Anti-Bigotry Drama Taps Its Authors’ Experiences : O.C. Theater: ‘Words Like These,’ featuring 10 vignettes from seven different writers and actors, is being staged at the Santa Ana City Hall Annex.

The anti-bigotry play “Words Like These” began with a conversation overheard from a hallway.

About a year ago, Kent Hawkins, one of the Orange County Coalition of Theatre Art’s founders, said he was working as a janitor for a Huntington Beach printing company when he listened in on the vice president and the personnel manager. The two discussed the merits of an applicant for a sales job--the man was well-qualified with strong references; he also was black.

According to Hawkins, the vice president told the manager, who wanted to hire the man, that he didn’t want a black in the high-profile position. A white would be a better choice.

“He said outright that he shouldn’t be hired for those reasons, that a black face would not be a good idea,” Hawkins recalled. “I was stunned. I really thought those attitudes were pretty much dead, that we’d made progress past that. It all came as something of a revelation.”

Angered, Hawkins soon quit and began outlining “Words Like These” for OCCTA, a small Anaheim-based drama workshop. The play, featuring 10 vignettes penned by seven local writers and actors, continues through Nov. 18 at the Santa Ana City Hall Annex.

“Words Like These” attempts to look at many levels of bigotry and intolerance, Hawkins explained, by dramatizing the personal experiences of the region’s minorities. To do this, OCCTA brought in Latino, Vietnamese, black, women and homosexual writers.

Hawkins added that the pieces are frank, with uncensored language. The most direct may be a dramatization of Patrick Purdy, the Stockton man who killed five schoolchildren and wounded several others, including Southeast Asian immigrants, in January.

Authorities believe that Purdy’s actions could have been racially motivated, and in the vignette, he rails against the Vietnamese while brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle. His diatribe is given counterpoint by writer Long Nguyen’s monologue on the plight of Southeast Asian refugees trying to settle in America.

The inflammatory nature of the Purdy piece aside, Hawkins said the two-hour production’s goal “is to break down fears and misconceptions the races have of each other and promote understanding between people. The result is a true interracial collaboration.”

The first writer to join the project, Felix Cisneros of La Mirada, said it gave him the opportunity to express his feelings about bigotry in all forms. He wrote three pieces: one focuses on the division between a successful Latino businessman and his gang-oriented brother; another has a son revealing to his father that he’s gay; the last depicts a powerful man, perhaps a politician, informing an all-white crowd of their superiority to minorities.

“It’s all from the heart. None of us are getting paid, or have been paid anything, so it has to be from the heart,” said Cisneros, an articulate 17-year-old. “I found it the best way to impart information (because through) live theater, you can project to a large audience. We have to get the message across, that tolerance is crucial.”

Cisneros, who said he has devoted close to four days a week for the past eight months writing, rehearsing and working on the play’s technical side, noted that he drew on his own experiences and those of friends when developing his vignettes. These encounters with racism have been both obvious and subtle.

“You hear the slurs and you hear from friends who (think they) didn’t get jobs because of their background. I can observe it all the time in Orange County, in the restaurants, for example, where the only brown faces belong to the busboys. Those kinds of things make you think.”

The project has not always gone smoothly. In the beginning, only Cisneros responded to the notices that were displayed at playhouses around the county, including the Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana where Cisneros first learned about it.

Hawkins had to become more aggressive in attracting minority writers. And once he did, there were other problems. Surprisingly, Hawkins found that racist tendencies erupted even during rehearsals. The most flagrant came when one of the early directors, upset with the ideas of one of the other participants, shouted an epithet. He was told to leave.

That outburst, from someone Hawkins assumed was free of prejudice, further underscored his belief in the need for “Words Like These.” He added that the production is not naive in believing that all biases can be eliminated, but only that it tries to point out positive directions.

“The truth is that America is a global village with all sorts of different people with different values. Basically, you should be measured by your net worth, by who you are and what you do. That’s really what this is all about.”

The Orange County Coalition of Theatre Arts’ “Words Like These” plays Friday and Saturday at 7:45 p.m. through Nov. 18 at the Santa Ana City Hall Annex, 23 Civic Center Plaza, Santa Ana. Tickets: $10 and $12. (714) 991-8556.