The shrill ring of alarm clocks woke up tired drama club members, calling them to a tedious Saturday full of cleaning and organizing the scene shop. The Drama Club’s first annual Purge was set to begin at 7am on September 10, and members would be required to “gut” and clean the entire PAC.

Upon entering the PAC, the members were surprised with a much less painstaking task. Instead of spending the next 12 hours cleaning, they were to write, direct, and produce a 3 act play completely on their own, which would be performed in front of their parents at 7pm the same day.

“I thought we were going to clean for 12 hours straight, which in itself sounds horrible,” Madison Braley, senior and stage manager of the production, said. “Then they were like ‘okay, make a show!’ and we were like ‘oh my god.’ We thought they were kidding at first. I kept getting texts from people saying things like ‘oh, this is totally just a prank.’”

This “prank” ended up being a real 12 hour commitment. After club members wrote the play, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Courthouse, cast members had 10 hours remaining to memorize lines and technicians had to face the task of building a set comprised of a jailhouse and a candy shop full of sugary props.

While the task was intimidating and stressful at first, according to Kelly Schwantes, senior and Drama Club president, the ending product was one that everyone was proud of.

“We had some bumps, but it’s expected when you only have 10 hours to write a show,” Schwantes said.

But why didn’t someone just tell them they would be putting on a show in the first place? Tom Skobel, Drama Club sponsor, admits that there was a method to the madness he put the actors and technicians through.

“We wanted them to have the challenge of having a show sprung on them so they’re prepared for the possibility of taking a show down to Theatre Festival,” Skobel said. “It was the idea of ‘here’s the challenge, let’s go forth and make this a possibility.”

Aside from building the confidence that the club members had in their own abilities, this 12 hour creation was successful in also building the relationships between actors and technicians in a way that wasn’t possible before.

“Being in drama club, if you’re not in the same aspect of the show as another person, you don’t really get to know

who they are,” Griffin Brown, sophomore and cast member, said. “Like if you’re in the cast, it’s very rare that you get to know people in Technical Theatre. With this though, we all had to majorly collaborate and help each other out and it was great.”

Parents, family members, and friends laughed throughout the production, and Drama Club members agree that the show turned out better than expected.

“It was super rushed and there was so much to do with not nearly enough time,” Braley said. “But it ended up going a lot better than we thought it would, so actually a lot of us called it a ‘hilarious disaster.’”