24 hours to make it happen: Speck of Dust presents its third 24 Hour Project

EAU CLAIRE — How much time would you need to create a play that is ready to be shown to an eager audience? Weeks? Months? How about 24 hours?

It might not seem feasible at first, but that’s just what the Speck of Dust Theatre Company has in store for its 24 Hour Project.

“24 Hour Project is a collaborative art and performance challenge that is conceived and presented within a 24-hour time period,” said Logan Toftness, the group’s artistic director and the organizer of the project.

The Friday before the show, those involved meet to discuss themes, locations and challenges that need to be included in each play. The writers write a 10-15 page script, which then gets handed to directors the morning of the show. Actors get called in, rehearsals get underway and, before you know it, you have the one single performance of the anthology of plays made specifically for the show.

While this is Speck of Dust’s third year of doing the 24 Hour Project, Toftness mentioned gaining inspiration from UW-Eau Claire’s own 24 Hour Project. Similar projects exist in the Twin Cities and throughout the country. She was part of virtual playwriting challenges throughout 2020 and 2021 through Performance Anxiety, Inc.

Toftness founded Speck of Dust in Eau Claire in 2016, putting a focus on new and original work, which included the 24 Hour Project, the Play Script Book Club, and radio shows and readings throughout the years.

“I wanted a platform to produce projects written by myself or by my friends or other writers I have connected with over the years. I also wanted a way to produce shows that I think are interesting or fun or challenging or unusual,” she said.

Last year’s project featured several seemingly unrelated short plays that included: runners in the Eau Claire marathon trying to cheat by going through Banbury Place and getting caught in a time loop; an anthropomorphic mouse with an equally anthropomorphic cat as a therapist; and scroungers in a post-apocalyptic world remembering when their reality forever changed. While very different in theme and tone, several aspects — a line of dialogue, a prop, and the like — carried over in each of the plays.

“Not even the performers, directors, musicians, playwrights, visual artists or anybody else involved get to know details before the 24 hours start — that’s a big part of the fun! It’s always a surprise and a challenge and the amount of creativity that comes out of these projects is always so exciting to see,” said Toftness.

“I love seeing what happens when you put a room full of creative people together and give them a collaborative challenge and a deadline. It’s really exciting to me to see what people come up with as a team to put together a whole show in such a tight timeframe.”

Toftness is responsible for choosing challenges, themes, and who goes in what groups. It is important to her that the project becomes a fun and worthwhile experience to those taking part.

“I hope the people that participate in my project take away a feeling of pride and joy in what they created,” said Toftness. “On one side, it’s really high pressure because you are working long hours and it’s so fast but on the other hand, it offers a sort of freedom from overanalyzing what you are working on and once the performance is finished, you never have to think about it again.”

The response to the project has been positive, and Toftness invited people who had interest in taking part in the project to sign up in many of the roles — actors, writers and the like — online by going to tinyurl.com/367e3ebx.

“I hope Speck of Dust continues producing this project 5 and 10 years from now! I hope it keeps growing and we get more people involved,” she said. “It would be so cool to be able to include new mediums — like poetry or comedy, improv or dance — and all they would need to do is sign up!”