Cast members of "Happy For You," featured in the Tribeca Theater Festival*

The Tribeca Theater Festival, which debuted last week and will last through the end of the month, is calling much deserved attention to the vibrant and varied Lower Manhattan theater community. Not to be confused with the spring's Tribeca Film Festival, the theater festival is a fall phenomenon in its inaugural year, and it serves to shine a spotlight on the wonderful, live theatrical performances that have long taken place downtown.

Bringing together a series of plays, playwrights, films, readings, and works-in-progress featuring downtown theater companies, the theater festival is a collaborative project presented by Tribeca Film Festival co-founders Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro, and Craig Hatkoff and downtown theater collective Drama Dept. It got its start about a year ago when Michael Rosenberg and Douglas Carter Beane, Drama Dept. executive and assistant directors, went to Rosenthal with the idea putting on several plays at once, all focused on downtown.

"What if we had a show that was just a group of some of the best writers New York has to offer, and we used that celebrity list to draw people downtown?" they suggested.  "Then they would start talking about the other downtown theaters and encourage people to check out these other spaces."

According to Rosenberg, Rosenthal responded immediately that she and her partners had been interested in doing exactly that. "Douglas and I looked at each other and said, "Let us know when, and we'll be the first to buy tickets,'" Rosenberg remembers. "And Jane said to us, 'Why don't we do it together?'"

She didn't have to ask twice. Immediately, the founders of the Tribeca Film Festival and the Drama Dept. set out to plan the festival.

"Our primary goal was to help draw audiences to downtown theaters, and to help them see what those theaters were already doing," Rosenberg says. Quickly, a theater festival program began to emerge.

Marilyn Torres and Chris Messina star in Frank Pugliese's play, "Late Night, Early Morning"*

The plays, which together take two hours to perform, are put on each night of the two-week festival at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University (located at 3 Spruce Street). They are directed by Tony-award-winning John Rando and hosted by an ever-changing cast of celebrities, which so far has included Whoopie Goldberg, Martin Scorsese, and De Niro himself, among others.

In addition to this collection of plays, the festival also features a series of staged readings drawn from new works and works in progress at a range of downtown theaters. Theaters participating in the reading series portion of the festival include the New York Theatre Workshop, the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped, and the New Federal Theatre, to name a few.

The readings, held at Tribeca Cinemas (formerly the Screening Room, located at 54 Varick Street), provide festival attendees with glimpses of the work being done at the many theaters spread throughout the downtown area without requiring that they to travel to each one. The readings are free and open to the public (but require advance reservations).

"It's about bringing people to see the work that these companies are already doing,"  Rosenberg says of the readings and of the festival as a whole. "It's about letting New Yorkers know that this work is going on south of 14^th Street every day and that there are great opportunities that they should come down and check out."

Maria Tucci and Ross Gibby are among the cast for Wendy Wasserstein's play, "Psyche in Love"*

In organizing the festival, its founders aimed to be as inclusive as possible of all downtown theaters. Turning to a service organization called the Alliance of Resident Theaters in New York (ART New York) for a list of all theater companies south of 14^th Street, they began to reach out to each one individually and invite them to take part in the festival, Rosenberg says.

Most responded immediately and enthusiastically. "The downtown theater company needs this tremendously," says Lynn Moffat, managing director of the New York Theatre Workshop, which is staging two readings as part of the festival. "We don't get a lot of coverage from the major press in New York, so by any means necessary we always need to remind people that we exist."

But, she continues, while the downtown theater company needs the attention, New York needs the downtown theater community. "We are the algae that the bigger fish eat upon," she says. "Without this layer of creative work, theater productions up on Broadway wouldn't exist. This is where artists develop and hone their craft."

Both Rosenberg and Moffat agree that the festival's greatest strength is that it focuses not on anything new or different, but on the great work that has been taking place downtown all along.

"You have these intimate theaters, you have amazing talent, you have incredibly cheap tickets," Rosenberg says. "There is great stuff happening downtown. Go and see it."

The Tribeca Theater Festival continues through October 31. For information about scheduling and programming or to purchase tickets, please click here.

*All photos courtesy Joan Marcus