Community is a word that comes up frequently when talking to Susan Bernfield, the founder and artistic director of New Georges and curator of the Performathon, a ten-hour festival of ten-minute plays on Sunday, June 11, to benefit The Room, New Georges’ workspace. And Bernfield’s use of the word isn’t lip service. There’s certainly a spirit of community engendered by 33 plays onstage in 10 hours, with productions ranging from staged readings to full prop-and-costume affairs, each having roughly six hours of rehearsal.
“We used to hold the ‘Thon in The Room,” recalls Bernfield, “and it was so hot and crowded, and at the end of the day there was almost no performance space whatsoever.” Nightmare? Not for this crew. “People are coming in and leaving, and there’s Raffle Babe, selling tickets,” says Jessica Davis, a veteran Performathon director whose work can be seen in this year’s festival, which is being held at the more spacious Dixon Place at Vineyard 26. “There’s beer and so your audience is laughing very loud, and it’s to raise money for New Georges, so everyone comes.”
The mood is addictive. “One person saw every single piece one year. She wanted to. Every piece!” Bernfield marvels. “People come to see their friends and end up staying.” She imitates typical post-show testimony: “‘I came for 20 minutes and ended up staying for five hours!'”
No doubt the Performathon is fun. Yet it’s not just the crowd, booze, heat, and great theater of all genres that makes this low-tech affair a theatrical bonding experience. Artists involved in the Performathon also note the communal feeling, which is created by something more unique. Davis avers, “There is such a sense of camaraderie at New Georges. At other ten-minute play festivals, there’s a kind of competition, and that is not true [of the Performathon] at all.”
Competition certainly isn’t what Bernfield has in mind. “We want to make people feel they’re part of the community,” Bernfield says (there’s that word again), “and also to assert, ‘These are the folks, folks!'” As in, these are your peers, these are other women who are emerging or up-and-coming, this is who you want to meet and now you can.
