The 24 Hour Plays

 

[On 6 February 2000, Kerry Eielson, a freelance writer who wrote about the Off-Off-Broadway theater for the New York Times, published the following description:

By 10 o’clock on the night of Jan. 22, 47 people had gathered at the Chopin Theater in Chicago.  A fireman, a lawyer, a journalist and a candy store clerk were among them.  Each had brought a prop and costume, knowing that in less than 24 hours he would be performing before an audience that had paid $10 apiece to see theater.  Some of those present had never been on a stage before.  No one had learned his lines.  No one knew what part he was to play.  As a matter of fact, none of the roles had been created.  The plays had yet to be written.

No, this wasn’t Ionesco or a nightmare.  It was preparation for what are called “The 24-Hour Plays.”  Actually, it takes 24 hours to create, cast and rehearse them; performances last 90 minutes or so.

[This is The 24 Hour Plays seen from the ground level.  (The official, trademarked name of the company has no hyphen.)  This event took place in Chicago, but it’s the same process in New York City, Little Rock, Dublin, London, at a high school in Portland, Oregon, or a resident theater in Hoboken, New Jersey. 

[It sounds hectic and haphazard—and it is.  “‘I have participated in the 24 Hour Plays three times as a writer,’ said one of the participants [at the Mile Square Theatre in Hoboken], Susie Felber, this week.  ‘It is scary, stressful, and so wonderful I would do it every day of my life if I could.’  She summed up the experience: “The 24 Hour Plays is 100 percent high wire act."

[The concept, borrowed by The 24 Hour Plays founder Tina Fallon from an idea cartoonist and comic book-maker Scott McCloud came up with, is meant to stimulate creativity without the self-censorship or -editing of over-thinking.  As playwright Warren Leight, author of 11 24 Hour Plays since 2001, put it: “The beauty of having to create something overnight is even if, like, say, hypothetically, you procrastinate . . . you have to come up with something.”

[As the tech director of my college theater liked to say, “Necessity is a mother.”

[The performances are usually a little rough and raw, and the plays often don’t come out quite the way the writers imagined.  Lee Sutton, a young playwright at a 24 Hour Plays event at London’s Old Vic, recounted:

"Looking back," he says the next morning, surprisingly together, "I can see so many little mistakes and decisions I'd avoid if I did it all again.  This is by far the strangest, most chaotic, random piece of work I've ever written, but I wouldn't change a second of it."

[This year’s 24 Hour Plays on Broadway was just last 21 October.  The phenomenon intrigued me, so I thought I’d read up on it.  Here’s the result of that reading.]

The 24 Hour Plays is a New York City-based organization that brings together artists to create plays and musicals within a 24-hour timeframe.  The 24 Hour Plays was founded in 1995 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan by Tina Fallon (b. 1969), an independent theater producer who resides in Brooklyn. 

Fallon served as the Executive Director of Creative Affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America from 2016 to 2020.  She’s been a presenter at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and The Association for Theatre in Higher Education, a judge for the KCACTF Irene Ryan Awards (which presents scholarships to outstanding actors who participate in the Festival), and a teaching artist at the Educational Theatre Association conference. 

Fallon stepped down as Artistic Director of 24 Hour Plays after almost 10 tears of guiding the company’s operations.  She remains on the board, succeeded as the organization’s head by the current AD, Mark Armstrong, who’s had a long history with 24HP, starting in 2003 as a frequent director of productions.

Fallon’s tale of how the concept of The 24 Hour Plays came about starts when she graduated from Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate, liberal arts college of The New School in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.  That was at the beginning of the 1990s and she kicked around the Off-Off-Broadway theaters trying to get someone to hire her to direct plays. 

As anyone who’s started out in that arena knows, that’s a hard thing to do; it’s the same for directors, actors, designers, and even dramatists (good plays are always in demand—but there are a lot of wannabe writers sending in scripts). 

(Just about the only theater worker who can get a gig for the asking, I’d guess, is the stage manager.  The need’s so great for a good one who’s willing to work Off-Off-Broadway, that when a theater manager or director finds one, she’s snapped up faster than a New York minute.  The only problem is keeping her.)

So, Fallon did what a lot of self-starters do: she started her own company.  She produced plays in whatever spaces she could find and even did some of her productions in Los Angeles.  On either coast, that meant, even as producer, she sold refreshments at intermission and served as a stage hand.

Back in New York City, she was directing one of her OOB shows and her leading man dropped out a week before opening.  She doesn’t say why, but it’s a frequent occurrence when there’s no contract and an actor gets a paying job.  You can’t hold him; it’s part of the ethic.

