Andie Arthur, Christopher Demos-Brown, Elena Maria Garcia, Lucas Leyva, Michael McKeever, Andrew Rosendorf, Juan C. Sanchez and Mark Swaner are getting ready to pull an all-nighter.

The eight aren't students who have decided to cram for a final exam. All are playwrights, men and women who are ready, willing and able to tease a 10-minute play out of their imaginations in just 12 hours. Then, after another 13 hours of crazy collaboration, the results will get a one-time-only performance when the third 24-Hour Theatre Project hits the Actors' Playhouse stage at 8 p.m. Monday.

The brainchild of the trio behind the small Naked Stage Company -- Antonio Amadeo, John Manzelli and Katherine Amadeo -- the 24-Hour Theatre Project has fast become the most collaborative celebration of South Florida's theater community (vs. the glitzy but competitive celebration that is the annual Carbonell Awards ceremony).

Modeled on similar pressure-cooker theater benefits around the country, the 24-Hour Theatre Project brings together actors, directors, stage managers, a few designers and those playwrights, united in their determination to prove that you really can write decent short plays, rehearse them, stage them, memorize them and perform them in just over a day.

``It doesn't get any fresher than this,'' says Leyva, who had his first 24-Hour experience last November. `` It's a testament to a living, breathing theater.''

Negotiating the theatrical process at warp speed makes for jitters and, around hour 23, fried brains. But McKeever notes that speed can also have benefits.

``All those fallback tricks we play to delay writing? You can't do that,'' he says. ``You have to focus and do as well as you can. In this situation, it's collaboration times three. We all cover each other's asses.''

The play McKeever wrote for last year's event, now titled Cravin Tutweiler (The Real Life Story of), proves that lasting art can come from the pressure cooker process.

As did each of the playwrights, last year McKeever dipped his hand into a hat and pulled out the name of a director and four actors. He chose a title from a crazy list dreamed up by Antonio Amadeo, then let his creativity percolate. Since he had one male performer -- Joseph Adler, the artistic director of GableStage -- and three women, he crafted a funny, sexy piece about an older man who had changed the lives of three very different women.

``When I found out my cast, I wrote the characters based on those voices,'' he says.

FINALIST PLAY

His play went on to a full-fledged production as part of City Theatre's most recent Summer Shorts Festival, and it is now a finalist for the Heideman Award for 10-minute plays, a national honor bestowed during the prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Mostly, the artists and the audience come together at the 24-Hour Theatre Project for the fun of it.

Lela Elam will be part of this year's gang of 32 actors. She's doing the event for the second time because she wants to work with new artistic collaborators, and she finds the pressure stimulating.

Elam also thinks she knows why audiences like the 24-Hour experience.

``You can see so many different actors onstage in one night. And I think people enjoy the idea that we could mess up at any time!'' she says, laughing.

Margaret M. Ledford, who serves as resident director for Davie's Promethean Theatre, agrees that working for the first time with different actors is one of the attractions of doing the 24-Hour Theatre Project, adding that the artists' ``energy and synergy get communicated to the audience.'' Even though the plays come together so quickly -- or maybe because they do -- Ledford found that her staging of Leyva's work last year kept buzzing around in her brain after the event was history.

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