The Up All Night Play Festival will take place at the Globe Theatre in the Doudna Fine Arts Center with introductions beginning at 7 p.m. Friday and performances beginning at 7 p.m. Saturday.

The premise of the Up All Night Play Festival is participants must write, rehearse and produce a theatrical production within the 24-hour time slot provided.

Participants will be separated into teams, with students taking on the roles of writing, performing and staging the performances.

Michael Surles, a senior theatre major, will be co-hosting the event with Josie Parish, a junior theatre major.

“It’s a fun opportunity for people to experiment and show off their writing and their art and not be afraid to just do something,” Surles said.

Up All Night will be the second annual 24-hour play festival put on at the Doudna.

“We had a decent turnout for our first ever festival,” Surles said. “Fingers crossed we get a big turnout again this year.”

Lunchbox Voodoo and Hello Dali!, two of the performing groups on campus, performed in last year’s festival, and Surles said he expects the groups will likely participate in this year’s festival. Surles also said he heard there were several people from the English department interested in writing for the festival.

“That would get more than just the theatre students there,” Surles said. “It’d be fun to connect with other people and give people an opportunity to work with people they’ve never worked with before.”

Parish said that the festival could include many different kinds of performances, such as songs, monologues or dance routines.

“Everyone gets the same amount of time to memorize and get it as complete as possible and perform something they might not otherwise have a chance to perform,” Parish said. “(The performers) go away feeling accomplished because we did it, and we did it in 24 hours.”

Regarding the performances, Parish said when people come to see it they get to have that experience of seeing how close-knit everyone can become in that 24 hours.

AJ Lingad, a junior theatre major, performed in the first play festival and plans to participate again in the second.

“Last year it was just really cool to see the whole department get together and come up with things to express themselves in ways that we normally don’t get to,” Lingad said. “Also, the fact that it’s student led is something very unique because it’s the students’ work and I think the professors that come to see it are proud of that as well.”

Mercury Bowen can be reached at 581-2812 or mjbowen@eiu.edu.