24 (not so)Little Hours

“Reminds you why you fell in love with theater in the first place” –Kevin Spacey on “The 24 Hour Plays”

Back in April Urban Arts Partnership announce they were bringing their successful 24 Hour Plays program to Los Angeles to benefit the arts program in the LA Unified School District in 2012.

Urban Arts Partnership has been benefit the New York school system for 19 years advancing "the intellectual, social, and artistic development of underserved public school students through arts-integrated programs to close the achievement gap." Actress Rose Perez has been with Urban Art Partnership since its inception. Over the year some of the participants of the "Plays" have included Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Chris Rock, Kyra Sedgwick, Brooke Shields, Sarah Silverman and Elijah Wood in the Broadway fundraiser.

Back in April the tentative line up was Jen Aniston, Leslie Bibb, Zachery Live, Eva Mendes, Kathy Najimy,Sam Rockwell, Nia Vardalos, and Rosie Perez and others. It looked like it was back then when Austin might have made the commitment then.

On June 17, each cast member brainstormed ideas before the writers began drafting the scripts at 10 pm Friday night that had to be finished by 6 am the next morning. The actors then got to rehearse with the directors for the next 12 hours and then, in front of a live audience, performed the plays for the first and only time on Saturday night.
When it the stage the line up was Eva Mendes, Saffron Burrows, Leslie Bibb, Jack McBrayer, David Eigenberg, Yvette Nicole Brown, Rosie Perez, Jenna Elfman, Adam Brody, Zachery Levi, Austin, Sophia and several others.
And the plays? They were each about 10 minutes long and included such themes as a Batman autopsy, a sex addict meeting gone wrong, a Chewbacca-like bear falling in love with a woman with an abusive boyfriend, and lots of Shake Weight references.Now we know Austin was working with a bear and I don't think he was the girlfriend, so the guess is he played the bad boyfriend.And the bear? It looks like it was Adam Brody.

Was Austin's unicycle and Edgar Allen Poe a part of the play? Not sure it made the cut.

The most poignant moment of the night was when a former student who received a scholarship through the program, who recited her poem “Why I Write,”. It reminded everyone there that the evening "wasn’t about the celebrities on stage, but about the future of arts in education and the future of the kids involved."