Bethel Stu­dents Pre­sent 24-Hour The­atre

MISHAWAKA– Bethel Uni­ver­sity pre­sented 24-Hour The­atre on Sept. 24, a pro­duc­tion writ­ten, di­rected and per­formed by stu­dents and fea­tur­ing ap­pear­ances by Pro­fes­sor Chad Jay.  

“It was amaz­ing,” Jay said. “The best part of it all was I only showed up three hours be­fore the show and was given all the lines and told what to do. So hon­estly, I did not know what to do or say. So, that was fun.”  

The show fea­tured five plays, each about ten min­utes in length, and Jay ap­peared in every play. For his role, he was given ten ran­dom sen­tences (two from each of the play writ­ers) and told to ran­domly se­lect one when he was cued to say a line. Jay said this was his first time ever do­ing some­thing like this and that, since he con­sid­ered the per­for­mance a suc­cess, he would not mind do­ing it again. He did, how­ever, clar­ify he would not want to do it every year be­cause every­one would get too used to him. 

Don Hunter, chair of the­atre, art and mu­sic, helped the stu­dents with any is­sues or ques­tions they had dur­ing the process. 

 “Right now, I'm just try­ing to fig­ure out when I will be able to go to sleep,” Hunter said dur­ing a post-show state­ment.  

Hunter said for this pro­ject he stayed up all night on Sept. 23, help­ing the writ­ers with every­thing they needed, and left to go home around 8 a.m. Sept. 24. Af­ter get­ting a lit­tle sleep, Don came back an hour be­fore the show. Hunter said one of his fa­vorite things about the pro­ject is to see how it brings dif­fer­ent ma­jors to­gether. He en­joyed see­ing every­one work­ing well with each other to cre­ate an en­tire show in a short amount of time.  

Com­ing up next for the The­atre De­part­ment will be the “Al­ice in Won­der­land” pro­duc­tion on Nov. 10, 11 and 12.