3-Card Monty, One World Theatre and Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC) kick off the summer installment of the 10th Anniversary Season of 14/48 The World’s Quickest Theater Festival in CHAC Showroom, Fridays and Saturdays July 13, 14, 20 and 21. This wildly popular theater festival debuted November 1997 in Seattle to praise from audiences, performers, and critics. This summer edition will be sponsored in part by 4Culture and Annex Theatre.

Each day of the festival features seven writers, seven directors, seven designers, seven musicians, and about thirty-five actors working day and night to create, rehearse and perform each new play twice before starting all over again.

The unique process of 14/48 begins when a hat is passed around collecting scraps of paper where people have completed the sentence: “Theatre would be a lot better if there were 7 plays about ________.” A theme is pulled from the hat at random and the seven writers are sent home to each write a ten minute play about the theme.

The next morning at 8:30am: Writers show up with scripts in envelopes. Directors pick envelopes at random and read the scripts they have blindly chosen. Everybody drinks coffee.

9:00am: Actors show up or wake up. Actors’ and actresses’ names are in two separate hats. Directors blindly select actors depending on the script’s character parameters. Casts are sent to rehearsal rooms.

10:30am: Writers go home and catch up on sleep. The band shows up. They create a theme song for the evening and create sound designs as needed for each script. Everyone keeps rehearsing. Throughout the day are lunch, band rehearsal, costume and prop runs.
3:30 - 6:00pm: Tech rehearsal. Each play gets 20 minutes of tech rehearsal. A run thru? Those are for wimps and perfectionists.

8:00pm: The shows are performed in front of a live and paying audience. The audience receives pencil, paper and an instruction to complete this sentence: “Theatre would be a lot better if there were 7 plays about ________.”

At the end of the show, the new themes are in the hat and one is randomly chosen. The seven writers go home and each writes a new 10-minute play with new character parameters. Everybody else gets ready for the 10:30pm show.

12:00am after the second performance: Everybody has a beer and then goes home to do it all over again in 9 hours, creating an additional seven plays in the same weekend.