In its second year, Pittsburgh Playwrights' Theatre Festival in Black & White ambitiously stages 12 new one-act plays, with black directors assigned to the six plays by white playwrights and vice versa. Each of three distinct, 2¹/₄- to 3-hour programs includes two plays by playwrights of each color.

	"Theatre Festival in Black & White" Where: Pittsburgh Playwrights at Penn Theatre, 4809 Penn Ave., Bloomfield-Garfield. When: • Program A: 8 p.m. Fri., Oct. 28; 2 p.m. Sat.; 5 p.m. Oct. 30. • Program B: 8 p.m. today, Sat., Oct. 29; 2 p.m. Oct. 30. • Program C: 8 p.m. Thurs., Oct. 27, 30; 5 p.m. Sat. Tickets: $7; 412-441-2213.

The plays may or may not have racially diverse casts and their themes may or may not touch on race, but the festival's concept inevitably helps shape responses. In some cases, race may even seem peripheral.

Some plays clearly suffer from the speed with which the festival was put together, but the whole project speaks nobly to the goal of festival directors Mark Clayton Southers and Corey Rieger for "actors and audiences to meet one another across racial divides," helping participants "to learn from one another professionally and personally." In that spirit, since this is a playwrights theater, perhaps future years will allow for more dramaturgical development.

Program A

In Michael Schwartz's "The Barbecue," a seemingly gentle Southern family anticipates the excitement of a local barbecue, which includes horseshoe throwing, a pickle competition and a lynching.

Director Rita Gregory keeps it intimate, placing scenes around a small back porch, but the energy level drags with some bland performances and characters. The playwright's heart rests with daughter Aggie, who's horrified by the lynching, but he never lets us see why Aggie is more sensitive than the rest of her family. Worse, he hardly lets us see Aggie at all, whose thoughts are presented in a most undramatic voice-over.

"The Powerhouse" by Tawanda R. Washington, feels like a throwback to '80s AIDS plays. A group waiting for results of their HIV tests gathers for a therapy session. Washington's dialogue can be crisp, but she relies heavily on character cliches.

The play is weighted by the odd circumstance of patients waiting publicly for test results while being forced to play life-enhancing games as they struggle with their fears. Director Gunther Kusior capitalizes on the more dynamic moments, especially with the help of a knockout performance by Ja' Sonta Roberts.

Jeff Benson Jr. writes very natural and witty dialogue, but a dialogue isn't a play. "Bruhs" is basically three guys sitting at a table talking about life, love, work and women. Benson seems to want to focus on Josiah but needs to find a way to dramatize the character's journey in what feels like a successful playwriting exercise. Under the direction of Ginger Lawrence, Wali Jamal, Jonathan Berry and Freedom Murphy are delightful as the three charismatic friends.

Chance D. Muehleck's "The Honeypot Redux" is the most fully realized play of the program, with an interesting story about two reclusive, beekeeping brothers and their lovely, mysterious customer who upsets their world. It's all very Pinteresque, with a creepy, off-kilter feel under the sure hand of director Art Terry and perfectly understated acting by Bridget Carey, Jeffrey R. Simpson and Corey Rieger.

-- Anna Rosenstein, freelance critic

Program B

The brief curtain-raiser is a slim conceptual piece, Lynne Wyant's "Crows on the Cornfield," directed by 12-year-old Carter Redwood. As Don McLean's "Starry Night" plays, we meet Van Gogh painting in a cornfield. He makes oracular statements while a young boy serves awkwardly as his interlocutor. A final revelation makes the self-conscious cliches plausible, but the piece is more idea than drama.

Terrence Haye's "First Son," directed by Adam Kukic, ambitiously intercuts ordinary dialogue with purple passages of self-expression -- soliloquies of free-form poetry set to jazz. The story is about Slim (Lonzo Green), confronted by an unexpected grown son and grandchild; Slim's woman, Boo (Marcia L. Jones), has her own unhappy revelations, and the violence of the community rises up to affect them all. Awkwardly constructed, it's as dark as the festival gets, and the shafts of poetry reward attention.

"Dancing Tomatoes" by Tony Zelonis, directed by Tracey D. Turner, is a grotesque danse macabre dressed up with quips and two long-legged beauties -- conjoined twins, played by sisters Jessica Obed and Jennifer Obed-Moats. In an obscure and deadly ritual, they seduce an innocent passer-by, obligingly named Billy Pilgrim (Charlie Murphy), to service their attempt to conceive similar twins to carry on their evil work. I suppose this is a purposefully grim version of a fertility goddess/sacrificial king myth, but the point is unclear.

The longest play on program B or C is Mark Clayton Southers' "The Cure," directed by Jeffrey R. Simpson. It imagines a young black academic who may have found a cure for intestinal cancer. A battle royal complete with bomb breaks out between two older professors, a black woman (Mayme Williams) who wants to use the occasion to advocate black reparations and a white man (Mark Thompson) in outraged opposition.

Although good points are scored on both sides, such huge issues can't get reasonable presentation in a 55-minute play, so the antagonists speak mainly in sound bites, like presidential debaters. Thompson often gets the better of the argument because he is better prepared. Playwright Southers supplies telling comic touches and a final twist, but this is a play that bites off a lot more than it can chew.

-- Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette drama editor

Program C

In Corey Rieger's "Flounder," directed by Linda Haston, Bridget Carey and Gregory Caridi play a cute couple, as they recently have in several plays -- this time, visiting a marriage counselor. More scene than play, it never goes much of anywhere, but there is some crackling humor in the battle.

More ambitious are the middle two plays.

Directed by Eileen J. Morris, Randy Kirk's "The Ties That Bind" is a farce about a spacey wife and aggressive husband on a trial separation, plus her feckless lover and an unorthodox private eye. It involves borrowed pants, raunchy talk, illogical behavior and a reverse revelation that needs to register more crisply to achieve its effect.

Wali Jamal's "Tigger's Tat" is an abruptly condensed comedy about a truculent father and rebellious daughter, played with swagger by Art Terry and freshness by Meredith Pierce. "Tat" is her tattoo, which incenses Dad but turns out to be benign enough. The emotional payoff is squishy sweet. Joanna Lowe directs.

If you were seeing this whole festival in A-B-C order (though there's no reason you should), you would wait until the very end for possibly the best of all. Vanessa German's "Pieces" is an astonishingly delicate 30-minute encounter in a train station between two young women, one black (German) and one white (Tressa Glover).

One comes on all smiles; the other hangs back for good reason. One is lesbian, one heterosexual; both have suffered heartbreak; both write. Gradually they warm, reading excerpts from each other's journals, almost as if on a dare. There is no huge revelation or spiritual conversion, but a gradual openness to risk, complete with tentativeness, embarrassment and pleasure. They blush, they cry. The performances are so good, it's hard to tell how much is due to the script or to director Roni Ostfield, but the whole is a lovely example of the fresh discovery that this festival is all about.

-- Christopher Rawson