Compression

Our local theater company does an annual Ten Minute Play festival as a fundraiser for their educational programs. Mine was one of the four performed last night, and will be again tonight (come on by if you’re in the neighborhood).

It was a wonderful presentation. The director and actors found material there that they could inhabit, and the play became far more than my script. But because my brain just works this way, I was thinking earlier in the day about how much went into that ten public minutes.

There were eight plays presented over the two weekends. It took me about four hours to write mine, so we’ll say that’s thirty hours of donated time.

Each play was rehearsed three times, at two hours each. That’s six hours per play, times an average of three performers plus director plus playwright, so 6*5 is 30 hours; at 8 plays that’s 240 donated hours.

Dinner was included in the ticket price, so that’s ten people at two hours apiece making crockpots of soups or trays of desserts, times four nights: another 80 hours. Plus a crew of ten feeding people and washing up and taking admission, times four nights: another 120 hours.

The company’s leader herself probably put in at least another hundred on her own, laying out the website and managing ticket sales and scheduling the venue and the lights & sound.

So all of that—and there’s undoubtedly more—adds up to 500 to 600 hours. That’s how the world of volunteer communities works. Six hundred donated hours, compressed to what the public sees in the two hours of soup and salad and theater.

None of us know what it takes to create the things we consume so easily. Our life of gratitude would be full if we thought about all of the unseen behind the illusions of ease and convenience.