Mark Southers' fine idea, a one-act play festival designed to get black and white playwrights and directors to collaborate, is in its fifth year. You might expect it to show more accomplishment, but it's still somewhat thrown together -- if it seems to have slipped, that's only because expectations have risen.

In other words, the festival seems to leave individual plays pretty much on their own. Fortunately, promise more than accomplishment is what we seek in new works, and some of this year's candidates do show that.

Program A

This quartet could hardly be more varied: a campy comedy, recriminatory battle between sisters, parallel lessons from history and a surprising comic character study that is almost a play.

Take the last first. Jamal Williams' "Mr. Ding Dong Daddy," directed by festival coordinator John Gresh, matches an aging Don Juan (Don Marshall) with a young lawyer (Jennifer Chervenick) who's furious that he's romancing her mother and incredulous that there's sex among the antique. Worse, he has other ladies on his string -- and his charm begins to have an effect on his young antagonist, as well.

Marshall almost pulls this off, hampered only by being unsure of his lines at the performance I saw. Chervenick has the right mix of outrage and curiosity, though Williams weakens the character by giving her selfish motives -- how much better if she were really concerned about her mother and was wooed anyway. True to the festival's mission, it hardly seems to matter that one of the actors is black and one white.

F.J. Hartland's "Cake Without Frosting," directed by Joseph Martinez, pits Elizabeth (Shaun Nicole McCarthy), just turned 30, against her bitter older sister (Brenda Marks), who assaults her with a powerful revelation. When the play was done at the 2004 New Works Festival, the sisters were white; here, they're black; again, that doesn't matter. But the battle still lacks a satisfying conclusion.

The oddest play is Erick Q. Irvis' "Sympathy for a Vampire," directed by Roger Babusci. It's hard to write parodic comedy, but, while Irvis creates some funny lines and you have to like a play with a theater critic as the villain, I can't really evaluate the play because the acting is so poor. Only Jeff Miller as a modern-day vampire engaged in a struggle with the IRS has comic style.

The most earnest piece on Program A is Lynne Conner's "1892/1982: Two Steel Stories," directed by Ron Black. I think this also had an earlier production, at the History Center, which would explain its didactic feel. On the eve of the great Homestead battle of 1892, upset that Frick has hired Pinkerton strike-breakers, Andrew Carnegie (Thomas Fuchell) meets J.J. Harrison (Ezra Smith), a black steelworker of 100 years later who has just been laid off.

The two argue, complain and compare, and we learn something about the differences between those eras and between a famously self-made man and an average worker. But they also discover kinship across the class divide, so modestly dramatized that it warms our thoughts of both.

Program B

This quartet includes a scary portrait of violence, tentative courtship, campy comedy about an art queen and Conradian tale of an older African rebel and a younger one, trapped in a ambiguous relationship to the dictator.

The fullest play is Andrew Ade's Conradian "A Question of Taste," directed by Jeanine Foster McKelvia. A young rebel (Joshua Elijah Reese) thrown into a dungeon discovers the leader he reveres (Ben Blakey) reduced to tasting the dictator's food for poison. The leader collaborates with the guard (Lonzo Green) and makes a good (if self-interested) case for the subversiveness of his apparent service. He then attacks the decline of the revolution's political ideals. Ade's thoughtful play is a bit longer than it deserves, or maybe it's just that the accents are sometimes hard to follow -- the acting is otherwise vigorous and fine.

James Michael Shoberg's "Play It Out," directed by Carter Redwood, is purposefully repellent, redeemed mainly by being short. Nate Hollabaugh is a torturer and Deanna Tangeman his bloody victim; at the end we get a bit of context by flashing back to his childhood. It's not for the squeamish.

Also slight but more appealing is France Luce Benson's "Out of Focus," directed by Lisa Ann Goldsmith. Brandon Williams and Ashley Coney play cute black teenagers, members of a church group, who skittishly court each other with a realistic dialogue of defensive insult and shy seduction. It's all about self-doubt and growing up.

The other more substantial piece in Program B is Rage Stevenson's "The Only Good Artist is a Dead One," directed by James Wong. I'm told that Stevenson is a pseudonym, but I don't know for whom. What I do know is that the play rests squarely on the un-actorish, surprisingly offhand appeal of Phat Man Dee, who is convincing as a downtown Manhattan (i.e., alternative) artist. The play is mainly her casual diatribe about the cruel ways of the philistine world, delivered to a friend (John Graham), whom I learn from a cast list is dead, and a sort of constantly revising court biographer (Cory Tamler), while dealing also with a regal but creepy patron (Dominique Johnson). The humor is bitchy and fun.