Think Pink Radio

14/48 – The World’s Quickest Theater Festival returns this weekend in Seattle. The premise is as simple as it is diabolical. A theme is randomly picked on Thursday night. Seven plays on that theme are then written, cast, designed, rehearsed, composed for, teched, and premiered on Friday night. Then, with a new theme randomly selected from audience suggestions, the whole process begins again for seven new plays on Saturday night.

Round One of the latest festival took place last weekend. It introduced to the world a starship captain keen on giving blow-jobs to his navigator, a polyamorous collective of men and women, a woman who uses the power of the Bee-Gees to seduce a bored housewife, and a kayaking enthusiast unable to tell his doting wife the truth about his “having amnesia for seven years” and living with his male “friend” the whole time. Oh, and there was a flying wiener, literally and figuratively, on Friday night.

14/48 has been uniting the local theater community with its exhilarating spirit of collaborative creativity since 1997, but it has become a vital institution since the unfortunate collapse of the Seattle Fringe Festival in 2003. While it is certainly about creating theater and having fun, it also gives actors, designers, directors and playwrights a chance to get to know each other outside the context of competing for jobs. The sell-out crowds at Round One last weekend testified to the festival’s enduring popularity. Round Two is this weekend, with a fresh slate of writers, directors, actors and designers ready to produce life-transforming theater in as little time as possible.

– R. Esquivel

Click below for tickets:

14/48 – The World’s Quickest Theater Festival
Capitol Hill Arts Center, Seattle WA
January 11-12, 8:00 PM and 10:30 PM