‘Act One,’ Take Two : The one-act fest returns for a second year, with 16 plays (culled from a list of 2,000) and no apologies for its glitzy show-biz benefactors.

One-act play festivals dot the Los Angeles theater landscape. From Beverly Hills to Woodland Hills and from Hollywood to the Westside, they have become a staple of small theater programming.

Some--the West Coast Ensemble and Theatre 40--have been around for nearly a decade. Others--such as the ones presented by the Wooden-O, Hudson and Ensemble Studio theaters--are much more recently minted.

One-act festivals are made on budgets ranging from mid-size to practically nonexistent, and they have casts that run the gamut from star-speckled to wanna-be-heavy. But what separates the winners from the also-rans is the quality of the work and the bucks behind it--two factors that are often, though not necessarily, related.

In both respects, “Act One ‘95: A Festival of New One-Act Plays” is at the front of the pack. The nine-week, three-bill, 16-play festival--which opened its second season on Friday at the Met Theatre in Hollywood and will add another program to the repertory on Wednesday--is one of the most carefully nurtured events of its kind. It is also one of the best funded.

This year’s festival is sponsored by original backer Showtime as well as Paramount Network Television and their parent company, Viacom Communications, and the independent Grammnet Productions company.

Such matings of Hollywood and small theater have, in fact, become increasingly common. HBO backs a similar “New Writer’s Festival,” now in its second year, staged at the Stella Adler Academy Theater. And starting this year, the Creative Artists Agency has an unofficial alliance with the Hudson Theatre’s “Hudson Shorts” one-act festival.

But getting money from the entertainment industry can be dicey. While putatively beneficial to both parties, such pairings may also pressure theaters to produce screen-friendly scripts. When it comes to theater for its own sake, say skeptics, forget it.

The creators of “Act One,” however, disagree.

“The theater is the important thing,” says co-producer Risa Bramon Garcia. “If something comes of it--and we fully expect that something will--that’s great.”

Certainly, Bramon Garcia and her partner are used to having their motives questioned.

“ ‘Act One’ was a reaction to working in the industry for years,” says co-producer Jerry Levine, who has been a television and film actor. “It is by no means about trying to back our way into some kind of movie deal or TV series. We came to this to balance our creative lives.

“We accept and understand certain thoughts about the way we straddle both worlds. It’s a delicate balance for us to not compromise our integrity.”

S howtime’s “Act One” began when Judy Pastore, the company’s vice president of specials and events, saw Bryan Goluboff’s play “Big Al” at the 99-seat Fountainhead Theatre in Hollywood.

The play--about a man who invites a friend over to his apartment in the middle of the night to help him write a script--was directed by Levine, familiar to TV audiences from the year he spent on the ABC series “Going Places.”

Pastore invited Levine to turn “Big Al” into a short film. He did, and the piece aired on Showtime in late 1993. Then Pastore asked Levine if he could find more plays like “Big Al.”

Levine turned to Bramon Garcia, whom he had known for 15 years, since their days working together at Manhattan’s Ensemble Studio Theatre. Bramon Garcia had spent five years directing theater and producing EST’s annual marathon of one-acts before moving to Los Angeles in 1988, and had developed a reputation as a casting director, working with Oliver Stone and others.

The two producers were given seed money for a festival.

“We got a couple hundred thousand for the year to finance the outreach, development and production of the plays,” Bramon Garcia says. “At the time, it felt like a lot of money. But for 10 months of work, it wasn’t.”

Naturally, there were strings attached. In return for the cash, Bramon Garcia and Levine had to deliver to Showtime the rights to the scripts. And now, as a result, two works from last year’s festival are indeed in development at Showtime.

Those two short plays were also the ones singled out by reviewers. Drew McWeeny and Scott Swann’s “Sticks and Stones”--which Times reviewer F. Kathleen Foley called “the evening’s set piece” in Program A--pivots on the meeting of a lawyer and a racist cop. Edward Allan Baker’s “Rosemary and Ginger” was praised by Times reviewer Scott Collins, who deemed it the best of Program C, describing it as a “domestic blood bath that pays like a gender-reversed retread of Sam Shepard’s ‘True West.’ ”

Bramon Garcia and Levine insist, however, that Showtime isn’t issuing directives about what kinds of plays are to be produced.

“They are not giving us a format to follow or trying to find some vehicle that can be turned into a series,” Levine says.

