Youth Theater Examines the Concentration Camp

I was once a little child, 3 years ago, a child who longed for other worlds. But now I am no more a child, for I have learned to hate.

--from “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.”

The Laguna Playhouse Youth Theatre’s third play this season is a dramatic departure from its razzle-dazzle “Barnum” and its folk tale romp “Wiley and the Hairy Man.”

“I Never Saw Another Butterfly” by Celeste Raspanti, opening today for five performances through Sunday, is based on the starkest reality: poems, letters and art done by children in Terezin, a World War II concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

Set in 1946, it is told by a camp survivor, a 16-year-old girl who begins her story with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Director Scott Davidson has no qualms regarding audience acceptance of the play, although he feels it is best suited for older children (8 years old, at least). “All of our shows are for a family audience, but some are more issue-oriented,” Davidson said, noting that the company likes to fill an “issue slot” each season.

In 1987 the issue slot was filled by “Special Class,” a play that dealt with handicaps. Last year, it was “Mother Hicks,” a drama about an orphan outcast, set in the Great Depression. The eclectic seasonal mix--fairy-tales, reality and just plain entertainment--seems to work: Davidson noted that the Youth Theatre’s audience “has grown 300%” in 3 seasons.

Still, why choose a play set in an era considered remote by most children and teens?

Davidson doesn’t think the audience will find anything untimely about “Butterfly.”

“Anti-Semitism, bigotry and racism have been with us for centuries,” he said. “It’s frightening for people to realize it’s here at home. We like to distance ourselves (but) it’s very much an issue today--the skinheads, the neo-Nazi movement. . . .

“Hatred goes back so far and becomes so deeply rooted in a culture that people aren’t even sure why it’s there or where it came from. We’ve focused on that here.”

To give the cast a sense of time and place, Davidson asked his players (who range in age from 8 to adult) to research various topics, from the life of Hitler and the pogroms to the prewar German economy. He then led discussion groups.

Then, everyone “played psychodrama and stature games.” Each cast member wore an armband for a week, each kept a nightly journal to record feelings and observations the play provoked, and each wrote poems. (Some of this work may be used as part of a lobby display.)

Davidson realizes that many in the audience may not be as knowledgeable as the actors are now. But he doesn’t think anyone will find “Butterfly” hard to follow.

“Unlike ‘Barnum’ with its circus setting or ‘Wiley’ with its green lights-and-crickets swamp environment, ‘Butterfly’ is going to be a very stylized production, surreal, almost expressionistic,” Davidson said. “It relies on audience imagination to create and sustain a place.

“My main goal as a director and producer is to create theater that entertains,” he said. “If people achieve a connection with the actors on stage, then history is not just names and dates, and education comes through entertainment.”

Davidson’s enthusiasm crackles through the phone. He’s young-- 26--but theater has been his life from childhood. He started out as a member of the nationally known Rainbow Company in Las Vegas (the company was created by Jody Davidson, who is now general manager of the Laguna Moulton Playhouse--and Scott’s wife).

At 18, on a scholarship at the University of Nevada, he majored in theater, was nominated for an Irene Ryan Award, and taught creative dramatics. Another scholarship took him to USC where he finished his bachelor’s degree in theater arts. In 1986, when the Playhouse decided to expand its children’s theater program, Davidson was hired. He hopes his efforts there are proving that “kids can do quality theater.”

Meanwhile, he hopes that audiences take from “Butterfly” a realization: that “in the end,” it’s about “triumph. There were so many reasons for despair, but (the Nazis) didn’t take the poetry away, didn’t stop the humanity these children were able to preserve.”

The Laguna Playhouse Youth Theatre’s production of “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” by Celeste Raspanti will be staged tonight at 7; Saturday at 2 and 7 p.m., and Sunday at noon and 3 p.m at the Moulton Theatre, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. The Saturday evening performance will be signed for the hearing impaired. Tickets: $3 to $5. Information: (714) 494-8022.