forty actors gathered on a Friday night at the Coralville Public Library (there were signups online ahead of time to determine who was doing what).  Seven teams were created by random drawings, each consisting of one writer, one director and an assortment of actors.  The writers drew a genre, a setting, and a “trope” (a specific line or a character type that needs to appear in the script), the teams chatted for a few minutes about ideas and casting possibilities, and then the writers went home and wrote a ten-minute script, which they emailed to the producer by 7 AM the next day.  The directors and actors met up at 8 AM to read the script and got busy blocking, rehearsing and memorizing.  At 8 PM, the seven plays were presented to an audience. 

The first year I did this, I signed up to be an actor and ended up playing a hardboiled crime photographer in a “noir” detective genre play written by my friend Joe.  It was set on the Empire State Building and someone had to say the line “Pretty is as pretty does.”   I’ve been a writer the last three times and find that job somewhat less stressful.   My first draw was a western set in a castle and last year I drew a “noir” drama set at a cast party with the trope, “wrong turn at Albequerque.”  Both of them were fun to write because I was comfortable with the genres.  But this time I drew my hated and dreaded genre:  science fiction. 

I love Star Wars and read Ray Bradbury as a kid, but I’m no hardcore sci fi fan.  I was intimidated, to say the least.   Our play had to be set in an ice cream parlor and had to have a “creepy child” character who creeps everyone out.  As it turned out, our team of actors included several sci fi fans and a guy who had managed the Great Midwestern Ice Cream Parlor for years.  The director had been trained in Las Vegas as a fight choreographer.  Another real plus was that a petite adult actress was willing to play the role of a creepy child.  (There were several very young actors involved in the plays, but none seemed sufficiently creepy.)   After I went home, I mulled over some ideas with my long-suffering husband and called my son in college (a real sci fi expert).   We all agreed that a plot involving aliens was the way to go.  I had an alien patronize the ice cream parlor in order to lower his body temperature.  He had been sent to investigate earth as a possible future site for his kind, but discovered that global warming had already compromised this planet.  Because he looked perfectly normal, no one believed him, except for the creepy child, who ended up leaving with him in the spaceship (offstage).  I decided not to write in any fight choreography, figuring the other constraints were challenging enough.

It was a great evening.  Our alien won the Best Actor award, and we watched some really funny plays—a western set on an elevator, a tragedy on a toboggan slope, and a fairy tale that had to include a fatal disease.  I no longer fear sci fi—in fact, I asked my son to recommend some books for me, and I would welcome more recommendations.