ACT I

random acts

Twenty-four hours from now, an audience is going to be filling seats at the Firehouse Center for the Arts to see your play. Yet you haven't written a word, and haven't a clue what you're going to write. That's the premise of this drama. 'Random Acts' throws a group of people-

14 writers, 19 actors, seven directors, three producers-who may or may not know each other, who may or may not have particularly written or directed before, together for 24 hours to see what they can make.

the writers

"Hello!"

"You came back!"

We're at Aloft, above the old Strand theater on Green Street, which has donated space for the writers' meeting. The room seems to be designed for brainstorming-the seats are rocking chairs, there's a shelf full of toys in one corner and a movie screen in another.

Event producers Hailey Klein, Michelle Fino and Leslie Powell greet everyone. Many people know each other from a writing group. The writers are split nearly evenly between men and women.

Here are the rules of the game. Writers are paired-"We've tried teams of three before. We won't do that again," Klein says-and they're assigned a certain combination of male and female actors to write for. There's a set of four lines-this year, famous lines from movies, like "You can't handle the truth"-of which they must include at least one. The game is self-selecting. People who sign up know what they're getting into. If they don't like it, they don't come back.

"The challenge of writing with another person is that it's really like life," Powell says later. "You never know what it's going to be like, but you know you have to interact with other people. You may as well grab it by the horns and respond to it."

Powell gives them a few reminders about writing for the stage. "Remember, write from the body rather than the head. It's more fun when it comes out of the senses."

Bruce Menin, down from York, asks about foul language. It's a mature audience, he's told.

Returning writer Sue Hamilton reminds everyone of author Anne Lamott's advice to welcome "shitty first drafts." "It's better than staring at a blank piece of paper," Hamilton points out.

The number-one rule of the game? Have fun. "Having fun is the key to the whole weekend. We're not trying for perfection. We've got actors who've never acted before and directors who've never directed before, but it all works out," Powell says.

They're off.

the actors

It's 10:30 a.m. on Saturday and seven piles of clean white scripts are lined up along a table in the Grade 4 classroom of the ancient Unitarian Meeting House on Pleasant Street. More than two dozen actors and directors pile into the room.

"I do it as a hobby, as a diversion, because I enjoy it," says Mike McKearney, when asked about why he's participating for the third time, every year since they started. "Some people run, some people do yoga. I act. It's fun, and it's good mental therapy."

McKearney also wrote last night. Like most teams, he and his partner figured out a process for writing their play, "Arbitrary Connections," on the spot. "Kristin (Bair) is a writer, our premise is a man and a woman. What happens?" Mike says. "Then we just said 'OK, let's start with verbs. Woman flips man. Woman scratches man.' We had a list of about 20 different verbs, man to woman, then woman to man. Which verb appeals? "Flips man?" what's that all about? She physically flips him? flips him out? flips him off? we started like that." From 7:30 to 11, they worked in Kristin's apartment in Newburyport, then added last-minute touches this morning. "We were pretty much done, but the ending was kind of unresolved."

Susan Hamilton and Ron Pullin, authors of "Fly Away," sat and started typing. "I threw out ideas and he typed them in, then we switched. We were doing that all night. When we needed more facts (on fly fishing), I went on another computer and looked up things (about fly fishing) on the Internet," Hamilton says. They were one of the few pairs that finished at 3 a.m.

The synopses are enigmatic. They are simply vague outlines, signposts. Parts are randomly cast. Female names are pulled from a wooden bowl and male names from an enamel pitcher. The actors will have only a short time to learn their characters. They're not expected to learn their lines, but they're expected to know them, to find their truth and figure out how to share that with the audience. Many of the participants, actors and otherwise, are students of Mark Clopton at the Tannery Actor's Studio. Several will be in the "Vagina Monologues" next week, including Gloria Papert, an older woman with a crisp British accent. "The aura builds up," she says of the short turnaround. "You get to know your people pretty well. It's intense. It's wonderful. You don't really have to know your script. It's a 'quickie,' and it's wonderful fun."

As with a "quickie," actors often surprise themselves.

"For me, the biggest challenge is not having time to find the clues and nuances, you have to trust the actors to bring their own magic in, and hope that the piece will speak to you. You have to trust your own instincts much more, rather than waiting and having something come to you in a more relaxed way," Karen Dent says. "Your first instincts, you trust them. You have to find the impulse that's important to the piece, where it's coming from and where it's going to, in a short period of time."

The groups spread out to rehearse at locations around Market Square, then come to the Firehouse for a 20-minute run through on the stage. Ron Marr plays Sid of "Sid's Place," a man free to say what he likes, but at the cost of hearing voices all day and night. Onstage tonight, he'll earn sympathy and laughs, like when he gets to tell busybody landlord "get thee to a dentist, you old bat." Seeing him rehearse on stage, it's hard to imagine he hadn't met Sid until just a few hours before.

In the lobby after rehearsal on stage, he reflects on the process. "A lot of people work from the outside in. I work from the inside out, so it's easier for me to find a character. And the script is good. That helps you define what you're doing," he says. Marr's performed off-Broadway, but hasn't been onstage since 1997. He came to Random Acts because a friend suggested it. What's he getting out of it? "Any time you can do something like this, you're getting something out of it, a sense of accomplishment. That's how you work. Whether you're playing or getting paid, you can't tell."

the directors

They start with a phrase: "After nearly crashing into one another on the road, a man and woman collide in a video store." "Sparks fly between the Duke and the Lady in this romp in the Wild West." " Thomas, a Brahmin from Hartford, and Joyce, an Irish girl from Lynn are getting married." "To Death: A Final Drama."