Fallon says she took a lesson from comic book-writer and graphic novelist Scott McCloud (Zot!, 1982-94; The Sculptor, 2015), who came up with the notion “[t]o create a complete 24 page comic book in 24 continuous hours.”  McCloud’s idea was: “The less you plan, the less likely you are to get frustrated.”

(McCloud also wrote a series of books about the comic medium and business in comic-book form: Understanding Comics [Tundra Publishing, 1993], Reinventing Comics [William Morrow Paperbacks, 2000], and Making Comics [William Morrow Paperbacks, 2006].)

As applied to theater, Fallon’s version of the lesson was: “Too much time and money is wasted.  This is a production manager's dream.”  It took her a few years to work out the practice, she says.

24HP‘s first showcase was mounted at the La Tea Theater on the Lower East Side in 1995.  Fallon’s intention was to do a one-time event, but the idea caught on, and what became the nonprofit 24 Hour Plays had an unsalaried staff, all friends of Fallon’s who liked her idea, no office, and no actual infrastructure.

The resulting performance company consisted of 45 unknowns and they charged $45 admission.  In 2001, 24HP was still operating and the participants were . . . well, better known.  As the New York Times reported Fallon’s account:

Billy Crudup committed first, then enlisted his girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker, who brought in Rosie Perez, who suggested a charity, Working Playground [now Urban Arts Partnership; an organization that brings arts education into New York City classrooms], to benefit from the event, and recruited Marisa Tomei.  Factor in Liev Schreiber, Brooke Shields and Philip Seymour Hoffman (he attended the same upstate high school as Ms. Fallon), and The 24 Hour Plays annual benefit achieved sufficient cachet to move to Broadway.  Bloomingdale's and Details magazine are picking up the tab and throwing the post-show bash; but the creative process remains, she swears, unsullied by sponsors (Robin Finn, “PUBLIC LIVES; A Broadway Baby Without a Minute to Spare,” 10 September 2003, Section B [“The Metro Section”]: 2; link above).

Since 1997, the 24HP concept is being licensed to schools and community theaters around the country and theaters abroad have taken up the program.  Today 24HP events have taken place in the United States in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, and San Francisco, among other cities.  Abroad, theaters in cities such as London, Dublin, Athens, Mexico City, and Florence have mounted 24 Hour Plays programs, as have venues in Germany, Finland, and Denmark.

Two books of material from The 24 Hour Plays have been published: 24 by 24: The 24 Hour Plays Anthology, edited by Mark Armstrong and Sarah Bisman (Playscripts, 2009), includes the work of celebrated theatrical voices such as Tony Award-winner Terrence McNally, Adam Rapp, Tina Howe, Will Eno, David Ives, and Theresa Rebeck, collected from performances of 24HP, and The 24 Hour Plays: Viral Monologues, edited by Howard Sherman (Methuen Drama, 2020), features a collection of over 50 original monologues by writers such as Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lindsay-Abaire, Stephen Adly Guirgis, and Jesse Eisenberg created during the coronavirus pandemic.

The 2003 New York Times profile of Tina Fallon cited above refers to a “TV pilot,” a “24 Hour short film,” and a “24 Hour music video,” but I wasn’t able to identify any of those projects.  There were, however, two TV segments that aired in New York City.  The first was “‘The 24-Hour Plays’ and The Agony & Ecstasy of Writing Negative Reviews,” an episode of the interview show Theater Talk which was broadcast on WNET, the New York City Public Broadcasting Service outlet (channel 13), on 6 April 2018 (and was syndicated nationally in PBS stations). 

The second part of the episode title is an unrelated story, but in the relevant segment, actors Richard Kind and Gideon Glick join Roundabout Underground Artistic Producer Jill Rafson to talk about the 2018 edition of The 24 Hour Plays she produced that spring.  (Roundabout Underground is the Roundabout Theatre Company’s home for new plays by emerging writers.  It’s housed in the Black Box Theatre in the basement of the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, the former American Place Theatre.)  Theater reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli, former New York Post review-writer (and current New York Times contributor), guest co-hosts with Susan Haskins. (The video is available on YouTube.)

The second TV show was “The 24 Hour Plays Viral Monologues,” broadcast on Working in the Theatre, the American Theatre Wing’s documentary series, shown on CUNY-TV, the cable outlet of the City University of New York, on 24 September 2020.  The segment showed members of The 24 Hour Plays cohort sharing how the Viral Monologues came to be, how their development shares many similarities to 24HP’s previous programming, and what challenges and changes they've experienced.  (A video is available on the American Theatre Wing site.)

