A free workshop led by Dan Henry July 7-9 aims at helping residents develop skits for September’s Historic Hysterics Skit Festival.

The festival, Sept. 9-10, celebrates the 90th anniversary of the Chilkat Center and will serve as the annual fundraiser for the Foundation for the Chilkat Center.

The festival aims to feature a series of 10-15 minute skits equivalent to a mini theater festival, with adjudication and awards, said Annette Smith, secretary of Lynn Canal Community Players.

A collaboration between the foundation and the theater troupe, the festival seeks theatrical pieces with a humorous and historical bent, based an event or item from Haines or Alaska history.

Anyone interested in creating a skit is invited to attend the workshop. “You don’t have to be a writer. You can just be a person who has fun developing something like that,” Smith said.

The first evening of the workshop will serve as a brainstorming session, with ideas about historic topics and ways to develop them into skits, she said. “We’ll kind of bat things around until (skit creators) get to the point where the plot thickens.”

By the third day of the workshop, skit creators might be be working on production. “It’s one thing to write something. It’s another to put it on stage. You have to have action, or something going on on stage,” Smith said.

Smith said skit creators might visit the Haines Sheldon Museum’s “Haines 50” exhibit to develop ideas for their skits. LCCP’s recent play “Incorruptible,” a spoof on the use of relics by churches in the Middle Ages, is a good example of what kind of skits would fit well in the festival, she said.

“We’ve all been to Europe and have wondered about those relics. Here, a guy wrote a whole play about it,” Smith said.

Dan Henry is an actor, writer and playwright who works as an adjunct professor of communications for University of Alaska-Sitka and Lane Community College in Eugene, Ore. He has acted in and directed many productions in Haines.

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