Leila Teitelman clasped her hands to her chest and stared up at the ceiling of a practice room at the University of Vermont’s Royall Tyler Theatre in Burlington. As she delivered a woeful monologue lamenting the rise of authoritarian power, Harley Winzenried sprinted and leapt across the room, grasping at the air with a look of dismay.
A third actor, Chris Caswell, watched the spectacle with a blank face — her expression left to be interpreted by the audience — as the scene from “People May Die” came to a swift end. The cast had finished the entire play in roughly two minutes.
“People May Die” is one of 30 original works that a six-member cast will attempt to perform in 60 minutes or less when Full Circle Theater Collaborative debuts its new show, “30Under60,” this weekend at Off Center for the Dramatic Arts in Burlington. But the breakneck pace won’t be the only challenge when the curtain rises: The actors won’t know the order in which the pieces will be performed. That’s up to the audience to decide, and it will change every night.
Full Circle cofounder Amy Halpin Riley developed and directs “30Under60.” Her goal for the unconventional show is to disrupt “passive viewing,” she said, by putting the onus on the audience to help create the drama.
“Our world and the human experience is needing a jolt of collective human expression and experience that we can share together,” Halpin Riley said.
Before the show, the numbers one through 30 will be hung from a clothesline, with each number corresponding to a different play. Written by the cast, the mini plays range from silent clown comedies to musical numbers to poems. Audience members will shout the numbers they want to see performed; the actors will green-light the loudest number they hear. Once the title of the chosen piece is announced, the race against the timer begins. The cast dashes to gather props, set the stage and get into character.
The process repeats for all 30 pieces. Once the hour is up, the stage will go black and the actors must stop exactly where they are in the performance, regardless of whether they’ve finished all 30 mini-plays.
“30Under60” is inspired by “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” produced by the experimental Chicago theater group the Neo-Futurists. That show, which features a constantly changing selection of 30 two-minute plays, debuted in 1988 and ran until 2016 — the longest-running production in Chicago theater history.
Halpin Riley, a veteran local actor and member of the sketch-comedy group Stealing From Work, saw “Too Much Light” when she was living in Chicago in the late 1990s. She said she has long wanted to produce something similar in Vermont and hopes to turn “30Under60” into an annual production or series. She and other cast members noted how the show’s structure demolishes the fourth wall, the invisible barrier between cast and crowd, by inviting the audience to drive the narrative.
“The Neo-Futurists have a saying: ‘If you’ve seen the show once, you’ve seen the show once,’” said Caswell, one of the six cast members. “It speaks to theater in its most organic form.”
Halpin Riley said the show has a disheveled quality: Transitions are sometimes unclean, and performances can be frantic. But for the actors and audience alike, reveling in shared chaos is what makes “30Under60” compelling during a time of disconnection, she said.
“The frailty and messiness of it is where all the light comes from,” Halpin Riley said. “Having that experience with audience members and a collective of people sharing a part of themselves is really special.” ➆
This article appears in Animal Issue • 2026.
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