Spread the Love: Sixteen in 10 Minutes or Less by Bradley Hayward

This week we spread the love for Sixteen in 10 Minutes or Less by Bradley Hayward. Recorded live at the 2012 TETA Conference in Houston, Texas.

Transcript

Lindsay: Welcome to Spread the Love!

Today, we are talking about Sixteen in Ten Minutes or Less: A Suite of Short Plays by Bradley Hayward.

What is it like to be sixteen? From finding your true self to finding out you were Facebook friended by accident. Bradley traverses the sweet and the bittersweet in this collection of ten plays, all ten minutes or less long, on teen life. Each of the plays can be performed singly or all together for a complete evening of theatre which leaves an infinite number of production possibilities.

We adore a flexible play here at Theatrefolk. We also adore a well-written, three-dimensional character. It is so easy to short-change team characters or write a stereotype. Bradley here offers a wealth of interesting, multi-faceted personalities.

All right, Craig, what do you like about Sixteen?

Craig: I love the diversity of the plays in this collection. They all start with the same notion – what it’s like to be sixteen – but the plays all take such different paths. There’s a play where teenagers reach out into the void of the Internet to find human contact. There’s a conversation between a girl’s right eye and her left eye. There’s an absurdist piece where a boy loses his cellphone and has to suffer indignities of using a pay phone – not only that, he has to deal with a meddling operator who keeps interrupting the conversation. And, there’s also a very lovely, touching monologue where a girl confesses her inner most thoughts to her best friend in the world, her dog, Jeff. And that’s just a sampling of how diverse the plays are in this collection.

So, I highly recommended giving it a look.

That’s it for Spread the Love!