Tonight the UW-Madison Memorial Union presents real-life humor from Ben Karlin and, at 7:30 p.m., fictional humor from the 17th Annual Marcia Legere Student Play Festival, taking place at the Fredric March Play Circle. Admission is free. The Wisconsin Union Directorate's Student Performance Committee issues a call for original scripts written by UW-Madison students, and faculty judges select three to be performed. Directors, actors, backstage personnel, and marketers are also all UW-Madison students.

Each play is well summarized on the Madstage.com and the Student Performance Committee page. The first play, Johnathan Kruse’s Raspberry Pie, is an comically outlandish piece that involves a retelling of “The Monkey’s Paw” (and has little to do with raspberry pie). The second, Denis Hart’s Natural Hospitality, is somewhat more naturalistic comedy though with a fair amount of eccentricity, including a mysterious visitor and an offstage bear hunt motivated by revenge. Ten characters total, with the most appealing moments going to the youngest character, a 15 year old girl with an astute sort of mischievousness.

The final play is The Dirt on Harry, a four-character play by Emily Houlter whose humor is at a more personal level, featuring some comic awkwardness and outrage over revelations. It also has some unusual and crowd-pleasing similes and the longest duration of in-character drunkenness of any play I can remember seeing. Total running time for the festival is one hour and 15 minutes.