"The 49 Sins" features 42 one-minute plays and seven 10-minute plays about lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride.
It finishes this weekend at North Fourth Art Center at 4904 Fourth Street N.W.
Sister Mary Abomination, a character painted to look dead, acts as the show's silent host.
Director Lou Clark said she's keeping the actor's name a secret.
"She came back from the dead to host this, and she sort of has her own arch through the play," Clark said. "She sort of pops up like Where's Waldo in every group of sins."
The plays are clustered together by sin. For example, lust is presented with six one-minute plays and finished with a 10-minute performance. An ensemble of actors from Blackout Theatre will perform all the works.
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Santa Fe playwright Dale Dunn, who wrote a one-minute piece about radioactive warfare called "Pride: A Testimony," said it was her first time attempting such a short script.
"It was really difficult," Dunn said. "You have to try to tell the whole story in, like, half a page, and so I found it kind of difficult because you don't have time to bring in a bunch of characters."
Dunn said she was in the middle of doing research on ranchers who caught the downwind of atomic tests in the '50s and '60s when Clark called her to write something for "The 49 Sins."
"So, that was all in my head, and all these characters were talking in my head, so I wrote a monologue from a young rancher's daughter's perspective about being victims of essentially radioactive warfare on our own people," Dunn said. "My one-minute play is a little bit more serious than most of them. I sat through a run-through of the plays - a lot of raucous, wacky things came out. I think it's going to be a fun night."
Clark said the same rules of playwriting apply to writing one-minute pieces and that the writer must secure a beginning, middle and end.
"Any writers, from the most experienced to the most novice, will tell you this was a challenge for them," she said.
Clark said she's especially excited to have 10-minute plays written by local playwrights Leonard Madrid, Don Garcia and Magdalene Gallegos.
"Those three I want to highlight because they are really wonderful at capturing the voice of New Mexico," she said. "They each have very different styles. Leonard's is (a love story) set in Portales - his was pride. Don wrote about wrath and what happens in the family, and Magdalene's is about greed and New Mexicans being greedy about green chile."
Clark got her MFA from UNM's dramatic writing program in 2007.
"It's a really good program," she said. "When I came into it in 2003, it was fairly new, and (since then) it's taken on a life of itself. We've had several of our students go to the Kennedy Center as national
playwriting award-winners. And now there's several of us living in Albuquerque that have graduated, and I really wanted to design an evening that could showcase the talent of my friends that I went to school with."
"The 49 Sins" is also the first big production by her theater company Ka-Hootz.
"We're dedicated to producing new works for theater in Albuquerque," Clark said.
"The 49 Sins"
North Fourth Art Center
4904 Fourth Street N.W.
Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.
Sunday at 6 p.m.
$15 general/$10 for theater artists, students and seniors
For tickets and info call (505) 344-4542
