The 29th annual 10-Minute Play Festival caps off Free Week 2026 with a setlist packed with emotion, comedy, and thought-provoking messages. Actors had only 10 minutes to captivate a packed audience of University of Iowa students, parents, and members of the community before the next play began, bringing the viewers on an entirely new journey.

For some undergraduate playwrights, this was an opportunity to branch out and experiment with art forms unfamiliar to them. For Rowan Koehler, a third-year UI student, the festival served as an introduction to the world of playwriting.

Koehler wrote “My Heart Tells Me I Love You” in a playwriting class for the university last year, and said a classmate suggested it be submitted for the 10-Minute Play Festival.

“It’s the first and only play I’ve written, and so I submitted it and got chosen for the festival. Very exciting.” Koehler said.

Koehler’s play tells the story of a family struggling with issues of connection, substance abuse, and memory loss, set in a sterile hospital that evokes feelings of dread and isolation.

For the actors, the shows are a much different experience. Along with many of the playwrights having their original ideas put out into the celestial sphere of shows, the actors are getting to originate characters and learn about them exactly how the author intended.

“[The 10-Minute Play Festival] gives us actors a chance to act in new things that we’ve never seen before and to experience new things and try out new roles, and it allows for everybody to experiment and for the audience to get a taste of what’s in these authors’ minds,” said Merus Brown, the actress who played the Mirror in the production of “Mirror Mirror.”

Some productions were comical, like “Mirror Mirror,” which focused on two boys who found a talking mirror in their attic and contained moments of dialogue that commented on the political climate of the U.S. Others were more haunting, such as “The Victim of a Hijacking,” which tells the story of a fugitive preparing to have their body swapped to a John Doe’s by a black market doctor.

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For all the shows, actors were able to test their skills, such as Brown, who had to consciously stand still for nearly the entire production, despite the show’s humorous aspects.

“My favorite thing about the show that I’m in is how the humor goes. It starts, and it’s such a high point of trying to kill the evil and corrupt king,” Brown said. “It just de-escalates ever so slightly throughout the whole show.”

Another student actor who got their first chance to test their acting skills is Payton Jaymes. The festival served as Jayme’s introduction to theater acting. Jaymes starred in “The Smell of Rain,” which depicted a group of friends as they realized that one of them, for reasons unknown, is being forced to leave everything they know behind.

“I always thought that my first time on stage, I would be scared and shaky and not able to get anything out, but I think it genuinely helped the performance, because not only is my character nervous and shaky, but also, as soon as you get on the stage, it’s like, OK, I’m not myself, I’m my character. It gives you a really big serotonin boost. It’s interesting,” Jaymes said.

While the festival is primarily for the audience’s entertainment, it can also allow those who usually don’t have a very strong platform to speak out on issues they are passionate about.

“I think the goal he wanted was to make the viewer feel confused and make you leave questioning: what is happening? But this was also an allegory for ICE and how it’s affecting people. Which I think is why I was so nervous, because portraying that is obviously a lot,” Jaymes said.

While the final day of the 10-Minute Play Festival is Feb. 22, theater enjoyers can stay tuned for next year’s showing, which falls on the festival’s 30th anniversary.