For each of the five playwrights who had just 12 hours to pen a 10-minute play for Plan-B Theatre’s And The Banned Slammed On, a simple text message from producing director Jerry Rapier rightly tweaked the focus and the results were excellent and exciting.

Wondering if they would need to stay faithful to the details of the quintet of actual Utah-based incidents that hit directly at freedom of expression, the playwrights were relieved to see Rapier’s counsel not to take the incidents literally. And, the actors, directors, and the sold-out audience in the 500-seat Jeanne Wagner Theatre in downtown Salt Lake City responded with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.

Whatever doubts that might have lingered about combining for the first time the company’s annual fundraiser celebrating the First Amendment and the 24-hour playwrights’ SLAM event dissipated very quickly.

There were wise choices at every level. Media personalities Bill Allred and Doug Fabrizio were funny, crisp, and on point. Former television anchor reporter Terry Wood, who took a bold stand on the Divine Strake controversy, connected to the audience with emotional impact, which was richly rewarded with sustained applause. The actors clearly had fun with the fresh material, energized by the audience’s obvious enjoyment. Perhaps the only real disappointment was that the always-dashing Fabrizio, not the short-adorable-in-his-own-way Allred, should have been wearing the kilt, a tip toward the recent incident at a middle school in which a principal, oblivious to the student’s pride in Scottish heritage, ordered a kilt-wearing boy to change his clothes.

Most importantly, the playwrights consistently made wise choices, acutely aware that the “word” would be especially prominent on a stage containing nothing more than two chairs, a table, and a bench. The scripts dug deeply, challenging at every corner the semantic engineering that drives censorship, suppression, and repression especially as a predominant culture, working from collective fears and uncertainties, works hard to shape the public colloquial language with ideally preferred meanings that simultaneously construct how the community can and cannot be perceived.

Debora Threedy’s interpretation of the incident involving the sales of a racially offensive Sock Obama monkey doll by a Utah-based toy company was a strong opener. Threedy, a law professor at the University of Utah, effectively incorporated the temperament of her daytime profession into a clever script – ‘Black and White’ directed by Alexandra Harbold – in which a three-member spiritual tribunal adjudicates the cosmic and karmic consequences of the toymakers’ decision.

One argues before the presiding judge for a deduction while the other makes the case for a cosmic pass. The trio of actors – Teri Cowan, Teresa Sanderson, and Jason Tatom – did great justice to Threedy’s funny, compact, comprehensive script – a reminder that a sincere apology is, indeed, preferable to anger or defensive silence and that many cases should not be decided solely on a dichotomous basis.

Conclusive as the play might have seemed, Threedy was smart to leave it open ended for the audience’s consideration with her last line about the next case involving State Sen. Chris Buttars, a controversial figure whose public statements have offended many groups. The truth is there are always lots of candidates for that last line.

Jenifer Nii followed with a brilliant take on the case of Chad Hardy, the Brigham Young University student who was excommunicated for producing a beefcake calendar featuring Mormon missionaries. In ‘Pomp and Circumstance,’ she set the scene with a pair of dancers being interrogated by Lieutenant Veronica Harmonica, the personification of the moral police charged with upholding the law of the “confine.”

In particular, as each playwright was assigned a cast of three actors, Nii was impressively resourceful with making dance the central unseen character in her story. The lieutenant, who finds it increasingly difficult to resist the infectious aspects of dance, tries to exorcise the dancers’ presence from the sexless, sterile, monochromatic confine. Yet it is the dancers who are liberated and rejuvenated. The actors – Colleen Baum, Carleton Bluford, and April Fossen – gyrated, thrusted, jumped, and danced in an energetic production under the direction of Tracy Callahan.

Incidentally, Threedy and Nii have co-authored the opening production of the Plan-B 2009-2010 season, a play about Wallace Stegner and Wallace Thurman. It will be a highly anticipated production based on what was presented by both playwrights during this event.

Kathleen Cahill’s script – ‘Smoke Signals’ – was perhaps the most challenging slam assignment. Working with the cue of the smoking ban on Utah’s private clubs which went into effect at the highly inappropriate time of midnight on New Year’s Eve, Cahill knew that, in many respects, the issue had lost its luster but she found inspiration in the ‘smoke signal’ metaphors of alcohol, sex, and general carousing, played up with comic exaggeration by Mark Fossen, Stephanie Howell, and Jayne Luke and directed by Robin Wilks-Dunn. Cahill situates the authorities as inordinately foolish trying to administer a code of conduct that focuses on wondering what their communities would say as opposed to acting upon what one feels individually in their heart and mind.

Christopher Larsen’s play – ‘Sticks and Stones’ – was an elegantly ironic, sensitive relationship piece taking its cue from the Blanding community values committee’s decision to remove a long-standing Hopi fertility statue from public view. Larsen sets the story with a woman at odds with her sister concerning the handling of her 17-year-old daughter who has been brought out of hiding after having a baby out of wedlock. The baby was given up for adoption and the teenaged father was never told that the girl was pregnant.

The story picks up five months after the girl went absent with everybody under the impression that she was sick. The girl, who is back at school but with strict rules limiting contact with any friends, reveals that her boyfriend, the father of the baby unaware that she was even pregnant, is happy to see her again at school and is hoping to resume the relationship.

Larsen, who has four television episodes going into production this fall that focus on Mormon-based stories, handles this well, demonstrating that an individual’s innocence lies within the proper domain of childhood and that it should be lost gradually and naturally as one matures and that to try recapturing it, especially through interdiction and mandate, is wrong and regressive. He leaves the play rightfully open ended with the mother worried that her child’s return might, indeed, suggest that it’s time to bury, for good, Blanding’s old-fashioned tropes about family life.

Director Marcine Lake and actors Elizabeth Howell, Tracie Merrill, and Rhiannon Ross approached Larsen’s script with well-polished sensitivity, especially given the extremely short period of preparation.

Rounding out the world premieres was Matthew Ivan Bennett’s ‘Terms of Use,’ a hilarious, ribald interpretation of an incident involving a Provo, Utah woman whose online photo of her breastfeeding was determined by Facebook officials to be obscene.

Bennett, Plan-B’s resident playwright, set the fantastical scene in a heavenly incarnation clinic as two technicians prepare to send a woman back into earthly existence, to be born in Provo. In particular, her ample breasts fascinate her. Despite every fervent intention on the technician’s part to keep things on a clinical level, his intern, with mischievously childlike glee, exults about the sexual beauty and possibilities of her breasts. In the process, the intern’s long dormant sexuality is awakened as well.

The actors – Kirt Bateman, Anita Booher, and David Spencer – dove with great fervor into Bennett’s script in an uproarious production directed by Christy Summerhays.

Bennett, as usual, managed to cover lots of territory with great effect. There is Lot from the Old Testament, whose wife, contrary to popular belief, was turned not into a pillar of salt but one of cumin. There is the acknowledgement that mainstream America has obvious difficulties with seeing an exposed areola. There is the awareness that Facebook’s classification of nipple shots as obscene, pornographic, or sexually explicit is completely absurd. And, finally there is the realization that the real serpents in an imaginary paradise are denial and detachment which feed the more incipient evil of unhealthy repression and suppression. Bennett’s contribution was the perfect coda to an outstanding benefit evening and to outstanding season that featured his work.