Mark Clayton Southers Dan Kirk and Jodi Lincoln, are one of the two casts of "Assassination." Click photo for larger image. Theatre Festival in Black & White Where: Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre, Jackman Building, 542 Penn Ave., Cultural District. When: Program A; 7 p.m. Oct. 27-29 and Nov. 2: d p.m. Nov 4-5. Program B: 3 p.m. Oct. 28-29; 7 p.m. Oct. 26 and Nov. 3-5. Tickets: $10 in advance, $15 at the door.

It took six hours Saturday to watch what was in effect the dress rehearsal for both five-play programs of this year's Black & White festival -- and it was time very well spent. The 10 plays are remarkably good, including at least five that are fully satisfying and only a couple that aren't, a very high percentage in a new play festival.

And even though a few plays weren't really ready to open, the acting and directing throughout had much to admire. I'd recommend the festival to anyone, not just those who will applaud its programmed collaboration between black artists and white.

The festival's focus on race is not all-pervasive. The divide between black and white is central in only three plays, figuring importantly but indirectly in a fourth and in a subsidiary way in a fifth. There are three plays where it doesn't figure at all, which leaves two where it figures, if at all, just by implication of the casting.

But race is necessarily in the air throughout, because of the festival's practice of pairing five white playwrights with black directors and five black playwrights with white. Oddly, the overall result is that race consciousness both intensifies and dissipates -- both of which seem to me to be desirable. But all this is up for interpretation and is somewhat beyond the scope of a simple theater critic.

Much more certain is the quality of the plays, which makes the three-hour length of each program acceptable (though I would have dropped one play from each five). The unreadiness seems the result of too few rehearsals or perhaps just a few actors who hadn't learned their lines. That isn't surprising in a cobbled-together festival with 10 playwrights, 10 directors (four of them also playwrights) and 32 roles. The moral is clear: avoid the opening weekend, which you already have.

One technical complaint: several plays suffer from proscenium blocking, which is unnatural and unnecessary in this intimate thrust space. It makes no sense to see actors backing awkwardly around to keep their faces always front, even with the audience on two sides. Artistic director Mark Clayton Southers should intervene.

Pressed to choose, I'd call Program A marginally better than Program B, but then you wouldn't see David Turkel's play or the craggy Don Marshall.

Program A

Brandon Bates' "Assassination," directed by Wali Jamal, is a delicious 11-minute comic skit about a mild-mannered social studies teacher turned would-be Bush assassin. His young daughter finds him on a Washington, D.C., parapet and tries to stop him ("you don't even let me play dodge ball!").

Their argument has a crazy comic logic, the daughter proves far more practical (because of pop culture) than he and there's even time for a twist or two. It proves a slick curtain-raiser for the festival, especially as acted by Jeffrey Carpenter and Nadia Cook-Loshilov (Dan Kirk and Jodi Lincoln play the roles in half of the performances).

	Mark Clayton Southers Carter Redwood and Nadia Cook-Loshilov in "A Summer's Tale." Click photo for larger image.

In "A Summer's Tale" by her mother, Astrid Cook, Cook-Loshilov plays a precociously educated white seventh-grader who becomes friends with the sweet, tall black seventh-grader (Carter Redwood) who moves in next door. Neither black parents (Ron Black and Marcia Jones) nor white (Pat Sena Samreny and Rick DeCarlo) approve. Recognizing the "Romeo & Juliet" parallel, the kids plot to jolt their parents out of their racism, only to meet a tragic twist.

Directed by Shanae Sharon, the 32-minute play suffers from didactic intention. But there are believable exchanges between the kids, and although the parents are insufficiently characterized, they do have monologues that are a start along these lines (Jodi Lincoln plays the girl in half of the performances).

Christina Maria Acosta's 31-minute "Around Midnight," directed by Dan Kirk, is a fantasy of the perfect man (David Conley), dreamed up by a sensitive, artistic, beautiful young woman (Marika Christie) who is tired of being taken for granted and jerked around.

Acosta relies too much on a long, awkward phone call for exposition (thank goodness for speaker phones!), and her elaborate parallel with the classic myth of Baucis and Philemon is rather forced. But the story is prettily told by Christie; her lover drifts through one scene in imaginatively staged counterpoint; and there's a concluding twist.

In "Holding Cell," directed by Mark Whitehead, author Jamal briefly exploits a perfect situation for a dark farce -- four men tossed into a jail cell, bitching about being there and turning on each other. Two are played by Conley and the quirky Jeff David Miller, and Michael Belgrove is very solid as the cop in control. But the center of passion is Curtis (Ezra Smith), whose anger is confronted by a strange, shamanistic Ice Cream Man (Lonzo Green) as the 29-minute play takes a quick U-turn into primal tragedy.

