The Theatre Festival in Black and White still seems like a new idea, but its fifth installment is already upon us. The given is that half of each year's one-act plays are written by black playwrights and half by white, with white directors assigned to the former and vice versa.

What originally seemed a gimmick has already, according to festival founder and producing artistic director Mark Clayton Southers, "accomplished what we set out to do, which is to work together." By acknowledging race, they've been growing past it.

Working together this year are eight playwrights, half black, half white, and eight directors, three black, three white and, as evidence of that growth, one Asian and one Hispanic. If you categorize the 16 another way, there are five women and 11 men, which is just how it worked out.

The eight plays are divided into two programs of four each, with each program staged five times between Saturday's opening and the following Sunday.

Festival coordinator this year is director/actor John Gresh, who's directing Jamal Williams' comedy, "Mr. Ding Dong Daddy," starring Jennifer Chervenick and Don Marshall, a former Post-Gazette performer of the year. "It's just a privilege being in the room with him," says Gresh with wonderment.

Among the festival's first-time directors are Roger Babusci, "Mr. B," who recently retired from decades of directing musicals at Schenley High School. Some 30 years ago he had Southers as a student, "though Mark's face was always in a viewfinder back then," Babusci remembers. So it was natural enough for Southers to rope him into the festival.

That's how one of this year's playwrights got involved. Andrew Ade teaches English at Westminster College, where Gresh also once taught. He came to Pittsburgh Playwrights to see Gresh's production of "Savage in Limbo" and, he recalls, "John stopped me on the sidewalk afterward and asked if I had a play."

"I have an idea," he said. So he spent August writing "A Question of Taste." It was selected for production from some 35 submissions. "It's the pleasure of pleasures to be doing this," Ade says, "to get back to theater-making, not just teaching it."

Ade calls his play "a political fable of modern Africa, with a tragic impetus." It's based on his time in the Peace Corps in Zaire under Mobutu but informed by memories of other countries.

In spite of its organizing principle, the festival is not about race, since the plays can be about anything at all. "It's not like you're going to be preached to," says Gresh. "It's more about being human."

The festival calls this "championing diversity and delivering compelling theatre ... providing a unique opportunity for cultural exchange and cooperation." Gresh puts it more simply: the festival has "opened up who you can call on."

Black and White schedule

Program A: Erick Q. Irvis, "Sympathy for a Vampire," directed by Roger Babusci; F.J. Hartland, "Cake Without Frosting," dir. Joseph Martinez; Lynne Conner, "1892/1982: Two Steel Stories," dir. Ron Black; Jamal Williams, "Mr. Ding Dong Daddy," dir. John Gresh.

Program B: James Michael Shoberg, "Play It Out," dir. Carter Redwood; Rage Stevenson, "The Only Good Artist Is a Dead One," dir. James Wong; France Luce Benson, "Out of Focus," dir. Lisa Ann Goldsmith; Andrew Ade, "A Question of Taste," dir. Jeanine Foster McKelvia.