SDSU Theatre and Dance presents Festival of New Plays featuring The 24-Hour Plays

The Festival of News Plays featuring The 24-Hour Plays, presented this week at South Dakota State University’s Oscar Larson Performing Arts Center, will celebrate the work of playwrights while allowing students and audience members to engage in the development of new works. 

Three professional playwrights will present staged readings of their work followed by public discussion with the playwright after each reading. The festival will conclude with The 24-Hour Plays. 

Festival tickets are $22 for adults and $20 for seniors, military and SDSU employees and can be purchased online, at the center's box office, or call 605-688-6045. SDSU students are free with a valid ID. As an added value, one ticket purchase allows audience members to attend all festival events. Seating will be general admission. Please bring your ticket back each night for admission. 

The schedule includes: 

“The Dead Woman” by Chelsea Sutton – 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 16 – Fishback Studio Theatre 

A dead woman is lying in the garbage outside a convenience store as time expands and the past and future become intertwined in the dead woman’s blood. 

“Snowblind” by Laura King – 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17 – Fishback Studio Theatre 

As a snowstorm builds outside, a group of recovering addicts at an Narcotics Anonymous meeting struggle to face their addictions. 

“Little Egypt” by Amy Tofte – 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 18 – Fishback Studio Theatre 

A fortune hunter and her bodyguard uncover the final resting place of the Holy Grail hidden in a small town in Middle America. But as they attempt to extract the Grail from the four fierce women charged to protect it, the two outsiders uncover the fundamental ideals that divide them. 

The 24-Hour Plays – 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 19 – Oscar Larson Theatre 

Teams of students will write, rehearse and present original plays crafted completely within a 24-hour time period. 

Sutton is an L.A.-based writer and director. She’s a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, a Humanitas PlayLA award winner, an Emmy-nominated co-writer of the interactive film event Welcome to the Blumhouse Live and a graduate of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop. Her award-winning play “Wood Boy Dog Fish” appeared in the inaugural season of the Garry Marshall Theatre. She is the associate artistic director of Rogue Artists Ensemble and holds an MFA from University of California, Riverside.

For more information on Sutton.

King holds an MFA in playwriting from the Playwright’s Lab at Hollins University and a master’s in English from Northwestern University. She is a dramaturg with Working Title Playwrights and a literary associate for YouthPLAYS. Her work has been published by Dramatic Publishing, Stage Rights, Pioneer Drama Service, YouthPLAYS, Applause Books, and Smith & Kraus. For more information King.

Tofte is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter who won the 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Her play “Righteous Among Us” (2020 Todd McNerney Award) had a staged reading at Urban Stages (off-Broadway) earlier this year. Recent productions include her play “Da Vinci’s Cockroach” at The LaBute New Theater Festival (St. Louis, Missouri) and “Parts & Pieces” (Larking House in Santa Ana, California). She is currently a playwright with the Evolving Playwrights Group at Circle X Theatre in Los Angeles, where she is writing a new “impossible play” called “Rain Dog War.” She has been in residence at the Autry Museum of the American West, Brush Creek, Monson Arts, The Kennedy Center and Yaddo, with work produced and developed throughout the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and twice at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She is a proud member of The Dramatists Guild and earned a Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts.