Two weeks ago, I participated in the twice-annual fun-time that is Combat Theater. The long story, shortened, is that for two days straight, a subject and location are randomly drawn from a hat by a writer. In the next 24 hours, a play must be written about said subject and location, a director must be chosen, the play must be cast, rehearsed, and finally, performed.
Each play runs anywhere from 8 to 15 minutes.
WHAT I DO: Stashed away neatly in a room removed from the theater, I listen to each play over a loudspeaker. And AS THE PLAY IS HAPPENING, I draw what I think is going on. No time for sketching. It’s all paint and pen to paper. Sometimes the plays and their puns are more visual, which means my drawings are WAY off the mark. Other, rarer times, I capture the happenings with the accuracy of a Cheetah. If Cheetahs were practicing marksmen. And I only have the length of the play I’m depicting to finish the piece. Once the audience applauds its end, I stop and hang it up near the raffle table.
Here are the eight results from the first day of January’s Combat, in no particular order:
1. Pretty sure the subject was “Musical Chairs,” and the location “a brothel.”
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2. Subject was definitely “Bob Saget.” And thanks to what technology’s done to the telephone, I was able to pull up a photo of him to get a close likeness. The location? A dump.
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3. I think the subject was “Romeo & Juliet” and the location “a pawn shop.” I can’t remember why I depicted the angry dad at the door as a clown, but I DO know the knife Romeo is trying to sell was allegedly owned by Frank Sinatra. So, you know, I made that pretty clear.
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4. The subject on this one was “The Lone Ranger” and the location “a candy factory.” Which meant I had it pretty easy from the start– just begin by drawing the Lone Ranger and Tonto. In the drawing, they look attracted to one another because based on what I heard, they were. But as is often the case, the play changed gears, and revealed that they weren’t actually attracted to one another. Just pretending to trick the factory owner. The drawing was already done, though. There is no “edit>undo”.
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5. I think the “subject/location” on this one was “Pablo Picasso/Area 51.” It was a pretty funny-sounding piece, with Picasso eventually serenading an alien who didn’t think she was an alien. You had to be there.
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6. “Beavers” and “The Brooklyn Bridge.” I definitely didn’t capture what was happening exactly, but drawing beavers was sufficient enough.
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7. I want to say this one was “Game Show / A trench.” And I wasn’t really sure how to depict the trench, or who, exactly, was in it. In fact, they didn’t make it aurally clear until late in the piece. Too late for me to draw correctly. Still, the characters were fun enough.
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8. This one was “Da Vinci in a Civil War Re-enactment.” On the left is a word balloon representing late-comer Abe Lincoln, who sounded hilarious. The dude asking “Pepperoni? Cannoli?” is a nod to a Milwaukee character who pops in and out of East Side bars, trying to sell you both items out of his tiny Igloo cooler.
At the end of the night, these were raffled off to seemingly happy winners. I was sad to see the Saget one go, but not after the following night happened and I got to draw….. (check back later, skaters!)
dwellephant 