At the opening of the “Downtown Plays,” the evening of 10-minute shorts at the Tribeca Theater Festival, Douglas Carter Beane quoted a sad statistic. Before September 11, 2001, downtown played host to more than 100 theater companies. Since then, that number has dwindled to 40.

After Mr. Beane sobered us, Robert De Niro, the co-founder of the Theater Festival, said eight thrillingly gruff words. Then Martin Scorsese confessed he doesn’t know how to use the Internet. We got the picture: This was a family exercise. Celebrating downtown trumped all other concerns; refusing to experience the fellow feeling would have seemed churlish.

Nine playwrights have provided the short scenes that make up the evening. Alexander Dodge’s blinking, metallic set mocks up a giant subway map, complete with little red lights for our favorite stops. When “8th Street/NYU” lights up, Warren Leight’s disgruntled screenwriters carp at an ex-friend getting an Oscar on television. At the Lower East Side stop, David Henry Hwang assumes we’re “Trying to Find Chinatown.”

All nine shows play to hometown pride, with applause lines like “We’re not Americans … we’re New Yorkers!” The only one to feature an out-of-towner is Neil LaBute’s offering – and that character is a psychopath. The nine also excite pride in another way. Though the 10-minute play format hardly shows anyone in the best light, the overall impression is of a cup running over. So many actors! So many playwrights! We have reason to hope.

Mr. Beane’s “He Meaning Him” is the appetizer, a tasty morsel of industry satire. At a lunch, a rising young movie heartthrob and his sharky agent try to lure a playwright back to Los Angeles’s Gomorrah. Josh Hamilton and Julie White have their timing down, and Ms. White wrings every last laugh out of lines like “Giving final cut to a writer? I’d rather give firearms to small children!”

Mr. Hwang, unfortunately intent on milking identity politics out of a random street meeting, slows down the evening a little, as does Kenneth Lonergan’s period-piece “True to You.” In director John Rando’s one false note of the night, Mr. Lonergan’s screwball patter sounds ponderous in the mouths of the usually excellent Mr. Hamilton and J. Smith-Cameron.

But the first half comes to a rousing finish with Jon Robin Baitz’s messy, painful “My Beautiful Goddamn City,” a conversation between sisters played by Julie White and Maria Tucci. Both quintessential New Yorkers, they explode at each other and their country. After a series of dear and funny pieces, Mr. Baitz ambushes us with the real*questions all in a row – how can you love and fear your home? Can you bear to?

The second half moves even more briskly. Frank Pugliese’s tender “Late Night, Early Morning,” wrests a love story out of unusual elements: Chris Messina and Marilyn Torres wait for the subway, worrying over rats and overflowing sewers. Like Mr. Baitz in the first half, Mr. Pugliese ups the stakes – making something long-lasting out of his quarter hour. Mr. LaBute’s “Union Square” is a disturbing monologue by a tourist with revenge on his mind; Josh Hamilton turns his sweet smile sick and delivers it without a flaw.

Jackie Hoffman also gets a tailor-made soliloquy – this one from Paul Rudnick. In “Pride and Joy,” she claims the title of Most Loving Mother of All Time, making her case in a brilliant adenoidal squeal. And Wendy Wasserstein rings down the curtain with a high-camp rendition of “Psyche in Love,” re-casting the myth as a bat mitzvah costume drama. Ms. White, having done versatile, splendid work throughout, was still in high form – wisely draping her costume over her face whenever she had a fit of the giggles.

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The Hungarian ARTUS/Company Gabor Goda serves up the most recent Kitchen dish “Cain’s Hat,” a fusing of “body poetry and conceptual theatre” loosely based on the myths of Cain and Moses. Though Mr. Gabor’s quartet dwells too long on their material, the images they create along the way are eerie and contemplative, weirdly appropriate for Halloween.

A tall figure presiding from the back, vocalist Erzsi Kiss, stands 10 feet tall in gray draperies, Ms. Kiss yodeling and cooing a strange soundtrack to the action. When Ms. Kiss glides in and out of dim light, burbling her bizarre half-words, she sends a chill up your spine.

The dancing foursome, dressed all in gray and black pajamas, struggle with one another for a supply of crushable black fedoras and a pile of stones. Dancers wear their hats as masks, get loaded into tiny wheelbarrows, stutter out syllables that can’t be understood. Whenever someone does get a hat on, someone else turns up to smash it with a rock. Just when the stone-faced carnage seems like a bit much, someone comes through with a butterfly suspended invisibly between his hands.

Company Gabor Goda’s program insists that this work isn’t philosophical. But when one member executes a dance entirely on the tops of nine thin poles, you could swear it’s an angel dancing on the head of a pin.