Fortifying themselves for an absurdist all-nighter

Actress Megan Slater has been eating her vegetables and, she says, spending as much time at the gym as possible. She has given up caffeine, so that when she drinks her first coffee in weeks about 4 a.m. Saturday, she'll get the full effect.

"I'm trying to be really sure I have as much energy as possible," she says.

She'll need it. Slater, five other actors, and director Madi Distefano will be pulling an all-nighter beginning at 8 p.m. Friday at Plays & Players Theatre in Center City. There, they will stage 24 performances of Eugene Ionesco's hour-long The Bald Soprano back to back and without a break.

A 24-Hour The Bald Soprano, as it's called by Brat Productions, where Distefano is co-artistic director, has been a theatrical event here three times before, when Brat has also carried it through the night and into the next day, past sundown.

If any play is made to be turned into the musical equivalent of a "round," with performances that just keep going, it's this one-act. Ionesco wrote The Bald Soprano about two couples, plus a fire chief and a maid, so that at the end of the play one of the couples begin to deliver the same lines that the other couple spoke when the play began.

Distefano built on that idea. If the couples switch roles at the end of The Bald Soprano but use the same lines as the beginning, why not just keep going, with the actors who portray each couple switching roles back and forth in a Bald Soprano chain that becomes an acting endurance test?

The Bald Soprano defies normal stage conventions because it's filled with non sequiturs, characters with unfathomable motivations, and illogical situations. It was Ionesco's first play, produced in 1950; he wrote it, he said, after being impressed by the banalities in the English phrasebook he was using to learn the language. (Romanian by birth, he wrote both in his native language and in French.) The play has been running - not in consecutive hours - for decades as part of the nightly bill at a small Paris theater.

Distefano decided in 1997 to try to enlarge on the play's absurdities by staging it as a round with swapped characters. The first production began in Richmond, Va., then went Off Broadway in New York, then landed at home in Philadelphia as part of the Fringe festival here.

"People asked about it all the time," she says. "People said 'the 24-hour Bald Soprano changed my vision of what theater could be' and was the most exciting event." So Brat Productions restaged it, at the Wilma Theater in 2007, then at the Annenberg in 2010. "I think we could do it every year and people would want to see it because they want to see actors go through that struggle."

Indeed, getting through the 24 hours is an obvious achievement for a cast - and some audience members stay for hours on end. From its first days, the marathon has developed a tradition of the two characters playing the fire chief and the maid surprising the other actors in different ways as the cycle moves forward. In Richmond, actor Anthony Lawton, on stage for about 20 minutes as the fire chief, walked on naked in one of the hours, without telling anyone beforehand. In other hours, he handed out grapes for eating, or hopped through his role instead of walking.

That shock-the-actors tradition continues, a trick that "keeps the actors awake and infuses new energy," Distefano says. "And the audience, if they're going to watch it 15 times in a row, as some people do, they're going to want to see different things."

Distefano justifies the stage pranks theatrically; she says the fire chief and maid are of another world, a blue-collar life, with more freedom than the couples, who are tied down by a code of social conduct and manners.

Brat Productions sells tickets at $20 for two consecutive performances, so audiences can see the couples swap roles at least once. Theatergoers are welcome to stay for others, as long as there are empty seats, or to come earlier than their ticket times if seats are available. This year, there will be a slumber party on the balcony during the show. "Bring your pajamas," Distefano says.

As for Slater, the actress who's looking for that 4 a.m. caffeine jolt, she has spoken with Bradley Wrenn, a fellow cast member and the only one who has been through the marathon before - plus other actors who have done it. "They send us notes and encourage us," Slater says.

"I think it's just going to be a triumph to be standing at the end," she says.

Presented by Brat Productions at Plays & Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey Place, beginning 8 p.m. Friday and ending with the performance that starts at 7 p.m. Saturday. The one-hour play continues repeating during the cycle. Tickets: $20 for a two-hour round; ticket holders may come early or stay later, so long as seats are available. www.bratproductions.ticketleap.com. EndText