PLAYWRIGHT IS DRAFTING NEW FUTURE FOR PUPILS

Farrell Foreman tends to ignore his own sizable talent as an actor. He fits naturally into the ham school of acting, bugging his eyes, pulling great faces, but he also can scale down his performance to a fine level of understatement.

The problem with acting, he told a theater full of high school students last week, is “acting is too much damn work.” Instead, Foreman prefers to “sweat blood at my typewriter,” preferably in four-hour segments with his coffee and cigar and sometimes a pipe, but mostly a cigar.

Foreman is a playwright. You can have your acting; Foreman would rather be writing a play. He’s got the plays, the awards, the work habits and the productions that prove he’s a playwright. Foreman has a sweet prose style and a flair for dialogue, a knack for building in comedy and adding layers of humanity to his characters that pull the listener into the play. But so far he doesn’t have the production--i.e., a New York production--which he needs to get published.

“The hardest thing for any playwright is to figure out a way to sustain yourself and still maintain your artistic output,” Foreman said. Since 1978, when Foreman was at Northern Illinois University, he has written a play a year. Foreman’s string of awards is impressive: a $2,500 Lorraine Hansberry Award in 1978, a $2,500 Samuel Goldwyn Creative Award in 1980, a $12,500 National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1982. In 1979 he came to UC San Diego because of its master of fine arts program, graduating in 1982.

One of his full-length plays, “Daddy’s Seashore Blues,” was produced at Chicago’s Victor Gardens Theater in 1982, and another, “Gym Rats,” about commercialism in sports, received a reading at the New Dramatists Theater in New York. Foreman and his wife, actress Sandra Sydney, returned to San Diego a year ago. “It’s insane, both of us being in the business. Usually when one of us works, the other doesn’t. This is the first time I’ve had a full-time job that enables me to incorporate what I do, and I love it.”

Foreman, 34, is working with UCSD’s early outreach program, which assists high school students from ethnic groups who are under-represented in the UC system--blacks, Mexican-Americans, American Indians and Asians--to get a leg up on the courses required for admission. University representatives visit selected area schools during the school year to instruct students, beginning with ninth-graders, on academic needs they must fulfill, such as the basic college preparatory courses: a foreign language, mathematics, science and English.

“If they can qualify for admission in the UC system, they are qualified for Harvard, Yale or anywhere,” Foreman said.

After more screening, 400 students are selected to attend, at no cost, a one-week intensive session focusing on writing skills held at the university during the summer. They live on campus. Every day, the students write all morning, and in the afternoon they are tested or counseled.

“Most of these kids don’t write well,” Foreman said. “Here, they study in a class with no more than 10 per instructor. It’s a holistic process. They write whatever they want to. We stress self-editing and focus on the entire piece, rather than minute errors.” Each student picks two of his best pieces, and one of these is printed in the Early Outreach magazine, which is published in the fall.

“It’s an important program, especially for kids who want to go to college, because as college students they will write . . . or die.”

Besides working directly with the collegiate aspirants, Foreman presents “Lone Eagle,” a long one-act play he wrote. Because funds are limited, Foreman also acts, under his wife’s direction, in the play, which is about one of the Tuskegee Airmen, an all-black World War II fighter squadron.

After last week’s performance of “Lone Eagle,” Foreman, still in costume, led the students in a discussion of the play. They wanted to know such things as what inspired Foreman to write it (poverty and hunger), did he plan to continue writing (yes, as long as he has something to say) and had he acted before (yes, but he prefers writing). Getting serious, Foreman told the students that the real trigger for the play was the October, 1983, Beirut bombing that killed 241 Americans (mostly Marines) and his discovery of the World War II’s black air squadron.

“Lone Eagle” is an anti-war play about how a disenchanted Nazi ace befriended a black fighter pilot, then tricked the American into killing him. The play has been performed twice at John Muir Theatre and will be staged again at 3 p.m. today and at 3 p.m. Aug. 25.

In the future, Foreman hopes to interest local theaters in his plays. That’s one route to a possible New York production, and his next play may be a Western. “I want to write a Western about a black outlaw who was killed by Tom Horn, the bounty hunter, at Brown’s Hole, Wyo. When was the last time you saw a Western on stage?

“I think sometimes I’m living out my childhood fantasies. Actually, I think I’ve never grown up.”