Yet there is a signature “Act One” play, and it’s a kind of script that, coincidentally or not, is ripe for translation to TV.

“We’re doing a bunch of plays that are two characters in a room going at it for half an hour,” Bramon Garcia says. “The relationship between people is the thing that appeals to us the most.”

And if you follow the “Act One” selection process, you see that it is indeed geared toward a particular kind of realistic drama.

I t begins with a script search. Last September and October, “Act One” sent notices to 200 regional theaters, 160 agencies and more than 100 universities, theatrical organizations and publications.

At the same time, the producers began to assemble an artistic committee, made up of about 20 actors, 10 directors and 10 other professionals from the theater and TV-film industry.

The committee sessions are dominated by actors. The comments--which are shouted out, rapid-fire, as Levine moderates--tend toward actors’ priorities. They are more often about psychological and character-related motivation--and how a script will play --than literary or other artistic qualities.

The committee members also reflect Bramon Garcia and Levine’s preferences.

“We informed the group what we were responding to, so that they would recommend pieces that they thought would work for the festival,” Bramon Garcia says.

“Act One” processes about 2,000 scripts during a period of four months. Each play is read by a group of four people. If the feedback is good, it gets another reading, and so on, for four rounds. The process culminates with the work being read aloud.

But it isn’t just Levine, Bramon Garcia and their appointed readers who are in on selecting the works that will be staged.

“Judy (Pastore) is with us for the whole process,” Bramon Garcia says of the Showtime executive, while also noting Paramount’s participation. “They give us input and help us select.”

Levine denies, however, that he and Bramon Garcia are overly influenced by their sponsors.

“We are not looking for commercially viable material to fit into some Hollywood mentality,” he says. “What we put on the stage does not necessarily transfer to the mediocrity of what is commercially viable.”

Bramon Garcia, though, does acknowledge a happy confluence of interests: “Definitely, we’re doing more realistic kinds of theater, so that does fit in with a television or film mentality.”

During January and February, script meetings and workshops were held and rewrites begun. Soon after, the plays were assigned directors and cast, a number with familiar industry faces both onstage and at the helm.

The result features production values that are above the norm for L.A. one-act festivals.

“The difference is that we’re producing substantial pieces of material for long periods of time, as opposed to 10 days of short plays, or, (the way some festivals) put on 50 plays and just throw it together,” Bramon Garcia says.

And so far the work has been generally well-received. In The Times last year, Foley praised Program A “despite some flaws” and found Program B “entertaining and provoking.” Similarly, Collins called Evening C “a very pleasant surprise.”

T his year, there are more chefs in the kitchen.

“Act One’s” original sponsors, Showtime and Viacom, which was a secondary silent partner in the first year, have been joined this year by Paramount and Grammnet.

Accordingly, there have been some adjustments.

“We have a few more comedies than last year, because Paramount’s involved and they’re looking for comedies,” Bramon Garcia says.

Mixed in with these comedies are more dramas in the “Big Al” mode, making a total of 16 plays. The works are by such well-known writers as Frank Pugliese (“Snuff,” “Aven’ U Boys”), Keith Reddin (“Nebraska,” “Life During War Time”) and New York Times critic Vincent Canby, as well as many novice playwrights.

In the three evenings of theater, though, only two of the works are by women, and only one by a writer who isn’t white. And the lack of diversity is perhaps the one glitch that Levine and Bramon Garcia don’t know how to fix.

Unlike HBO--which uses the rainbow demographics of its writers as a calling card for its festival--”Act One” isn’t an affirmative action showcase.

It’s not, says the producers, for want of effort.

“We tried extra hard this year with women and ethnic writers,” Bramon Garcia says. “But in the end we decided to pick the plays that spoke to us.

“As a woman, I got so angry that women were writing froufrou and fluff,” she says. “Could we please get a play by a woman that’s not about a bridal thing or a divorce or sitting at lunch, talking about having an affair or a divorce?”

For Levine, choosing the plays boils down to a matter of craft, which he has found lacking.

“We’re not a politically correct organization,” Levine says. “But I will tell you this: Your play will get read faster here if you’re a woman or a minority.”*

* “Act One ‘95: A Festival of New One-Act Plays,” Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hollywood. Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Through June 26. (Program A continues through May 27, Program B opens Wednesday, and Program C opens May 31. Call for specific performance schedule.) $19; festival pass, $45. (213) 957-1152.