Jen Live! America's Sweetheart Aniston Takes the Stage

So how was she? And by "she," you know we mean Jennifer Aniston, who volunteered her time along with 23 other actors for the latest Broadway edition of The 24 Hour Plays? Well, all those years of taping Friends before a live audience—not to mention the training she got at the High School of Performing Arts—seems to have paid off. Judging from her 10 minutes in the spotlight at the American Airlines Theater in Adam Bock's Three Girls and Bob, Aniston has what it takes to act onstage.

Internet gossip reports claim that Aniston is considering a Broadway run in a play called Since Yesterday no word on who wrote it or what it's about, so a one-night benefit performance, surrounded by the likes of Liev and Pablo Schreiber, Wallace Shawn, Rachel Dratch, Elizabeth Berkley, Matthew Lillard and Julianna Margulies must have seemed like a safe way to test the theatrical waters. Her honey Vince Vaughn—they're still together, okay?—just did the same thing in London.

Of course, being handed a script at 8:00 AM to memorize and perform in front of 750 savvy New Yorkers 12 hours later is not really a task for the fainthearted. Six stellar playwrights Terrence McNally, Adam Bock, Adam Rapp, Julia Cho, David Ives and Tina Howe delivered 10-minute-long plays to six directors Miguel Arteta, Elinor Renfield, Ian Morgan, Andrew McCarthy, Bennett Miller, Josie Rourke early in the morning of October 23. Rehearsals began immediately, with tech rehearsal from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., and the shows went on at 8:00 using the drawing room set of the Roundabout Theater Company's current production of Heartbreak House.

Gimmicky? Sure. But the event was also fascinating in showing off the stage smarts of the stars involved. And where else could you see the brothers Schreiber sharing the stage with hunky Michael Ealy in McNally's pithy slice-of-life playlet The Sunday Times, with Pablo and Ealy as a gay couple and Amy Ryan as Liev's ranting wife, Nia Vardalos playing Kieran Culkin's adoptive mother in Julia Cho's The First Tree in Antarctica and Wallace Shawn as a world-renowned organist with a lisp in Tina Howe's nutty Toccata and Fugue? David Ives contributed a surprisingly creepy mystery playlet called The Blizzard, starring Anna Paquin, Fisher Stevens, Aasif Mandvi and Gaby Hoffman. The acting "find" of the night was Sam Rockwell, who commanded the stage as a scriptwriter with a menacing grin in Adam Rapp's Jack on Film about the making of what might turn out to be a snuff film.

But what about Jen? The stage novice was well matched with her playwright the New York Times invoked Friends in its review of Bock's 2005 comedy Swimming in the Shallows and castmates Rosie Perez, Lynn Whitfield and comedian David Cross. Aniston drew the evening's only entrance applause when she, Perez and Whitfield sat down to bitch about a seminar they'd just attended on women and intimacy. Enter Cross as Bob, a balding everyman that all three women inexplicably decide to hit on. Perez was given most of the zingers in this extended sketch, but Aniston, cast as "the smart one," landed all her laugh lines and looked perfectly comfortable onstage—even if she couldn't stop herself from playing with that amazing mane of honey-highlighted hair.

Ten successful minutes onstage don't necessarily mean that Jen and Vince should tool up for a revival of The Heidi Chronicles ka-ching! or yet another go-round of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof too soon; darn that Ashley Judd. But Aniston's happiness during the curtain call was palpable, so don't be surprised if Broadway is indeed in her future.