Few New York traditions are as endearing as the annual benefit for the Urban Arts Partnership association, an event known as 24 Hour Plays on Broadway. If you like the theater—and really, why else do you live here, paying those rents?—this event is your idea of the coolest Iron Man ever: Wills are tested, grown men and women teeter on the brink of insanity, egos are crushed then propped up again.…It’s just fantastic! (See my report from last year’s performance.)

The concept is demonically simple: Six playwrights are paired with six directors and a troupe of actors, and they all team up to put on six ten-minute plays. The hook: The whole process takes 24 hours from beginning to end, starting Sunday evening and finishing Monday night. After crashing the creation/casting/rehearsal cycle into a few hours, the pieces are staged just once. In our age of on-demand entertainment, this old-school dedication delivers a real thrill—as if Mickey and Judy were putting on a show not in a barn but on Broadway and for one night only. Like all stunts, this one inspires excitement and dread.

I arrive at the American Airlines Theater Sunday night for the initial meet-and-greet with all the participants of this year’s edition. Everybody is gathered in the fifth-floor penthouse, which has been turned into a de facto war room and appropriately looks like a cross between a Masonic lodge and a council ballroom in Star Wars. A table is well stacked with the two main food groups of theater: sugar and caffeine (though the mere sight of POM Iced Coffee may be enough to keep writers awake at night). Newbies and vets stream in, get Polaroids taken and greet each other, some hiding their nervousness better than others. Legally Blonde’s Laura Bell Bundy, who tomorrow will provide musical interludes with She & Him’s M. Ward, reveals she’s just moved to Nashville in order to further her singing career; former SNL cast member Horatio Sanz is carrying a Double Buffet Range; playwright Adam Bock (The Receptionist) looks freakishly relaxed and chats with Terrence McNally. All the actresses are oddly petite—no Kristen Johnson–ian amazon this year, so I guess nobody will be writing a Xena-ish part. I have to fess up to Matthew Settle that I don’t know who he is, thus indicating that I don’t watch Gossip Girl (he’s the dad). He asks if I’ve seen Band of Brothers. Er, no. Hey, but I knew that Britney Spears was Laura Bell Bundy’s understudy in Ruthless!

Chairs are set up in a circle and we listen to speeches from Urban Arts Partnership’s Philip Courtney and Jan-Patrick Schmitz, CEO of sponsor Montblanc (who announces that the goodie bag is worth a grand or something, which hopefully "will motivate you to throw the roof away tomorrow night"). Rosie Perez—who’s been chair of UAP’s artistic board for 16 years and has participated in all but one of the 24 Hour Plays—talks about the group’s work delivering arts education in NYC schools and gleefully declares: "Tomorrow’s going to be hell! It’s going to be excruciating!" Two alums from UAP perform short slamlike poems. Stage manager Kurt Gardner then gets down to brass tacks and explains the process.

Next: They’re sitting on chairs arranged in a circle and introduce themselves. No, this isn’t an AA meeting.