NEXT STAGES
from the San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, April 24, 2005
by Alison Luterman

Play No. 1: Two tigers, one male and one female, tearfully pledge love and loyalty, although their union is forbidden on pain of death because they come from different tribes.

Play No. 2: Two monkey brothers, marooned on a desert island, argue about the best way to escape: through faith and imagination, or by building a boat. When one manages to get away and the other is stranded all alone, the escaped brother returns to rescue his sibling. All squabbling is forgiven in an embrace.

Play No. 3: A guitar and a guitar pick argue about their forthcoming concert. The pick gets stepped on and broken but wants to play anyway, even at risk to his life, because he believes so much in the guitar's talent. At first, the guitar accepts the pick's noble offer, but then he worries: Will my friend die if he makes this sacrifice for me? Is it worth it to pursue my dream at the expense of my closest relationship?

The audience sits on folding chairs in the gymnasium of Hillcrest Juvenile Hall. Many of the adults are wiping away tears. They've just watched the short plays synopsized above, which were written by young incarcerated men who participated in a mentoring program called Each One Reach One.

These are good, well-made, deeply emotional pieces of theater. Yes, the characters speak a little more openly and honestly than is the fashion in plays these days, and the language tends toward the street. But it also veers off on wild flights of poetry, or is brought crashing to earth by harsh truths: Love can tear you apart; all choices have consequences; survival is not guaranteed.

That is what makes the grown-ups, who know this all too well, reach for their Kleenex. But alongside the pain of the situation is the work's excellence. The professional actors, volunteers for this occasion, read from the stapled- together scripts with passion. The layers and shadings they bring to the dialogue are revelatory. You can see them practically chewing on the words in appreciation of their raw strength.

But it is the youths themselves, each playwright taking a turn sitting onstage as his play is read, who command the most attention. Underneath the adolescent male posture -- legs sprawled, arms folded protectively over the chest -- one can see the quickening of attention as each young man hears his words brought to life by the actors.

And the people shedding the most tears in the audience are their parents. They are the ones who have received dreaded phone calls from police; they are the ones who have sat in courtrooms while their children were sentenced to jail. Now they are watching concrete evidence of their sons' talent. Robin Sohnen, who created this program and runs it out of her Pacifica office, is wiping her eyes as well. Although she has been doing this for eight years, ushering hundreds of youths through the transformative process of becoming writers, the work has never lost its poignant edge for her.

I've logged two stints in the program as a playwright-mentor myself, so this final performance moves me all the more because I have an inkling of the hard work it took to get here.

The first time I did the program, I found that getting there was indeed half the battle. Highway 880 can be slow on a good day, and at rush hour it is tortuous. Hillcrest Juvenile Hall is tucked far, far away on a deserted hillside outside of San Mateo. Once parked, I find that I can't carry anything in with me except my ID. No purse, no wallet, no keys. It's a descent into an underworld, a world where children are locked up.

Along with my fellow mentors, I surrender personal items into a little plastic bucket, and we are walked, single file, through the corridors that are institutional the way high school once was, only worse.

Along the way, we smell industrial bleach, teenage sweat and cooking smells -- fried food, and sometimes popcorn. A guard with a key ring attached to his belt leads us through the labyrinth of corridors to meet the youths who have signed up for the opportunity to write a play.

Most of the students had only a dim idea of what they were getting into when they said they would do the program. Same here. At the first meeting, there are just a dozen of us, looking and feeling awkward, in a beat-up classroom with insufficient ventilation. There are six or seven adults, all of whom have some experience as actors or playwrights, and the same number of young men in their regulation sweatpants and T-shirts, their puppy-large feet stuffed into sneakers with no laces, or prison-issue plastic sandals.

The leader guides us all through some standard improvisation games. Say your name, make a sound, add a gesture. The adults, longtime veterans of this kind of warm-up, jump in with a big flourish. Most of the young people hold back, rolling their eyes at our antics, afraid of losing their cool. "This is the extra-credit thing we signed up for?" is written clearly all over their adolescent faces. Eventually, one or two of them take the plunge.

"Lee-on!" one exclaims, windmilling his arms. "Lee-on!" the group repeats, mimicking his gesture. Everyone laughs, the kids' faces flush pink and they begin to look like kids again.

We show up again on the second night, and the one after that. Each night, there are the same simple warm-ups, stretching and flexing and letting ourselves act goofy within the safe confines of theater games. Each night, the lead instructor adds a small building block to the playmaking structure.

The rules ask that the students create nonhuman characters -- cats or eagles, owls or parakeets. (For some reason, birds are a popular choice, maybe because they possess the coveted skill of being able to fly over walls; maybe because caught birds are kept in cages.) This use of metaphor provides a safe distance from fiery emotions, frees us from bondage to the literal and pushes us all into the realms of the imagination.

It is a discipline, though. The young writers have to come up with names, ages, family relationships, desires and fears for their characters. But before doing that, before settling in to the hard work of writing, they get to simply play.

As they show up night after night, individual personalities begin to emerge. Some of the guys are shy and quiet, slow to trust. Some are on fire with creativity. They have filled notebooks already with their poetry and drawings. This program will give them a chance to stretch their creative wings into a more collaborative arena.

Some of the youths speak very little English. Some can't write, even at 17 years old -- the mentor scribes their dictated plays for them.

All have experienced more drama in their short, difficult lives than could be adequately expressed by Miller or Ibsen. Sometimes haltingly, with much prodding, sometimes in a flood, the stories begin to emerge into the notebooks. The dialogue is raw, funny, honest. Each youth is encouraged to pause the action in order to see and say how his protagonist feels, to allow moments of honest connection between the characters as well as expressions of conflict.

There's always a point in every creative work where it feels as if the thing will never come together. I have experienced it myself many times; time to lay the work aside for a while, go for a walk, drink tea, call a friend. But these guys don't have a while, and there is no place to go. So the work is completed in the communal pressure cooker that is their reality.

We mentors don't know details of their legal cases. We don't know the nature of the crimes our student may have committed, his sentencing, or where he is in the system. All we get to know is his imagination, his most intense yearnings and his sadness at being locked away from family and friends. The bare classroom becomes a refuge, a place where simple rituals are enacted, foolish-seeming to the outside world, but necessary to the creation of a play, to the healing of a self.

Two weeks go by quickly. We have been telling our students how great the evening of the performances will be, but they are adolescents and tend toward doubt. Because of that rule of creation that says that everything must break down before it can come together, we mentors sometimes feel a bit dubious as well. XXX The night before the performance, each mentor takes his student's precious notebook home and types up all the work of the past two weeks. It is suddenly overwhelming -- how much is there, how much humor and tragedy and conflict and understanding has been captured in these dialogues between eagles or monkeys or bears. Wild landscapes, sometimes harsh, sometimes beautiful, are the order of the day. Humor runs rampant.
If I let myself think of it, I am also overwhelmed by how much is not there. Everyone knows the way kids whose parents don't have money can slip through the cracks in school, but this work is so vivid and real.

How have we collectively decided as a society that it is easier and cheaper to lock up the wild genius energy of our children than to give it the care it needs in order to bloom? And what terrible price do we all pay for it, now, and for years and years to come?

Alison Luterman is a freelance writer.

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