"I'm going for the trifecta -- a hat trick!" jokes Wali Jamal, who is writer, director and actor in the third annual Theatre Festival in Black & White, the groundbreaking event developed by Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre and its founder, Mark Clayton Southers.

	Wali Jamal/J.P. Patrick Click photo for larger image. Theatre Festival in Black & White Where: Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre, 2nd floor, Jackman Building, 542 Penn Ave., Cultural District. When: Through Oct. 30; Wed.-Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. 2, 5 and 8 p.m. (schedule below). Tickets: $8-$10; $20-$25 pass for all three programs; 412-288-0358.

But Jamal sells himself short: He also has a fourth role as festival literary manager, helping to choose the 10 plays to be produced from about 50 submitted. And there's a fifth role, hauling furniture and props and helping with the many technical details that a festival of this magnitude requires.

J.P. Patrick has multiple roles, too -- writer, director and carpenter. In fact, just about everyone in the festival is involved in multiple ways, says production stage manager Laurin Gahler. "Ten shows, ten playwrights, ten directors and tender actors": That's how she sums it up, and she should know, since she has to keep everyone on schedule without colliding.

The festival's 10 new one-act plays are arranged in three separate packages, each of which will be shown six times between last night's opening and Oct. 30.

As the festival's multicultural spirit and purpose dictate, the five plays by black playwrights feature white directors, and the five by white playwrights feature black directors. The casts are variously white, black or mixed as the roles require, and the behind-the-scenes staff is as mixed as talent, availability and happenstance allow.

The result is an astonishing maelstrom of activity, with the racial fusion in which the festival is grounded disappearing beneath the hurlyburly of getting 10 plays to the starting gate at the same time. Just as there are supposedly no religious divisions in foxholes, there are no racial distinctions as the plays hurtle toward opening.

That was certainly the impression Tuesday in the rambling warren of rooms and alcoves that make up the Pittsburgh Playwrights home, courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. It's on the mezzanine floor beneath the parking garage in the Jackman Building, above the Subway shop on Penn Ave., right around the corner from Heinz Hall.

At least three rehearsals are going on simultaneously, with additional spaces being used to study lines, paint furniture, build sets and baby-sit siblings or children of cast members. Anyone who doubts the creative energy of Pittsburgh would be heartened.

Sitting down for a minute to talk, Jamal, 43, says that this year he thought he could write, direct and "sit back and watch" -- but all they had to do was ask him twice and he agreed to act, too. And of course they would ask him, since Jamal is a natural actor whose first experience was in "Lifting" in 1999 for Kuntu Rep and who appeared at City Theatre in the Frank Lloyd Wright play, "Work Song."

So he now finds himself playing an 80-year-old man who remembers the 1923 racist slaughter in Rosewood, Fla. -- the subject of Erick Irvis' "Burning Wood."

Jamal is also much taken with the power of Bob Gorgzyca's "The Other Side," which he's directing. It's a portrait of a South Side bartender and an angry ex-fighter on the night of the second Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight in 1946. "I think it's the best show in the festival," he says.

The selection process was arduous. Jamal and Corey Rieger read all the submissions, then spent an entire night debating their merits with an expanded committee including Southers and Mark Whitehead. "We've agreed on the best and most entertaining," Jamal says. But he volunteers that they need to stimulate more submissions from blacks: "We need more African-Americans to put pen to paper and express themselves."

Jamal's own play, "Detention," in which two young girls and two teachers have parallel experiences of racism, was specifically commissioned to fill in that shortage. It had an odd origin. Driving through West Mifflin, he found an old child's school desk (dated 1926) put out as trash and brought it home to the Hill. Just three days later he found a similar desk on Webster Ave.

Those two desks stimulated the play. "I like to take an object and just run with it," he says. As for the chalkboard used in the play, he didn't write that in, figuring if he did, "I'd probably be the guy who had to carry it." But the director, Pitt undergrad Tara Adelizzi, added a chalkboard anyway.

Patrick, 50, is an actor, director and technician whose play in the festival, "Awash," is the first he's written. He submitted it a couple of years ago to the Pittsburgh New Works Festival, where, in spite of good readers' comments, it wasn't produced because of the difficulty of the bathtub it requires.

No problem at the Festival of Black & White: "We have a full working tub on stage," Patrick says. He calls the play "sort of a tribute to single mothers, who never get any privacy."

Directing is his biggest love. For the festival, the native of Mars, Butler County, is directing "Burning Wood," using skills picked up at West Virginia University and exercised in New England and Alabama. "I left the seminary for theater," he says. But he had been out of it for many years, "putting three kids through school," so the festival is a welcome re-entry -- and he's already signed up to act and direct in other Pittsburgh Playwrights' shows later this year.

"I always tell my actors," Patrick says, "that this is the only profession in the world where, when you're standing on a stage, the feeling, power and ability to affect an audience are no different than if you were on Broadway."

And looking around the purposeful clutter and swirl of the Penn Avenue space, he says: "I like this right here."

Program A (Sat. and Oct. 30, 2 p.m.; Sun. 5 p.m.; Oct. 27 and 29, 8 p.m.):

Heather McNeish, "Phobia," directed by Art Terry; Rob Gorman, "Twenty Questions," directed by Jeannine Foster McKelvia; Lynn Jackson, "Mixed Messages," directed by Joanna Lowe.

Program B (tonight, Sun. and Oct. 28, 8 p.m.; Sat. and Oct. 29 and 30, 5 p.m.):

J. P. Patrick, "Awash," directed by Eileen J. Morris; Wali Jamal, "Detention," directed by Tara Adelizzi; JaSonta Roberts Deen, "Who's Hero," directed by Mark Thompson; Ginny Cunningham, "Hidden in Harlem," directed by Ben Cain.

Program C (Fri., Sat. and Oct. 26 and 30, 8 p.m.; Sun. and Oct. 29, 2 p.m.):

Erick Q. Irvis, "Burned Wood," directed by J.P. Patrick; Bob Gorczyca, "The Other Side," directed by Wali Jamal; Kim El, "When Souls Whisper," directed by Mark Whitehead.