The format for The 24 Hour Plays is pretty simple.  The process beaks down into six steps.  The performances are usually on a Sunday evening, so the process starts at about 10 o’clock on a Saturday night.

First, the participants meet for an introduction session.  There are six playwrights, 24 actors, and six directors.  The 24HP artistic director has selected the writers and directors as well as the pool of actors.  

   The actors are photographed and then introduce themselves, accoutered with what American Theatre senior editor Allison Considine called “preposterous props and costume pieces” that they brought with them, and explain their special abilities and artistic wishes.  

   When the introductions are done, the costume bits and hand props are tossed into a pile in the middle of the space so anyone can use them for inspiration.  It sounds a lot like an acting exercise of Michael Chekhov’s that I described as “instant character.”

   Artistic director Armstrong sees this as a reversal of the usual casting approach: “Rather than the traditional formulation, where writers—and directors like me—proclaim to the actor, “Here’s what we’re looking for, can you do that?,” this approach asks the actor to declare to the writer, “Here’s what I can do and here’s what I dream of doing—what can you do with that?”

Second, the participants sit down and brainstorm ideas for the plays, informed by what the director and playwright have learned about their potential cast.  The actors and directors go home.

Third, in what seems like a sports draft, the AD divvies up the actors, using the photos (they were Polaroids back in the early years), among the directors.  If a director wasn’t assigned an actor she or he had wanted, the pix are traded like baseball cards.  

Fourth, the writers stay up all night to compose the plays.  (The venue becomes a writers’ room.)  They write for the actors in their casts, which fits in exactly with Mark Armstrong’s comment.

Some playwrights work through the night, but like some others, Warren Leight, the veteran of many 24-hour plays since 2001, says that last year, he slept until 6 a.m., wrote his play in an hour, went back to sleep, and then “tried to tighten it up later in the day.”

Fifth, at 6 the next morning, the writers return with their scripts and the directors vote on the three plays they’d like to stage.  The AD makes the assignments, trying to accommodate the directors’ wishes.  The playwrights go home.

   In the afternoon, the actors return and each cast rehearses in the performance venue.  At the end, each cast get 15 minutes to rehearse the tech.  No delays or extra time.

Sixth, the performances of six 8- to 10-minute plays are presented, starting at 8 p.m.  The plays must be acted as written (no improvising).  

   Mistakes will happen, of course, and the participants just have to roll with the punches.  Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, veteran of 13 years of 24 Hour Plays, recounted a mishap when one of the actors forgot a line, “and each of the actors onstage thought it was the other person’s line. ‘From the audience, I yelled out the line, and got the biggest laugh of the night!’ said Lindsay-Abaire.

   All the plays must be performed regardless of how the cast or director feels about the result (no drop-outs).  Actors in the casting pool may be cast in more than one play, but may only have a major speaking role in one.

There are variations on this schema when The 24 Hour Plays are presented in different locations.  At London’s Old Vic in 2011, for instance, there were seven plays and 52 participants, and the performances started at 7:30 instead of 8 p.m.  The rest of the procedure was the same there as in New York City.  

At the Arkansas Repertory Theatre in Little Rock, the performances started at 7.  Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon, a participant in The 24 Hour Plays since 2016, gave their performances on Saturday rather than Sunday.

The 24 Hour Plays, which started as an Off-Off-Broadway event in venues like the La Tea Theater on the Lower East Side, the New School University (now just called The New School) in Greenwich Village, P.S. 122 (now known as Performance Space New York) in the East Village, and the Present Company Theatorium, also on the Lower East Side, soon branched out into a multi-faceted operation. 

In 1997, The 24-Hour Plays ran around the clock for 10 days in a row (“The 240-Hour Plays”) at the New York International Fringe Festival (13-24 August; the inaugural festival) and 53 new plays were created in 10 days.  Fallon acknowledged that the effort was too much, both emotionally and physically, so it was not attempted again.

Since that year, as I mentioned earlier, 24HP franchised the program and licensed it to schools, colleges, and community groups worldwide.  The company has laid out both the rationale for producing The 24 Hour Plays in one’s community and the procedure for obtaining a license on its website.

But there have also been other developments and expansions of the franchise.

Within a year or two of initiating the licensing venture, the company began working with organizations of all kinds, such as professional theaters, arts organizations, and community groups, to produce The 24 Hour Plays in theaters all around the world.  These partners have brought together local arts communities from London to Los Angeles, Dublin to Minneapolis, Finland to Mexico, and more for a 24 Hour Plays event.  

