For three decades, the most notable coming together of South Florida's far-flung theater community happened at the annual Carbonell Awards, where polished productions and performances are honored.

But since 2007, an event designed to benefit one of the region's smallest, newest theater companies has brought out the community in a different yet undeniably exciting celebration of South Florida stage talent.

The 24-Hour Theatre Project, brainchild of Naked Stage founders Antonio Amadeo, Katherine Amadeo and John Manzelli, happened for the third time this week. Like its predecessors, the all-volunteer event had its roughness and glitches, and generated short plays of uneven quality and doubtful shelf life.

But the miracle of the 24-Hour Project, as event producer Antonio Amadeo points out, is that the art a few hundred audience members enjoyed Monday evening didn't exist before eight playwrights gathered at Actors' Playhouse just after 7 p.m. Sunday to pull the names of directors and cast members from a hat, pick titles and start writing.

Actors inevitably drop lines (some don't even pretend to have memorized their parts), performers crack up and costumes make broad statements about characters.

And the plays? This year's writers -- Juan C. Sanchez, Lucas Leyva, Mark Swaner, Christopher Demos-Brown, Andie Arthur, Andrew Rosendorf, Elena Maria Garcia and Michael McKeever -- crafted mostly funny works laced with hostility, angst and/or menacing violence (not to mention more f-bombs than an uncensored hip-hop artist).

Sanchez kicked things off with The Family Jewels, a black-comic collision between two violence-prone guys and their jittery neighbors. Leyva, a funny young playwright with a wild imagination, took Sanchez's dismemberment idea farther in The Purloined Sweater, a play about a mousy woman (Laura Turnbull), her self-adoring mom (Barbara Bradshaw), mom's over-the-top agent (Sandy Ives) and a suave dinosaur (Ken Clement) with an appetite for grandiose women of a certain age.

Swaner's astutely observed The Britneys gave Barbara Sloan a plum role as an emotionally needy, wine-guzzling woman who looks for more than literary chit-chat at her book club meetings. Demos-Brown's clever The Life and Death of Child Star Paulie Delucca walked a fine line between raucous comedy (Deborah L. Sherman was at her scene-stealing best as the ``only Jewish Mouseketeer'') and the darkness of a former child star's suicidal thoughts.

Arthur's Abacus Jones: Boy Detective was a sweet romp with whimsical performances by Tom Wahl, Irene Adjan, Stephen G. Anthony and David Perez-Ribada. Rosendorf's mysterious Haunted lived up to its title and led to another luminous performance by Lela Elam. Garcia's Deja Vu, Deja Vu took its cue from its title, serving up variations on a scene to wearying effect. McKeever's F*ck the PTA presented a quartet of especially disagreeable parents of kindergarteners -- not entertainingly disagreeable, just disagreeable.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

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