SCR, Teatro Cometa Take Issues to Home Turf : Plays Target Gang, Immigrant Problems in O.C.

It wasn’t the most polite way to ask the audience to take their seats. But then most theater audiences are easier to control than the 400 sixth-grade students at Lathrop Intermediate School in Santa Ana.

“Now we begin. Quiet! Right now! Sit down!” ordered Assistant Principal Steve Solomon. For the most part, the fidgety schoolchildren obeyed, and, for the next half an hour or so, they were treated to an energetic little play that school administrators and performers alike hope did more than just entertain.

Roy Conboy’s play “Happy Birthday, Angel,” is the tale of an 8-year-old boy who is killed in a drive-by shooting and then must follow a bewildering path to discover his self-worth in order to return to the living.

South Coast Repertory Theatre’s community outreach program is now presenting the piece at elementary and intermediate schools in areas of the county where drive-by shootings and other types of gang violence are a very real part of life to teen-agers.

“We hope to get to the children who, while too young to join now, are already being confronted with these issues through older siblings and neighbors,” said Jose Cruz Gonzalez, director of the play.

While South Coast Repertory is taking its anti-gang piece to county schools, another theater group is launching its own socially conscious, issue-oriented production to specific audiences.

Monday, Teatro Cometa, a neighborhood theater group in Fullerton, will debut “Zero Dolares la Hora: Ya Basta” (“Zero Dollars an Hour: Enough Already”). The short piece on exploitation of undocumented workers will play at Santa Ana High School before hundreds of English-as-a-second-language students from throughout Santa Ana.

“Angel” and “Zero Dolares” share a didactic quality reminiscent of Luis Valdez’ “El Teatro Campesino,” which started by performing on a flatbed truck for grape pickers during the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott in the 1960s.

“It’s stylistic theater . . . a teaching element,” said Gonzalez, adding, though, that “we’re not politicians, we’re artists. Yet we’re able to combine art and still reflect what’s happening in the community. . . . It’s a good one-two punch.”

The message of “Angel” is one that the Rev. Jesse Jackson made famous with the “I am . . . somebody” refrain with which he often peppers his talks to youngsters. After Angel (Robert Almodovar) is shot by tough-talking, Dead Street gang-member El Gato (Vic Trevino), he is given a chance to return to the living by taking part in an otherworldly game show, “Don’t Mess Up or You’re Dead.” He encounters three spirits: baseball star Roberto Clemente (Robert Crow), aviator Amelia Earhart (Angela Moya) and Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (Crow)--who challenge him to follow his dreams and discover his potential.

But in each case, El Gato persuades Angel that he is a “nobody” and shouldn’t put forth the effort.

“Hey, get a grip, ese, “ Gato says to Angel when he is within one strike of fanning Clemente and returning to life. “They want you to try real hard just so you can fail. . . . It’s all rigged.”

Gato tells Angel that he can join the Dead Street gang and be a “somebody” by committing the same crime that ended his own life. At the moment of truth, Angel shrugs off Gato’s influence and says the magic words--”I am somebody”--and the game show host (Moya) returns him to life, much to the relief of Lathrop’s young audience, which had had just about enough of Gato’s negativism.

“We adjust depending on the age of the kids,” said Trevino, who was mobbed by autograph-seekers after the performance when it was announced that he appears on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” each Saturday morning. “We use a smaller gun with younger kids, and we don’t aim it out at them.”

Lathrop sixth-graders seemed to grasp the play’s message, more or less.

“It was good that he (Angel) didn’t kill the girl,” Ricardo Romero said. The lesson was that you should “do what good people tell you to do, not bad people.”

Pedro Cazares, 12, thought the play was “nice.”

“It was OK . . . not to join the gang,” he said.

The troupe will perform the play next week at schools in La Palma, Anaheim, Buena Park and Santa Ana, and may give additional performances if there is demand, Gonzalez said. Pacific Bell has underwritten the production with a $10,000 grant.

While the SCR troupe faces the problem of performing before a squirmy audience, Teatro Cometa’s most difficult task is finding--and keeping--performers.

Jaime Gomez, a Fullerton native, started the group in 1979 and still runs it. He also writes most of its material.

“Zero Dolares” was commissioned by Orange County Human Relations Commission staff member Barbara Considine, who works with undocumented laborers and saw a need for a better way to get information across to them.

“I think people remember a message much more clearly when they identify with what’s going on up there on the stage,” Considine said. Putting that message in a play is more powerful, she said, than “if a county social worker is up there telling you what your rights are.”

Gomez wrote the piece for six actors, but the recent departure of two troupe members--one due to illness, the other because he had to take a job out of town--forced him to do some quick revisions. At the moment, Teatro Cometa consists of Gomez, his two sisters, Lukie Ramos and Yolanda Gomez-Rivas, and Rene Acosta, a newcomer to the group.

“A lot of people in neighborhoods like this don’t know about the theater,” said Gomez, who will receive an award from the Human Relations Commission on Sunday both for his theater work and his work as resident manager of the New Vista Shelter in Fullerton. He runs the theater group out of a food distribution center in back of a park. “Part of our work is to stimulate interest in the community . . . to get them excited and show that there is an alternative to partying and stuff--which is OK.”

Gomez studied theater at Cal State Fullerton and performed with the Mascarones theater group in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1977 and 1978. When he returned to Fullerton, he formed Teatro Cometa, and in 1979 the group toured the state with a production of Gomez’s “La Confusion y El Desmadre” (“The Confusion and The Disorder”), which dealt with “the confusion of youth,” Gomez said.

“Zero Dolares,” a melange of Spanish and English, is straightforward agitprop theater. The scene is a street corner in Orange, where scores of men assemble each day hoping to be picked up by contractors and other patrones.

But one of the workers, named Pollo, winds up being stiffed by his employer, a contractor at a “Rancho Santa Margarita” development. Pollo goes back to the job site in search of the unscrupulous employer and finds a TV news reporter interviewing other workers. Through the interaction comes advice on how to avoid being ripped off: getting the license number of the boss’s truck, his address and phone number and a firm understanding of the system of payment.

“This kind of stuff happens everyday,” Gomez said. “A lot of those guys are ripped off. . . . This play is aimed at the workers, letting them know that there are ways to protect themselves, precautions to take. At the same time, it’s something that (other) people need to know. They think they go to work and everyone gets paid.”

The first audience to see the play will be 1,200 English-as-a-second-language students--many of whom are illegal aliens or recent amnesty applicants. Considine, who is scheduling the performances, hopes to take it to similar groups around the county.

“The audience we want is already there,” Considine said. Pacific Bell is underwriting the first 10 performances of “Zero Dolares” with a $1,000 grant, she said.

Gomez would also like to take the play directly to workers waiting out on the street corners.

“They’ll get a kick out of it,” Gomez said.

For information regarding “Happy Birthday, Angel,” call South Coast Repertory at (714) 957-2602. For information regarding “Zero Dolares la Hora: Ya Basta, “ call the Orange County Human Relations Commission at (714) 567-7470.