Some of these partners include: 

New Victory Theatre: The Broadway house on 42nd Street which operates as a children’s theater collaborates with The 24 Hour Plays to include families and young people in their efforts.  New Victory presents seven young playwrights, New York City students in grades 5-12, as they collaborate with professional actors and directors to stage their own original works, written and rehearsed over a single day and night, live.

The Sands College of Performing Arts at Pace University: Steps from City Hall to its north, the downtown college, one of the top 10 most represented colleges on Broadway, partners with The 24 Hour Plays to produce The 24 Hour Plays: Nationals (see below).

Broadway Advocacy Coalition: A Tony Award-winning (2021 Special Tony Award for providing a platform for underrepresented members of the theater community), nonprofit arts-based advocacy organization dedicated to the use of arts and storytelling to build a more equitable society, BAC is a partner of The 24 Hour Plays.

Dublin Youth Theatre: Committed to producing theater at a high artistic standard that’s relevant to the lives of young people, DYT is a partner of The 24 Hour Plays.

The University of Minnesota - Duluth: Mark Armstrong, Artistic Director of The 24 Hour Plays, was raised in Duluth and is a theater alumnus of UMD, a partner of 24HP.

Savannah Repertory Theatre: South Georgia’s “flagship regional theater” is a partner of The 24 Hour Plays and declares that it “intentionally produces vibrant works of modern theater and is compelled to create space for a new generation of storytellers.”

Cincinnati Shakespeare Company: “Cincy Shakes,” a partner of The 24 Hour Plays, asserts that it participates “in the global dialogue by producing the classic canon, commissioning the next generation of classics, and engaging the artists, schools,” and its community.

Other partners include the Lymphatic Education & Research Network (New York City), The Lillys (NYC), InterACT Theatre Company (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), Communities United for Police Reform (NYC), The Fled Collective (NYC), Asian-American Justice Center (Washington, D.C.), Nicosia International Festival (Nicosia, Cyprus), Gilda’s Club (NYC), Developing Artists (NYC), Biennington College (Bennington, Vermont), National Queer Theater (Brooklyn, NY), New Sanctuary Coalition (NYC), INTAR Theatre (NYC), STLFringe (St. Louis, Missouri), Atlantic Theater Company (NYC), New 42 (NYC), The Dramatists Guild (NYC), The Rockefeller Foundation (NYC), and many more.

In 2001, The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway began with the writing of plays at Town Hall the night before the annual gala.  The last iteration was on 21 October 2024, when stars from Broadway, film, and TV gathered to write, rehearse, and perform six new plays. 

Past participants in The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway have included Jennifer Aniston, Jason Biggs, Wayne Brady, Anna Chlumsky, Michael Cerveris, Billy Crudup, Alan Cumming, Hugh Dancy, Peter Dinklage, Rachel Dratch, Jesse Eisenberg, Gloria Estefan, Edie Falco, America Ferrera, Greta Gerwig, Aasif Mandvi, Tracy Morgan, John Mulaney, Cynthia Nixon, Lynn Nottage, Anna Paquin, Amanda Peet, Rosie Perez, Chris Rock, Sam Rockwell, Wallace Shawn, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Sarah Silverman, Marisa Tomei, Naomi Watts, Vanessa Williams, and many more.

Tickets for the 2024 edition of The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway began at $50, plus a voluntary donation if desired.  Proceeds support 24HP’s non-profit activities, including education programming with students from middle school to college and professional development for emerging artists.

The 24 Hour Musicals began in 2006.  Artists—actors, directors, writers, composers, choreographers, and a live band—create and perform four 15- to 20 minute musicals in one day, “a feat of artistic agility,” says Playbill. The event takes place at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater, the East Village home of the Classic Stage Company (CSC) on East 13th Street in Manhattan. 

This year’s edition was held on 10 June 2024.  The process is essentially the same as for The 24 Hour Plays, except, obviously, instead of a lone playwright, there’s a dramatist-composer team, and the director is paired with a choreographer.  There are only four musicals instead of six for the straight plays—because the musicals are about twice as long.

