A lot can happen in 10 minutes. That’s 600 seconds. For Emerald Theatre Company (ETC), 10 minutes is all it will take for one vignette to be performed in the 7th Annual 10 Minute Play Festival, which will have 10 vignettes total.
For this year’s festival, all the one-scene plays adhere to a theme, “Remember When,” with the playwrights having been asked to set their plays in a moment of historical significance. The resulting original plays, which were selected by a panel from ETC’s annual open-call playwriting competition, range from the 14th century to the present day. “The great thing for this particular play festival this year is that some people will not be familiar with some of these moments in history, and then several will be,” says Hal Harmon, ETC’s co-artistic director. “So those of us who are a little long in the tooth can remember things that happened in the ’70s and the ’60s.”
But more often than not, these plays are not about the historical events during which they’re set, but rather about people whose lives were affected by them. Take the bent-identity parody Chasing Rainbows by California-based Christopher Wiley, who placed first this year; it’s about two ’80s/’90s Hollywood movie icons who “morph into … two U.S. Navy investigators in search of an unidentified woman named Dorothy who organizes networks of gay servicemen.”
Like Wiley, all of the playwrights are from out-of-state, but the directors and actors are all local, which in turn encourages collaboration between Memphis and the rest of the country. It’s been this way since the festival’s inception. In fact, when it all began in 2016, Harmon says, ETC even received international entries from England and New Zealand.
This year’s festival opens the company’s 28th season. Looking back to ETC’s start, Harmon recalls, “Emerald was created to give a voice to the LGBT community. … We wanted to give more of a voice to gays and lesbians because the shows that we were seeing were basically about [stereotypes]. Like all the shows that dealt with gay men usually dealt with AIDS and people died. We’re so much more than that. So that’s why Emerald was created. … Over the years, we’ve grown and grown and grown, and we’re so happy and we’re so thankful that society and most of society’s views towards alternative lifestyles changed for the better. Sadly, so much legislation, though, has taken us steps backwards, but, as viewpoints have grown for the better, we have worked and changed our mission statement to be more encompassing of all people, regardless of sexual identity and so forth.”
Indeed, most, but not all, of the shows in this year’s 10 Minute Play Festival touch on LGBTQ issues.
“We’re happy that we have made it literally 28 years, super excited and proud of that. We don’t see ourselves stopping anytime soon. We have an incredible season ahead of us.”
For more on ETC and the 10 Minute Play Festival, go to etcmemphistheater.com.
