For Couple, Interracial Love Is Reality; On Stage It’s Fantasy : Race: La Habra Community Theatre’s decision to not cast a black male lead in “Romeo and Juliet” disappoints two youths. The theater says its duty is to the ticket-buying public.

“ROMEO--black male, 15-25 with youthful glee. JULIET--Caucasian female, 15-25 gentle sensuality” read the ad in Drama-Logue, and that was enough for Jermaine Hopson and Lisa Marie to spend one hour on the road getting to La Habra Sunday night.

The San Fernando Valley teen-agers, aspiring actors both, had never heard of this North Orange County town before seeing the casting notice for the La Habra Community Theatre.

But Hopson, 18, and Marie, his 16-year-old girlfriend, had special reason to take note of an interracial production of “Romeo and Juliet”: Hopson is black, Marie is white, and thus La Habra offered them a rare chance to play the English language’s most famous pair of lovers on stage.

And since Hopson was the only black actor to show up at the auditions, Marie figured, “I thought he had it made.” All she had to do was win the part of Juliet.

Such hopes, however, were dashed long before the couple auditioned on the Depot Playhouse stage.

Theater board members, upon learning last week of director Marla Gam-Hudson’s casting intentions, held an emergency meeting to reverse her decision. Gam-Hudson entered the auditions with instructions to cast all members of the feuding Montague and Capulet clans with actors of the same race.

Theater officials didn’t tell Hopson of the change in casting policy; he was allowed to read for it and only learned of the controversy on his way to the parking lot.

He was disappointed.

“I thought the idea was cool,” he said. “I’d like to talk to the board of directors and explain it to them.”

But board members already had reasons for their action.

They acknowledged that interracial casting is frequently done elsewhere--the New York Shakespeare Festival, for example, attracted no controversy for casting Tracey Ullman, who is white, and Morgan Freeman, who is black, as the contentious newlyweds of “The Taming of the Shrew.”

La Habra, however, is different.

“We felt it wasn’t right for this community,” said board member Cathy Furrer. “This is an older community, and it wouldn’t go over here.”

Board President Jeanne Diamond said that controversy of any kind, not simply racial issues, repels La Habra theatergoers. She said the struggling troupe, with fewer than 100 subscribers, cannot afford to offend potential ticket buyers.

“We don’t want to make statements one way or the other,” she said. “We’re not about that, we’re not about messages.”

Further, she said, some board members felt that an ad calling specifically for a black Romeo amounted to reverse discrimination.

And, with “West Side Story” being the season’s following production, Diamond felt that ethnic extrapolations of the “Romeo and Juliet” story were being accounted for. The 1957 musical recasts the Montagues and Capulets as white and Puerto Rican gangs in New York City, offering, she said, an interesting comparison to a “traditionally” cast “Romeo and Juliet.”

Finally, she said that Gam-Hudson’s ad would never have appeared at all had the board gotten around to asking her about the play at a regular meeting earlier this year. The board would have rejected her proposal for interracial casting--as it had in each of the preceding three years--and no public controversy would have emerged.

These reasons, however, were unpersuasive to many of the 22 actors who came to audition.

“It’s a really cowardly choice for the board to try to curry favor with a conservative audience at the expense of challenging, interesting theater,” said Steven Opyrehal, 23.

The Anaheim resident discounted the notion that the presence of Puerto Rican parts in “West Side Story” demonstrated the board’s commitment to multi-ethnic casting.

“The operative word here is black . Latinos are one thing in Orange County, but around here, black and white don’t mix,” Opyrehal said.

“This isn’t Mississippi, this is Los Angeles,” said Eduard Will, 27, of Hollywood. “It’s shocking to me that they are making an issue out of interracial relationships. As a statement by the theater, it’s an embarrassment--as an artist in L.A., it makes me feel embarrassed,” he said. (In fact, an interracial production of “Romeo and Juliet” was staged last year in Port Gibson, Miss., which is still de facto segregated, and went off without a hitch.)

“Theater,” he asserted, “has a progressive mission. If the board feels that the community would be disturbed by a black Romeo, that’s all the more reason to do it.”

Others linked the La Habra action to what they regard as a repressive climate for artists in general.

“It’s an example of how America censors everything today,” said Glynna Goff, 22, of Anaheim. “This is like censorship of the NEA brought to the local level,” she said, in reference to attempts by some conservatives in Congress to restrict the content of art supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

“And I can’t believe they find an interracial relationship to be so controversial--they had one on ‘The Jeffersons’ years ago,” she said, referring to the CBS-TV sitcom of the 1970s.

Diamond, the board president, said she sympathized with the feelings of the actors, but “we have to be concerned with the overall welfare of the theater.

“They’re all very young and their opinions are admirable--but they don’t pay the bills,” said Diamond, 53. The troupe leases the 144-seat Depot Playhouse from the city of La Habra and presents a six-play season at an annual budget of $30,000. The company supports itself through ticket sales and benefits, officials said.

Interestingly, Gam-Hudson’s effort to cast a black Romeo within a conventional Elizabethan staging of “Romeo and Juliet” was far less adventuresome than her initial idea to set the story in present-day South Africa.

However, Gam-Hudson, a four-year veteran of working with the theater board, concluded that its conservative members would never approve such a project. She received the director’s job after a board committee independently decided to schedule “Romeo and Juliet.”

The board decision to overturn her interracial casting, which she had intended as a statement against bigotry, left her “a little disappointed.”

Still, Gam-Hudson, who is white, said “I truly do not believe the decision was based on any sort of racism” and expressed hope that minority actors would turn out Monday night for the final set of auditions.

“I’m hoping for some Hispanic Romeos, for a black Juliet, for an Oriental Friar Laurence,” she said.