This year’s artists included Angelique Cabral (actor; Life in Pieces [sitcom]), Will Frears (director and scriptwriter; Misery [Broadway play]), Kirsten Guenther (musical librettist; Benny & Joon [regional musical]), Dylan Guerra (writer; The Other Two [sitcom]), Jakeim Hart (actor; Hell’s Kitchen [Broadway musical]), Leigh Ann Larkin (actor; Gypsy [Broadway musical]), Ryan Scott Oliver (composer and lyricist; 35MM [Los Angeles musica]), Carolyn Cantor (director; Sell/Buy/Date [Off-Broadway musical]), Jesse Eisenberg (playwright; Happy Talk [Off-Broadway play] – actor; The Social Network [film]), Kathryn Gallagher (actor; Jagged Little Pill [Broadway musical]), Josh Koenigsberg (writer; Orange Is the New Black [TV comedy-drama]), Gabrielle Ruiz (actor; Crazy Ex-Girlfriend [TV musical comedy-drama]), Heath Saunders (actor; Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 [Broadway musical]), George Abud (actor; Lempicka [Broadway musical]), Sherz Aletaha (actor; Merrily We Roll Along [Broadway musical]), John Carrafa (choreographer; Urinetown [Broadway musical]), Kayla Davion (actor; Tina: The Tina Turner Musical [Broadway musical]), Olli Haaskivi (actor; Oppenheimer [film]), Emily Xu Hall (composer and lyricist; Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile [film]), Andrew Leeds (actor; Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist [TV musical comedy-drama]), Ryan Jamaal Swain (actor and dancer; Pose [TV drama]), Will Swenson (actor and singer; A Beautiful Noise [Broadway musical]), and Natalie Walker (actor; White Girl in Danger [Off-Broadway musical]). 

The 24 Hour Musicals also partnered with Tony-winning designer David Rockwell and the Rockwell Group for scenic and video design.  The creative team also included sound coordinator Kai Harada, lighting designer Elizabeth M. Stewart, costume designer Katja Andreiev, and props design by Courtney Kupferschmidt.

There’s a documentary film from 2011 (eight years after the New York Times article that mentions the other media products).  Directed by Trish Dalton and Elisabeth Sperling, One Night Stand records the 2009 24 Hour Musicals event that featured the creation of four musicals in a 24-hour period.  The stressful undertaking of the creation of the four mini-musicals is captured in the 73-minute behind-the-scenes documentary.  (Viewer reviews appear on IMDb and the blog J.B. Spins.)

The film had its World Premiere on 24 July 2011 at the NewFest, New York’s LGBT Film Festival (21-28 July 2011, Film Society of Lincoln Center) and features Cheyenne Jackson, Mandy Gonzalez, Roger Bart, Rachel Dratch, Alicia Witt, Richard Kind, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, among others.  One Night Stand won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature.  (A video is available on YouTube.)

The 24 Hour Plays: Nationals—the program for artists 25 and under—has been cultivating the future of theatrical talent since 2013. 

Each summer, 24HP brings together a group of talented early-career theater artists for a free professional intensive in partnership with New York City’s Pace University.  Participants, who also receive a $200 participation stipend, are invited into a weeklong experience in the City featuring workshops, master classes, panel discussions, career development, community building, and more.  The program culminates in a production of the resulting 24 Hour Plays in an Off-Broadway theater.

This year’s Nationals ran on 15-22 July 2024, with the performance night at 7:30 p.m. on 22 July at the CSC’s Lynn F. Angelson Theater.

Alumni of The 24 Hour Plays: Nationals are employed in the entertainment industry from on and off Broadway, to television and film, and in the leadership of theaters here and abroad.  Past participants include playwrights Bekah Brunstetter, Ken Greller, Laura Jacqmin, Mike Lew, Liliana Padilla, Andrew Rincón and Celine Song; actors Pico Alexander, Satya Babha, Elizabeth Lail, Naomi Lorrain, Bobby Moreno, Ebonee Noel, Coral Peña, Brandon Scott, Chris Smith, and Natalie Walker; producers Shariffa Ali, Kelcie Beene, Carly Hugo and Patrick Anthony Surillo; and directors Jake Beckhard, Miranda Cornell, Ryan Dobrin, Colette Robert, and James Dacre.

The 24 Hour Plays: Viral Monologues were created during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020.  To keep theater alive during the shut-down, the 24HP community of artists connected through safe, socially-distanced, new collaborations, the company gathered artists virtually to create monologues in 24 hours.

24HP returned to in-person programming in 2022, two years after ceasing live events.  The Viral Monologues continued, however, and are accessible on line.  On the designated day of the performances, one video is released every 15 minutes on Instagram and YouTube starting at 6 p.m. (Eastern Time).  There’s an archive of all past monologues on The 24 Hour Plays website. 

The latest episode of The 24 Hour Plays: Viral Monologues ran on 23 May 2023 in support of the Writers Guild of America’s strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (2 May-27 September 2023).