Theater Festival to Include Evenings of 9 Short Plays The people who brought you the Tribeca Film Festival are raising the curtain this month on live theater. The Tribeca Theater Festival, presented by the film fest’s founders Jane Rosenthal, Craig Hatkoff and Robert De Niro, opens a run of short one-acts, films on theater and theater-related panels from Oct. 19-31. The short pieces, called “The Downtown Plays” are the heart of the festival, with nine pieces (about 10 minutes each) presented each evening. “Seeing a play is so wonderful and people just don’t think of going Downtown,” said Douglas Carter Beane, the artistic director the Drama Dept., a theatrical ensemble of actors and writers who collaborated to create the evening of plays. Not only will the plays be seen Downtown (at Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts), they will be about Downtown. The charge to the Drama Dept.’s writers was to set their plays somewhere below 14th Street. Among the results are Beane’s own creation, a story about Tribeca movie people and their attempts to woo New York talent. Jon Robin Baitz also set his play in Tribeca, his story revolving around artist pioneers dealing with today’s world. Then there is David Henry Wang’s piece on tourists trying to find their way to Chinatown, Warren Leight’s take on an Oscar party in Soho and Kenneth Lonergan’s look at Wall Street in the ’20s. Each evening ends with Wendy Wasserstein’s creation, a play set on the Lower East Side and narrated each night by a different celebrity. Drama Dept. has been producing about two original plays a year since its founding nine years ago. In recent times, families and burgeoning careers have made it harder for the group to come together on major projects. “We really needed to find a way for our people to work with us for short bursts of time,” said the group’s executive director Michael Rosenberg. "The theater festival is perfect." Films about movie-making and panel discussions will be at Tribeca Cinemas, 54 Varick St. For information and a schedule go to www.tribecatheaterfestival.com.