All in a day’s work - Best of the 24 Hour Plays

On six occasions since January 1999, Plain Sight Productions and Synchronicity Performance Group have staged The 24-Hour Plays, a theatrical marathon in which eight short works are written, rehearsed and performed within a single day. Next to the high-wire bravado of the format itself, the adrenaline-charged excitement of the participants tends to be the show’s strongest asset. But how do the works look in the bright light of day, after a good night’s sleep? That question is answered by The Best of the 24-Hour Plays, which features nine of the short plays. In revisiting their works, the writers, directors and casts had weeks, not hours, to prepare for production. The end result loses much of the seat-of-the-pants thrills of the standard 24-Hour Plays but makes up for it by having more consistently entertaining work.

Given such an idiosyncratic approach and the youth of the talent, you’d expect that the 24-hour play concept would be an incubator for cutting-edge material. It consequently comes as a surprise that the first half of Best plays much like a stage version of “The Carol Burnett Show.” Which is hardly intended to diss the TV series or its conventional kind of sketch comedy, but Harvey Korman and Tim Conway aren’t quite the role models you expect.

In “Karen’s Manifesto,” we see a dramatist (Jessica Reidell) laboring to write, and three actors trying to implement her ideas while wrestling with stage directions like, “She’s 28 but looks 40,” or dialogue like, “Stephanie, I love you in such a non-gender-specific way.” Next, Marc Cram zestfully plays hardboiled private eye Lucky Strike in the film noir spoof, “The Man With No Pants,” the evening’s only real flop. It must have had a terrific original performance, because here it seems to go on for hours, offering weak puns and double entendres.

“Quiet, Please” by John Gregorio and Emily Pender offers a charming snapshot of Hollywood adjusting to the sound era, in which a washed-up matinee idol (Scott Warren) has dashing body language but no verbal talents. I saw “Quiet, Please” the first time around, and for the revival, the extended, dialogue-free scene at the end seems more fleshed out than I recall, taking nice advantage of Best’s preparation time.

Best’s most weirdly anarchic shorts come in the second act. “Jean Paul Sartre’s Anne Rice’s Salon” offers a wicked satire on Goth culture, imagining the disembodied head of Anne Rice (Julie Oshins) holding a party for such gloomy sorts as Hamlet, Nosferatu and Dr. Faustus. It’s ideal for audiences who enjoy a good Helen Keller joke. George Faughnan goofed on Hamlet for the original and is missed here, although Adam Fitzgerald is droll in his own right. (Many of the original players return for Best).

Clint Thornton and Topher Payne provide an even more satisfying spoof on Irish nostalgia with “Ashes to Ashes, Spud to Spud,” placing Hansel and Gretel (Justin Welborn and Alison Hastings) in the midst of the keening and genuflecting of the great potato famine. Throughout Best, Welborn proves a physical and diverse player, whether as the constantly skipping Hansel or a silent, shadowy figure menacing a young woman in the suspenseful but perplexing “Threshold.”

Given the time constraints of the plays’ initial writing, it’s not surprising that so many draw on familiar pop culture tropes or, like “Karen’s Manifesto,” the creative process itself. Best begins on a self-referential note, with Hastings hosting “The One-Minute Plays,” a mostly amusing self-parody that features four plays and one musical of roughly 60 seconds apiece. Amy Barratt and Jillian St. Charles’ good-natured bedtime story “Once Upon Any Time” explores the conventions of fairy tales.

The plays tend to have a loose, anything-goes attitude, which makes the tight focus of the final piece, Kendra Myers and Stephano Andreas’ “Masterpiece,” such a contrast. At a significant gallery opening, an artist (Adam Fitzgerald) changes his behavior to match potential buyers, from a brash cowboy to a drunk dude to a pretentious Ph.D.: “I think the difficulty here is, can a canvas taste a metaphor?” “Masterpiece” offers some pleasingly simple insights into how art is perceived, while having good jokes as well.

The usual 24-Hour Plays often seem like more fun to participate in than to see. With no safety net, a typical show can contain plenty of dreadful, tedious scripts that don’t work at all, but still must go on. Best mostly succeeds in filtering out the flotsam to showcase an evening of breezy short plays, which generally deserve the extension of their expiration dates.

The Best of the 24-Hour Plays runs through Aug. 8 at Horizon Theatre, 1083 Austin Ave., with performances at 9 p.m. Sun. and 8 p.m. Mon. and Tues. $10-$12. 404-584-7450.