AP Why is Amy Thorstenson smiling? Winning the one-minute play contest makes you happy.

For this innovation in brevity, thank the One Minute Play Contest, a scriptwriting sweepstakes in which competitors have just that long to tell their stories.

About 90 people submitted scripts last summer for the contest, conceived by the Minneapolis-based Playwrights' Center as a way to bring the public into the theatrical sphere.

Six plays were picked as finalists, three each in student and adult divisions. The two winning plays were acted out in September at the Ivey Awards, which honor theater in the Twin Cities. Winners in each category bagged $1,000 gift cards, and runners-up got cards worth $500.

The abbreviated format challenged Julie Tosh, a fifth-grade teacher and published playwright from Sewickley, Pa., who mastered it well enough to make the finals. In her piece, which she describes as a "feminist manifesto," a woman outwits three men vying for a spot in a lifeboat.

"You don't have any room to monkey around," Tosh said. "Everybody in the play has to act fast and act now."

Tosh is right. During a one-minute play there's no time for that gradual dramatic rise and fall stuff. Instead — the plot goes up then down, and it's over. That applies, at least, to the good ones, said Polly Carl, artistic director for the Playwright Center.

Carl, who chose the finalists, said the successful plays all told a story and answered the question — "How do you take a full journey in a minute?"

The ones that failed, she said, tried to do too much or simply didn't have fun with the format.

"It demands a levity. You can't be very serious in one minute's time," Carl said.

Carl acknowledged that some people might fret over a contest that seems to cater to "our snippet culture." But in its defense, she said theater fans "can feel enthusiastic about the democratic nature of it."

Ten-year-old Preston Anderson, of Lakeville, Minn., took advantage of the even-playing field and made the student division finals. Preston got a nudge from his mom, who thought the contest might help him earn money toward a coveted iPod. After she pointed it out, Preston immediately plopped down at his desk and spent half an hour banging out a fantastical tale about his schoolteacher rising from a lake as a monster while he and his grandfather are fishing.

"I had to think of the idea and start typing," he said. Asked if this was the start of a promising playwriting career, he doubted it. "I think I just hit the high point."

In the end, Preston was beat out by high school junior Paula Skaggs and her political commentary, "Rhode Island."

The top prize in the adult division went to Amy Thorstenson, a senior at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis. Her punchy vignette, "From Russia, With Love," features a 300-pound Russian dubbed "Dostoy-hefty" who shows up after a bachelor named David orders an Internet bride. Happily for David, he eventually learns that the Russian is not his contractual life partner, but just a messenger, and that his bride will arrive the next day.

Thorstenson, a 21-year-old English major, has honed her skills at school through a theater company she founded with a friend. She jotted down the first draft of her play during a slow 20 minutes at the Minnesota-themed gift shop where she works.

"I was just standing around and I was thinking, 'You know I should get to that one-minute play thing,'" Thorstenson said.

Before the winners were named, a group of Twin Cities actors gathered to give the finalists' plays dramatic readings. Audio recordings were made for a Web site where visitors were able to vote for their favorites.

The actors thought the concise plays were a difficult medium, too.

"These one-minute plays are making me have a heart attack," actor Kate Ifrig said.

And in a turn that emphasizes our culture's natural leaning toward making things bigger than they were intended, the winning one-minute plays that were acted out in front of an audience grew to over two minutes each.

__

Archie Ingersoll works for the AP in Minneapolis.

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.