All in a day’s work – Actors leave egos offstage for 24 hour plays

The audience at the American Airlines Theatre tomorrow night (8th) will have a rare chance to see some of Hollywood’s most famous actors absolutely lose their friggin’ minds. The source of this potential meltdown is the ninth annual “24 Hour Plays,” a series of six 10-minute works in which the actors — including Brooke Shields, Jennifer Aniston, Rosie Perez, Naomi Watts, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Mooreand more — don’t get to see their scripts until 12 hours before curtain.

The sold-out show, a charity presentation for the arts-in-schools charity Urban Arts Partnership, will work as follows. Twenty-four actors, six playwrights and six directors will meet at 10 tonight, with each actor bringing a costume and prop of their choosing.

After introductions are made, each playwright — including Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire (“Shrek the Musical,” “Rabbit Hole”) and Tony winner Warren Leight (“Side Man”) — will spend all night writing short plays that must be completed by 7 tomorrow morning. Then actors spend the day memorizing lines, rehearsing and tearing their hair out before performing at 8 p.m. By 10, exactly 24 hours later, it’ll all be over.

Rosie Perez is a veteran of the event, for one reason, and one reason only.

“All the money is going to my charity. Otherwise, I wouldn’t put myself though the torture,” says Perez, who recalls how one famous actor — who she wouldn’t name no matter how hard we begged — lost his nerve.

“He hadn’t done a lot of theater, and he came in going, ‘I’ve done some theater, this is gonna be fun,’ and the real theater actors were going, ‘Umm hmm,’” says Perez. “By the fifth hour, he had a full-blown meltdown — screaming and talking to himself in the hallway. I go, ‘It’s alright, it’s normal. If you throw up, you’ll feel better.’ The actors’ fates will largely depend on their experience at the seat-of-the-pants performance. “SNL” veteran Rachel Dratch has done it six times, calling on her improv background.

“It’s my favorite night, because you have actors from all different areas thrown together, and you don’t know who’s in your cast,” says Dratch, who last year wound up playing a Boy Scout who had to suck snakebite poison from the bitten leg of “Gossip Girl” star Matthew Settle.

For “24 Hour virgin” Emmy Rossum, the thrill is tempered by nerves.

“I’ll probably have cold sweats every night this week,” says Rossum, who’s considering a bedazzler as her prop. “But I have no idea who I’m playing, and that’s what makes it so exciting. I could play a toddler, a psychotic geriatric woman, a psychotic geriatric woman with a bedazzler. Who knows?”

When asked for advice for first-timers, Perez directs them to take the challenge seriously — unlike the cocky jerk who almost lost his mind.

“Respect the process, because it’s a real theater performance,” she says. “Know your lines and character as much as you can, and drop the ego, because you’ll need your fellow actors. We take it seriously.”

- nypost.com

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With only 24 hours to create six plays from start to finish, it is not surprising that things run on a strict schedule here at the American Airlines Theater. By 8 a.m. the directors had finished submitting their choices (Lucie Tiberghien said she thought the scripts were all good, and all funny. “Nobody tried to do a dark drama,” she said). It seemed only a few minutes had passed before Philip Naudé, one of the producers, gave the directors their assignments. Leigh Kilton-Smith is to direct Stephen Belber’s play, “Ramen Noodle,” and her reaction seemed unclear for a moment — was that pleasant shock or something more like horror that flashed across her face?

It turned out to be the former, as she explained a bit later. “It was one of my top two picks,” she said. “He is a wonderful writer who can frame the absurd in reality in a way that few others can.” Ms. Kilton-Smith said she has never directed in a 24-hour-play event in the past, and was feeling both “psyched and panicked” about the challenge ahead.

By 8:30 a.m., once the actors had arrived and were drinking coffee and munching bagels in the lobby, Lindsay Bowen, another of the producers, announced the full casts for each play (see list below). The casts dispersed to various studios to begin rehearsing and the lobby that had seemed like a relaxed party for all of 15 minutes was soon nearly empty again. There is no time to waste.

Ms. Kilton-Smith is the first director who gets a chance to rehearse on the real stage and soon her cast was sitting around that previously mentioned absurdly long wooden table and reading the play aloud. Staging a play that is supposed to open outside on a park bench is going to be tricky on this set, which could hardly state “giant kitchen” more clearly than it does. The short read-through over, Ms. Kilton-Smith begins to figure out where to put benches and actors, then turns to Zach Murphy, the lighting designer. “How much of that set can we get rid of with lighting?” she asks. So it’s going to be a day of challenges.

Since there is clearly much to be done and the other casts have all vanished to secret locations, this seems like an opportune time to sneak out for breakfast. Or a nap. Rehearsals will continue all day and we’ll be checking back later.

Oh, and for those who cannot stand the suspense, here is a very unofficial list of titles and casts. It is probably safest to assume any number of things could be subject to change, but the show tonight ought to look something like this (but not necessarily in this order):

“And It Seems to Me a Very Good Sign,” by Harrison Rivers, directed by Jessica Bauman, starring John Krasinski, Naomi Watts, Sam Rockwell and Amber Tamblyn.

“Second Opinion,” by Tina Howe, directed by Lynne Meadow, starring Liev Schreiber, Fisher Stevens, Diane Neal and Leslie Bibb.

The Untitled Pen play (and that is not necessarily the title, thus no quotation marks), by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Peter Ellenstein, starring Demi Moore, Jeremy Sisto, Gaby Hoffman and Julia Stiles.

“Daily Bread,” by Warren Leight, directed by Lucie Tiberghien, starring Billy Crudup, Rachel Dratch, Claudie Blakley, Emmy Rossum and Rosie Perez.

“Furry Little Angels,” by Nathan Louis Jackson, directed by Josie Rourke, starring Ashton Kutcher, Michael Ealy, Tracie Thoms, Eva Mendes and Rosario Dawson.

“Ramen Noodle,” by Stephen Belber, directed by Leigh Kilton-Smith, starring David Cross, Anthony Mackie, Brooke Shields and Jennifer Aniston.

- nytimes.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Career. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.