Behind All the Play, Warning About AIDS

Dancing music blares from the stage at Inglewood’s Morningside High School. A play is about to begin. It opens with the lines:

Yo.

Yo. Yo. Yo. Yo.

Yo. Yo. Yo. Yo. Yo.

The audience likes it already.

This is pop theater with rap music, dance fever and a character so cool his nickname is Refrigerator. The message, mixed in with all the hoopla, is deadly serious: preventing acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The somber story is this: Before Junky Jane dies of AIDS, she shares a needle with Sister Sly. Later, Slow Bro and Sister Sly have a baby. At the end of the play, the Thang Dancer, a ghastly monster symbolizing AIDS, scoops up the infant to the sound of beating drums.

The play, “The Real Deal,” sponsored by the Youth and Family Center in Inglewood, will tour school auditoriums in Inglewood with its troupe of teen-age performers and its message.

“The kids know exactly what we’re saying,” said Curtis Hopkins, a Morningside senior who plays one of the lead characters. “It’s going to be ringing in their ears. I’ve been a lot safer myself (since getting the play’s message). Once you hear it, there’s no excuse anymore.”

At last week’s dress rehearsal, Morningside students roared throughout the production and leaped to their feet as the curtain closed. The play got a similarly strong reception at a performance for local officials Thursday night. Teachers and students agree that AIDS lectures in health class rarely evoke such reactions.

“I’ve heard this so many times before,” said Ayana Herbert, a freshman at Morningside. “We get the same message over and over. But this one was different. It was not the boring, straight way of doing things.”

Herbert said the play is far more likely to reach her classmates and make them change their behavior than other methods of teaching about AIDS.

Students in Inglewood are not the only ones experiencing theater with a cause. Across the South Bay, specialty plays are being used to fill young people’s heads with thought-provoking messages.

“When the kids come in they are wild and out of control,” said Sunna Rasch, who brought an award-winning play on drug and alcohol abuse to schools in Torrance and Rancho Palos Verdes last month.

“When they leave they are quiet and passive. Guidance counselors say some of the kids come down to talk to them afterwards.”

Rasch, executive director of the New York City-based Periwinkle National Theatre for Young Audiences, said that in addition to her theater company’s play about substance abuse, “Halfway There,” she has sponsored plays on divorce, literacy and self-esteem in schools across the nation.

“I think theater is the most powerful medium,” she said. “When kids watch TV, they’re passive. Kids turn a deaf ear to lecture. Live performance puts the audience in the same room with the actors. Every kid sees part of himself or herself in one of the characters.”

At the Hermosa Beach Civic Theatre in January, a play called “I Can’t Talk About It” brought its message to young people that it is OK to tell on sexual molesters. A question-and-answer period on sexual abuse followed the play.

Last week, a 40-minute production called “Secrets” played in Wilmington with a theme debunking the myths about AIDS and warning students to use condoms or abstain from sex. That play ties together a series of deadly relationships that begin with a character called “Eddie,” who shares a needle with a group of soccer buddies. All the tales in the play are based on true stories.

“Most teen-agers do not believe that AIDS can happen to them,” said Dr. Neil Schram, an internist with Kaiser Permanente, a health maintenance organization that sponsors “Secrets.” “Fortunately, most of them will be right. Unfortunately, some of them will be wrong.”

After viewing the play at Banning High School in Wilmington last week, Nancy Stuart, a health teacher at Carson High School, said she hopes to encourage her school to use the play. She said the production made it very clear that AIDS is not a strictly homosexual disease and succeeded in “weaving the facts with fun.”

As part of its sponsorship of “Secrets,” Kaiser Permanente makes sure that teachers have the materials to prepare students for the play, said Abelardo de la Pena Jr., a Kaiser spokesman. The actors answer questions about AIDS and hold discussions that expand on the play’s messages, he said.

French Stewart, a professional actor who is in the cast of “Secrets,” called the play far more rewarding than the typical work young actors get--like making television commercials for soap.

“We’re close to (the students’) ages,” said Stewart, who has performed in Kaiser Permanente’s theater education program for the past three years. “They get to learn about AIDS without watching slides of some amoeba.”

The author of the production touring the Inglewood schools, Judi Ann Mason Williams, said the power of her play is the AIDS monster, “a visible virus that the children can picture in their minds.”

Although there is plenty of revelry in “The Real Deal,” Williams said she wants to leave the young theatergoers troubled, too.

“Some day everyone will know someone who died of AIDS,” she said. “For a moment these kids get to feel that. I want a lot of fear, but I want that fear tempered with common sense.”