The comic section is like a separate play, with some juicy riffs on such topics as female gossip and racist insults. More of this would be welcome. But there's dark anger loose, so the tragic turn, although it breaks what has seemed the promise of more fun, is retroactively justified. This is strong stuff.

	Mark Clayton Southers Ken Bolden and Wali Jamal break into song, watched by Carter Redwood and Nancy Mimless, in "The Kitchen." Click photo for larger image.

The best structured play in Program A is "The Kitchen," an early play by Rob Zellers, best known as co-author of "The Chief." Like "Summer's Tale," it has a frank focus on the gulf between white and black, but at 46 minutes it has the time to develop a fuller story and richer characters.

Primarily, those are white Joe (Ken Bolden) and black Fred (Jamal). In the middle of the night, Joe catches Fred's teenage son, Michael (Redwood), about to rob his house. He calls Fred rather than the cops, and the two spar, exchange views, lecture and fight, while Michael offers objections and Joe's wife (Nancy Mimless) gets her own smaller rant.

Mainly, the two men confront each other about myths and truths about black and white. In the process, they discuss language, clothing, pit bulls, kitchen equipment and especially music -- Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic, soul and the catastrophe called disco. What have we come to, they wonder, when the best golfer is black and the best rapper, white? Some dialogue sounds implausible, but director Jeannine Foster McKelvia nicely balances the many laughs with the serious message, and the ending is not simply feel-good and pasted on.

Program B

Perhaps the festival's strongest play is David Turkel's "F.O.R.D.," directed by Southers, a comedy with a focus on religious hypocrisy. Even with plenty of searching for lines, it was funny and eccentric.

Trey (John Gresh) is a fat invalid -- or is he faking an injury for the insurance payoff? He lives in a trailer with Elly (Lissa Brennan), his spunky-tough barkeep girlfriend (her face registers dismay with deadpan humor), hiding from insurance spies as they dream of escaping to greener pastures.

Visiting first is Lee (Jamal, already mentioned here as a director, playwright and actor), a member of the church Trey has been attending, to challenge his sincerity. Trey may attend to gain sympathy, but he has interesting religious views which disgust Lee's wife (Mayme Williams), who arrives to exorcise demons in a wild scene of flying brooms and hysteria.

No one around here dramatizes trailer trash like Turkel, partly because he knows they aren't trash, partly because he is liberal with telling details. Trey's sincerity remains enigmatic, but we root for him and Elly anyway. By the way, they are white and Lee and wife are black, but that doesn't seem an issue, unless you think it is.

Brenton Mock's "Ridin' Dirty" is a taut 15-minute encounter between a middle-class cab driver, Pete (Conley), and an unemployed friend, Damon (the excellent Gregory Parker, here from Dayton for the festival). Damon accuses Pete of being a traitor to his race and friends, while Pete calls Damon shiftless and in love with victimization. It's a familiar argument, given electricity by these two actors and Mock's frank language. Director Kirk doesn't find a way to free them from their static seats in Pete's car, though, where his head throws a shadow on Damon's face. The fight turns violent, but the emotional pain is uppermost. No false ending is imposed.

Kirk, who has already been mentioned as an actor and twice as director, turns playwright for "Gossip," a slight piece about three co-workers, two of whom (Aaliyah Habeeb and John Feightner) pull a painful joke on the third (Rosa DeFerrari). It is she who tells the 28-minute story, and in her monologues there is some funny stuff about the minutiae of an office day.

Nailah "Blu" Lewis' "For the Love of Friends," directed by Stephanie Figer, is also slight, but it has the advantage of two loving, gently comic character studies by Cheryl El-Walker and Kim El, overplaying and underplaying respectively as elderly friends, gossiping away their day.

	Mark Clayton Southers Don Marshall in "The Exile of King Harold." Click photo for larger image.

Closing Program B with a bang is Southers' craggy, rumbling "The Exile of King Harold," a 40-minute tour de force monologue by Don Marshall, directed by Ginger Lawrence. I'm not sure how long it would be if Marshall knew all the lines, but I don't much care, since his wandering is stronger than most actors' control.

Harold already wanders in his mind. Institutionalized for addiction, he carries on a long, angry rant and wheedling negotiation with God, first asking to be given a shot as his Son, then settling for the role of King Harold, albeit with a kingdom worthy of his abilities. Along the way, much African American history and myth boils up, full of apocalyptic vision and anguish, but with plenty of comic commentary, too. Harold is one of those inspired fools, a prophetic innocent and seer, and Marshall makes his powerful ramblings both comic and dignified.

Playwright and actor are fortunate in their collaboration.