Artistic siblings, creative souls

In TriBeCa this week, the lights lower on an empty stage and come up again on two characters, a cutthroat agent in from the coast with her heartthrob client, at lunch with an invisible playwright. This playwright, says the agent, has spent so much time in Hollywood that he can’t write an unhappy ending. And should his play -- his “2 1/2 -hour poem” -- be made into a film, he wants final cut. “Give final cut to a writer? I’d rather give firearms to small children,” scoffs the agent.

This one-act leads off a night of nine works by nine playwrights. A collection of pieces about New York, “The Downtown Plays,” is the centerpiece of the Tribeca Theater Festival, the endeavor of Robert De Niro, and, most principally, movie mogul Jane Rosenthal, two figures who owe their careers not to the creak of the boards but to the whir of a camera. They have found great success with the three Tribeca Film Festivals and want to generate some publicity and cash for the downtown theater scene, which, always suffering, has been struggling for life since Sept. 11, 2001.

The plays, panel discussions and theater-related movies continue through Sunday. The number of people rushing downtown to see them is far smaller than the sellout crowds that have overwhelmed the film festival. Clearly, the theater festival huddles in the shadow of its movie sibling. But in many ways, it serves as a microcosm of the industry at large.

These days, it’s hard to find a big-budget play that dares to open in New York or London without a Hollywood actor in the lead. And even the festival, though it cast no big-screen heavyweights in the production, relies on featured guests such as Ben Stiller and Billy Crudup to introduce the plays.

“The joke is: You get a celebrity without having to put them in the play, which leads to tears,” says Douglas Carter Beane, the festival’s artistic director and the author of the play that opens the evening.

Of the nine playwrights featured in “The Downtown Plays” (directed by John Rando), not one is without a major screen credit. In fact, the whole evening becomes positively self-referential as Warren Leight’s disconsolately jealous playwright characters watch their nominated friend on television at the Academy Awards “five rows above Matt Damon” -- just a light-dimming before his Oscar-nominated friend Kenneth Lonergan’s one-act begins about a downtown moneyman indicted for fraud.

Featured names like Neil LaBute and Paul Rudnick are just as familiar on back lots as backstage. “Even if you don’t know these writers’ names, it’s just because you don’t stick around for the credits -- you’ve seen their work,” says Beane, who intentionally selected writers who would be familiar to a wide audience. “I wanted it to say theater is accessible and fun, not church without the hymns.” And, Beane comments, these writers are playwrights first.

“But I don’t think there is a such a thing as a fully employed working playwright,” says Leight, who makes his living writing for “Law & Order: SVU.” “The odd thing is: You put up with a huge amount of neglect and abuse in a desperate attempt to get that play up -- and then they see you with a TV job and they think you’ve sold out.”

In fact, of the marquee writers featured in “The Downtown Plays,” only LaBute has been able to mount a full-length play in the past year. So if Hollywood needs to pitch in to help keep low-budget theater alive, that’s fine with Leight. “It’s the P. Diddy thing,” he says, referring to Sean Combs’ recent Broadway performance in “A Raisin in the Sun.” “People may have gone to see P. Diddy, but then they’ve sat through a remarkable play.”

Rudnick, whose films include “In & Out” and “Jeffrey,” doesn’t care whom it takes to fill a house. “Theater is such a minority art form that anyone who wants to support it is OK by me. Telling someone you’re a playwright is like saying ‘I’m a shepherd’ or ‘an alchemist,’ ” he says. And no one, Rudnick says, is as bemused by people who choose to write plays as the people who tend to populate the movie industry. No money, tiny audiences, “they always try to figure out the angle like there’s some aspect they haven’t figured out yet.”

Across art forms

Tribeca Films President Rosenthal, who heads the festival, is perhaps the quintessential example of the sort of person Rudnick describes. When she works with playwrights, it’s on the set, whether it’s Lonergan on “Gangs of New York” or David Mamet on “Wag the Dog.” Whereas most theatergoers go to see a play, she goes to option it.

Scroll through her filmography and you’ll see films including “A Bronx Tale,” “Marvin’s Room” and the upcoming musical “Rent,” all off-Broadway plays she brought to the cineplex. She has more than a culturally altruistic reason to keep theater afloat through efforts like her festival. Playwrights, she believes, write from a place of passion, not corporate interest. “I think there are writers in Hollywood just writing because I can sell it, because they can sell it. They’ve forgotten why they write,” she says.

Hollywood has always depended on playwrights for scripts, going back to Sam Warner and David O. Selznick, but a trend has developed, adding a new fold to the incestuous relationship of stage and screen brethren. These days a movie gets made into a play and then back into a movie -- as with “Hairspray” or “The Producers.” But the Tribeca writers are neither concerned that full-time screenwriters will usurp their money-bleeding trade nor that the trade will die out despite dire predictions.

In a strange way, Rudnick says, it comes back to the movies. Films like “All About Eve” -- shown in the theater festival’s film series -- made a Jersey kid like him cross the river in search of life in the theater. Such filmed fantasies of that world have inspired thousands to alight on this city to commit their lives to filling of folding chairs downtown and plush seats uptown, no matter how the applications at NYU and USC film departments tend to climb.

“It’s a weird addiction. Somehow those kids keep coming along and somehow that addiction continues,” Rudnick says. “That gives me insane Pollyanna-style faith.” Sometimes it just takes a little West Coast evangelizing to preach it.