The second annual Pittsburgh Pride Theater Festival opens tonight with eight one-act plays on lesbian, gay and bisexual themes. Two programs of four plays each will run in alternating repertory through June 26 at the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre, 542 Penn Ave., Downtown (Jackman Building, second floor of the parking garage).

"It's a big theatrical clambake," says Ted Hoover, festival playwright, director and co-producer (and also theater critic for City Paper). "With something this big, everyone is doing triple duty. I must be older than I think I am -- it used to be easy to put up eight plays all at once. There are so many people running around, it's like doing a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movie."

After the plays were selected by a committee, Hoover helped pair up directors and playwrights, who have used the occasion to do some rewriting. There has been some attempt to diversify gender and races.

The plays are half comedies and half not. Quite accidentally, Hoover says, there has emerged a theme of family, whether the kind of families we're born into or the ones we choose.

Hoover is directing the play by Milan Stitt, head of the dramatic writing program at Carnegie Mellon University. Another notable name is Paula Martinac, a new playwright but a journalist and author with three published novels and four books on lesbian and gay culture and politics. Hoover, whose work has been developed at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Connecticut, is nationally known as well.

Tickets are $15 at the door; $5 discount for reservations by phone. For info or tickets: 412-288-0358.

THE SCHEDULE:

Program A (8 p.m. tonight, Saturday and June 24; 3 p.m. Sunday; 4 p.m. June 25; 7 p.m. June 26): Jeffrey Cordell, "How Gay? So Gay" (directed by Cordell); Gayle Pazerski, "Break Room" (Brian Czarniecki); Americus Rocco, "Little Buddies" (Ginger Lawrence); Paula Martinac, "I Won't Dance, Don't Ask Me" (Mark Clayton Southers).

Program B (8 p.m. Fri. and June 23 and 25; 4 p.m. Sat.; 7 p.m. Sun.; 3 p.m. June 26): F.J. Hartland, "Clean Sheets" (Beth Hommel); Carol Mullen, "Laughing All the Way" (Nona Gerard); Kathryn Miller Haines, "Sibling Rivalry" (David Minniefield); Milan Stitt, "Places We've Lived" (Ted Hoover).