Palo Alto High School students, teachers, and alumni put together the holiday-themed, sixth annual Play in a Day on Dec. 19 in the Haymarket theater.

Play in a Day provides an opportunity for students and alumni to put together short plays in only one day. This year, each of the plays was centered around a different holiday.

On Dec. 3, students signed up to act, direct and write for the performance, but were not given an assignment until 1 p.m. on Dec. 18. Participants divided into 12 groups and received a holiday, a costume and two props to include in the plays.

The playwrights had until Saturday morning to write their seven-minute plays, when rehearsals began in preparation for performances that night.

Sophomore Grace Barry, a first-time Play in a Day writer, struggled with finalizing a plot line for her play, “If You Can’t Take the Heat.”

“Basically, it took me six hours to come up with a basic plot concept,” Barry said. “I toyed with so many different ideas … my final idea was pretty much the cookie-cutter Play in a Day — let’s stick a bunch of fun characters in a weird situation and see what happens.”

Barry was assigned “Talk Like a Pirate Day” as the holiday on which to base her play.

“It [Talk Like a Pirate Day] was an interesting holiday, but I found it to be pretty easy to work with just because the theme is more like a jumping point than a crucial element to the scene,” Barry said.

Barry enjoyed watching others react to her play during the performance.

“With Play in a Day, it’s so interesting to see how the audience reacts and hear what they’re saying, because some of the people sitting around me didn’t know that I had written it,” Barry said. “It’s really cool to see it all come together.”

Junior Stephanie Spector said that her group utilized the entire day to prepare for the play.

“We basically spent every second of the day working, running lines, figuring out how it was even going to work and trying desperately to pull it all together,” Spector said.

English teacher Kevin Sharp, who has participated in the even for four years, wrote the play “True Love from A-Z,” which centered around April Fool’s Day. Sharp said he was pleased with the way the performances went.

“I was beyond happy,” Sharp said. “I only knew three of my cast of eight, and they all delivered big time.”

Spector said that the Play in a Day audiences understand mistakes because the production is put together so quickly.

“People get it if you screw up,” Spector said. “In fact, they expect you to. The important thing is to have fun.”

Kelsey Swezey, a 2009 graduate, found that the finished product makes the pressure of putting on a production in one day worthwhile.

“It is super stressful but so rewarding in the end,” Swezey said.