theater

We’re Already Exhausted Thinking About Alia Shawkat Spending 24 Hours Performing One Scene 100 Times

Alia Shawkat. Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images

If you’re making your stage debut, you might as well start off easy by performing just one scene — though maybe it’s a little much to do that one scene 100 times in a row. Nevertheless, that’s what Alia Shawkat, of Arrested Development and Search Party, has decided to do. Shawkat will perform in the theatrical endurance piece The Second Woman at BAM for 24 hours this fall, from October 18 to 19, 5 p.m. to 5 p.m. In the production, created by Australian theater-makers Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, Shawkat will repeat a scene inspired by John Cassavetes’s film Opening Night with 100 different male-identifying actors, both professional and amateur, over the course of the play, which will also be digitally filmed and projected above the performers as the event goes on. “I couldn’t be more excited to make my stage debut in The Second Woman,” Shawkat said in a statement. “It’s a show that encompasses all the themes of art that I am most interested in being a part of.” The performance will take place as part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival, with a conversation about the work on October 11, though of course that talk will happen only once and not for 24 hours.

Alia Shawkat to Spend 24 Hours Performing 1 Scene 100 Times