Words on a flat page can be read any number of ways with any number of intonations. Actors give them flesh and blood, and directors suggest how to do that.

There will be no special effects, no lighting effects. The producers have told the directors to think about a large stage, project big and have fun.

Some writers have delivered props. Al Vautour, director of "Sid's Place," has been walking around with what looks to be a hospital sheet under his arm all day.

"We worked on blocking immediately," says Phil Atkin, director of Tom and Lori in "Arbitrary Connections," the play set in the video store. "It could be very dull the way it read," noted Lori, who described the process as fun and frightening. "There's a lot of pressure," she says. What pressure? "To get it right."

Phil notes that's a mixed blessing.

"You don't have the luxury of making choices, which is actually a nice constraint."

This group did lot of experimenting, they've run through their allotted 20 minutes on the Firehouse stage, and now they're headed back to their rehearsal space for one more run-through.

Back in the theater, a man speaks to his fianc??e.

"I adore you...."

"Bring your voice up!" intones Kimm Wilkinson, director of "You Never Come Out the Way You Went In," the story of a bride and groom on the eve of their wedding. "Keep up the pace." Snap, snap go her fingers.

The man speaks again. "I like your mother's name-Claire."

"OK, I want you to go back. Don't have so many pauses in that."

The directors' direction helps the actors translate for the audience. "Don't put your hands over your face." "Don't bend over at the waist." "Turn around and watch him, you're watching him." The director makes sure the whiskey bottle glugs after the mother, played by Gloria Papert, pours a swig.

Producer Michelle Fino opens the door into the theater and breaks the spell.

"Time," Fino says.

"What?!" exclaims Wilkinson.

showtime

Outside, the lobby is filling with friends, family and curious strangers. Inside the locked theater, Fino grabs scripts from directors and gives them to the tech guy so he'll know when to bring the lights up and down. People who've been in street clothes all day are showing up in grandmotherly cardigans and cowboy hats. From backstage, there's a question about time for one more rehearsal. Producer Hailey Klein gives final instructions, then asks, "Any questions? Ron?" "I left my T-shirt at your house," he lets her know. The actors laugh and let out a "oooh."

The showcase starts in 30 minutes. Lori, Tom and Phil thought their last rehearsal sailed. "What created the energy was I stepped on her foot. She used all that energy," Tom jokes. "I wish we were doing it in that little noncommital stage (at Aloft)," Lori frets.

The first two installments of Random Acts were held at Aloft. They couldn't use the space this year, and that seems to be for the best, as it's nearly a full house tonight.

Even if nobody showed up, the actors would be each other's eager audience. After all, this is a rare opportunity to come again with beginner's mind to the work they love. The atmopshere, though full of personalities, is miraculously absent of ego.

The key to writing for the stage, Powell had told the writers the night before, is asking "what do the characters want?" "It can be verbal or nonverbal, in action or subtext. Sometimes even the characters don't know what they want."

And so the lights go down, and they explore. "Where are you going?" asks one character, riling up the 31-year-old woman who's about to be divorced, who can't help but blurt out, "I've been married for 11 years to the only guy I've ever fucked."

"Almost an Angel," the sisters have to figure out whether to pull the plug on mom. In "Fly Away," Frankie wants to reunite with his father after 30 years, but his father's failing memory can only produce a family singsong from childhood: "Frankie, Spankie you've lost your.... Frankie, what did you lose?" "30 years," observes Frankie.

With so little time to negotiate characters, lines and blocking, the performers have found the heart of each piece. Though pacing is rough, laugh lines get laughs-"Oh, you read?" the Lady asks her hired hand in "Nothing a Little Wire Can't Fix." "I read." "Of course you do. Did I sound surprised?"

And the lines meant to take your breath away do-"I hated you, you know. You were always right.... And you hated me because you weren't always right," Frankie tells his father in "Fly Away." "I did?" his forgetful father asks. Frankie has to remind him. "We fought all the time."

Most fascinatingly, for civilians and actors alike, it's a reminder of which piece of a play belongs to the writer, which to the actor, which to the director. And yet, at the same time, we see how a simple gesture, like a hug, owes a debt to the writers, the actors and the directors. And, in their absence, we recognize the art of the set and lighting designer. Random Acts reveals the tricks of the trade, reminding the magicians and their audience how the illusion is created. To say everyone is brilliant would be untrue. But watching them invent memorable, living, breathing characters who didn't exist just the day before is absolutely dazzling.

The show ends with "To Death." Director Maria O'Sullivan, a first-timer, had been the one to ask for extra rehearsal time. Called in to help out at last minute, she figured a 10-15-minute play written for three characters in nine hours would be a scene study. She ended up directing a farce/murder mystery, with characters trying to pull off hijinks behind each others' backs, witty one-liners, lots of props moving from here to there-something she would typically rehearse from six weeks to three months.

The show comes off smoother than expected, a twisty, fast-paced ride that leaves the audience laughing nearly as hard as the characters, who've all poisoned each other to death.

"There's a lot of regional theater that doesn't deserve to have attention paid to it. There's something about this area, though. You get a lot of things that surprise you," O'Sullivan says.