Young Actors Aren’t Kidding in Drug Drama

It’s play rehearsal time at Sherman Elementary School in Southeast San Diego. Light illuminates the small stage in the darkened auditorium.

Tommy is eating with his father at Zippy’s Pizza, a family celebration except that one member, Tommy’s older brother, is not there. “I wonder what Johnny is doing?” he asks his Dad.

“Probably out having fun, like us,” his father responds.

“Yeah, like us,” Tommy says.

But across town Johnny is smoking a joint laced with PCP. Death is approaching. The boy begins to cough uncontrollably and doubles over.

He later dies of an overdose. “He Was My Brother” is over.

Eleven-year-old Rodrigo Madrigal says he wrote the play last year after seeing drugs almost kill someone close to him.

“I’ve seen the consequences that drugs bring to a person when they take them; it scares me,” he said. “I wanted to do this for the rest of the kids.”

Ten elementary-school students, all members of the school’s drama club, make up the cast of the play. It has been performed twice, once for parents and once for the San Diego Police Department.

“I think that the younger children should see this,” said Dartagan Parker, 11, who plays Johnny. Younger students will be less likely to use drugs after they see the play, he said.

Ramon (Chunky) Sanchez, of the San Diego Street Youth Program, viewed the play last month and offered this opinion:

“I think that it was put on a level that can relate to elementary school kids. Sherman is located in an area where there is a high concentration of drug use and drug sales. A lot of the youngsters see this on a daily basis.”

Sherman Elementary School Principal Cecilia Estrada agreed with Sanchez. She said heroin sales were so high around the school, at 450 24th St., that in January school officials called police for help.

“They have kind of cleaned up the corner,” she said, referring to the junction of 22nd and K streets.

Estrada said of the play, “At first I was dissatisfied with it,” she said. “I thought that the subject matter was too real.”

But she later changed her mind. The play will be performed for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade students in April, Estrada said.

School drama director Daniel Herrera hopes to perform the play for the San Diego Unified School District’s board of directors.

“In this area you find drugs on the playground,” said Talalupe Pollard, 11, who composed and performs the play’s music. “Some of the younger kids may pick it (the drugs) up, see what it is and taste it.

“Some parents think that their children are too young to know about this, but the kids already know,” she said.

Seven-year-old Raymond Padilla, the play’s lighting director, said he wants parents to understand its message.

“It’s for the parents so they won’t let their kids into drugs,” he whispered. “They (children who use drugs) could lose their life.”