“We Wrote This in a Day (Don't Yell at Us),” January 8 and 9

Saturday, January 8, and Sunday, January 9, 7:34 p.m.

The Mockingbird on Main, 320 North Main Street, Davenport IA

If you spend nearly two years working on your company's debut show, and it not only gets successfully produced but enjoys several sold-out performances during its run, what do you do for an encore?

If you're the Haus of Ruckus' TJ Green and Calvin Vo, and your comedy “Jacques”alope turned into a hit for the Davenport venue the Mockingbird on Main, you return to the site of your previous triumph – and give yourself all of one day to stage something new.

On January 8 and 9, the Haus of Ruckus ensemble will again grace the Mockingbird stage, but this time with We Wrote This in a Day (Don't Yell at Us), an experience modeled after the 24-hour-play-festival format, with Green, Vo, and company newcomer Mel Maylum each contributing an original short play under the same general parameters.

“The general idea for it,” says Green, “was we wanted to play with the idea of how different writers and different writing styles can make the same prompts different. So the way it's evolved is that we will give each writer one random quote that we share, and a few other prompts, and from that, we will devise three separate productions based off that concept. I like the idea of seeing one concept done three different ways.”

“I think of it as a non-competitive Great British Bake-Off,” adds Vo. “Everyone gets the same ingredients, and then the writers and directors will use their personal flair and style on those ingredients, and even though the ingredients are all the same, everyone will make something different. Everyone's making bread, but someone's gonna come up with rye, someone's gonna come up with sourdough, someone's gonna make white bread.”

In the spirit of a 24-hour play festival – a popular event among theatre companies in which all of the writing and staging of works takes place in a single day – Green, Vo, and Maylum, like their audiences, won't know what they're working on until this Friday evening.

“On the night of the seventh,” says Vo, “we're gonna live-stream the selection process from the Mockingbird. So at 7:34 (p.m.) on Friday, we're gonna get our prompts, and the 'audience,' so to speak, will be along for the ride.” He adds that the chosen prompts, however, won't originate on the spot during the Livestream broadcast. “We're gonna try to gather a bunch of prompts ahead of time, like earlier in the week. Just so we know we have them for sure. And then we'll essentially pick them out of a hat or something. Like bingo.”

In addition to Green and Vo writing and directing their We Wrote This in a Day pieces in a day, they'll appear in the January 8 and 9 performances alongside a number of their fellow co-stars from “Jacques”alope: Sarah Goodall, Joseph Lasher, Max Robnett, and Isaac Smith.

“It is almost the entire crew, yeah,” says Green. “We sort of lucked out with the people that we were able to get. They like working with us, and we like working with them – so , you know, we might as well milk 'em for all they're worth.”

“When we started work on “Jacques”alope,” says Vo, we wanted to make sure that we had people we were working with that wanted to form something of an ensemble. Where we could all continue to work together. Because I think the energy in the space with Ruckus is very specific, and it's very much about what works for us. So as we were sort of creating the Jacques”alope ensemble, we were also thinking, 'Is this something that could continue into other shows?' And it's worked so far. They're great people.”

“Another exciting thing about this,” adds Green, “is that it will be the same actor ensemble for all three of the productions, so it's more like a full unit putting on a production together and opposed to three separate shows. We want to showcase our performers and see how they perform the same characters in a wide variety of parts.”

Vo says that while “we're still working out the hour-to-hour details” of the rehearsal process from shortly after 7:34 on Friday to shortly before 7:34 on Saturday, he and Green do have a general outline for how things will work. “We'll do the prompt selection, and then we immediately start work on the scripts. And then once that's done, we start looking into tech design, blocking, and then we'll have the dress rehearsal period for each section.

“And we will have time,” he says in a comment that sounds directed less to me than to himself and Green. “It will happen. It will.”

Whatever results from We Wrote This in a Day, Vo says that he and Green “want to make sure that the night is a full experience for audiences. Something that's been rolling through our heads is that 24-hour theatre festivals are really fun for everyone involved, but we want to make sure we're doing it in a way that benefits the audience as much as possible. It's a writing/acting/producing exercise for all of us in Ruckus, but it also has to be something that's entertaining and cultivating for audiences.

He adds that, if necessary, that includes potential small changes made in the productions between Saturday and Sunday night. “I think the nature of the process itself is very much malleable and fly by the seat of your pants,” says Vo. “And we haven't had this conversation yet with anyone involved, but I imagine the second day, if there were things that really didn't work the first night, we can sort of tweak things while staying true to the 24-hour format as much as possible. It's all scary but very exciting.”

We Wrote This in a Day (Don't Yell at Us) will be performed at the Mockingbird on Main on January 8 and 9 at the Haus of Ruckus' now-standard start time of 7:34 p.m., with the Davenport venue's doors opening at the now-standard 6:59 p.m. Admission is $10, and more information and tickets are available by visiting TheMockingbirdOnMain.com. For more on the ensemble, visit Instagram.com/HausOfRuckus.