Quick play

An award-winning playwright had another 30 minutes of fame, and then another and another at Winter Park High School’s Festival of One-Acts, where players turned classic drama and comedy into frantic rapid-fire theater on the Ann Derflinger Auditorium stage last weekend.

Senior Evan Roush’s “Happiness for You and Everyone You Know” had already been chosen as the Critic’s Choice at the 2011 Florida State Thespian Festival before it even hit Winter Park’s stage. But for 30 minutes at a time, playgoers caught an insightful glimpse into the mind of the rising young playwright, as he wrought a tale of despair and depression in search of happiness on a therapist’s couch.

That play had toured the state in the last few months, winning awards along the way, driven by the dialogue between a quirky therapist and a despondent man sifting through the smoldering subconscious ashes of a destroyed relationship after his wife has an affair with the plumber who remodeled the couple’s bathroom.

Half of the dialogue happens unconsciously, as the hypnotized protagonist reveals more of himself than he knew he could.

“How did you know that?” he asks his therapist. “Because you told me,” she replies.

Thematically and literally dark, the play took audiences on a constantly scene-shifting cerebral journey as an unconscious flashes through time, in search of the meaning behind a failed relationship, and happiness beyond it amid the drudgery of a boring desk job and a disconnected loneliness from the world.

Other student works

And before and after “Happiness for You and Everyone You Know”, the four-part series of plays gave audiences quick glimpses of young play writers and directors from Winter Park High. That’s because all of the plays were written and directed by students, including those reduced from classic works that had played the stage for centuries.

In Katie Gould’s “Reduced Hamlet”, easily digestible modern English dialogue turns into hilariously rapid banter as actors leap back and forth between the action on the stage and acting as impromptu narrators to cut Shakespeare’s famous play from more than 4 1/2 hours in length down to less than 30.

“Drowning” became a spray bottle in the face. Stabbings took place in seconds instead of minutes.

Shoving the palpably anxious plot forward with full force, Hamlet’s father’s comically pushy ghost yells from behind a curtain, “Don’t talk. Just do it!”

Skylar Munn’s “seriocomedy” “The Fraudcast” bridged the gap of seriousness and satire, while Liz Mputu and Hayley Spivey’s “Night Crawlers” eschewed any semblance of sanity in favor of bizarre comedy.

And in two quick strokes of the short hand of a clock, it all ended in tears of laughter.