On CSUN Stage, ‘Tracers’--the Next Generation : Vietnam: The play about soldiers’ experiences in an unpopular, controversial war is being performed in honor of its 10th anniversary.

Ten years ago, a small group of Vietnam veterans eager to cry out about their experiences in the war staged a play at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. They weren’t convinced, in any way, that people wanted to hear what they had to say.

But “Tracers” went on to become critically acclaimed in productions across the country. It won a Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Award, a Dramalogue Award, a Joseph Jefferson Award in Chicago and a Drama Desk Award.

“There is a great spiritual force behind this play,” said John DiFusco, who conceived the drama and wrote it with seven other veterans. Those same eight men acted in the original production.

Now, to celebrate the play’s 10th anniversary, DiFusco is staging “Tracers” at Cal State Northridge. In the past, he almost always cast veterans. Now, he is using college theater students.

“Some of these kids were born while I was in the war,” said DiFusco, who served in the central highlands of Vietnam from November, 1967, to November, 1968.

DiFusco’s risky experiment has succeeded. Times theater reviewer Ray Loynd called the play “a hand grenade of a show” and “one of the Open Festival’s major surprises: a pulsing, hallucinatory production.” Loynd praised the young cast for being “remarkably convincing grunts” who “mature on stage.”

“Tracers” begins with fresh-faced kids before the war. But as the drama progresses, we follow these young men through war and watch as they try to recover in the aftermath. DiFusco had to lend his young charges a deep sense of what the war was like and how it affected soldiers who fought.

Preparation for the production took the whole summer, DiFusco said. “We had long rap sessions. I talked at length about Vietnam. I had vets from the vet center come in and talk to them.”

But, DiFusco said, the most useful motivations came from within. He had the actors talk about themselves in a confessional setting similar to the rap sessions between veterans that gave birth to the play a decade ago.

“There are some kids, growing up in the ‘80s, who have probably seen more people shot than some Vietnam veterans,” DiFusco said.

Some of the actors had second-hand experience with the war, as well. One has an uncle who hasn’t yet recovered from psychological trauma of war. Another has a father who fought in Vietnam but refuses to talk about it.

“I got them to use that,” DiFusco said.

This production has been a particularly emotional one for the actor-writer-director. There’s a certain sentiment attached to the 10th anniversary. More important, two of the original cast members have recently died, one of AIDS and another from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease related to Agent Orange, the defoliant used in Vietnam, DiFusco said.

“I can’t help but see the two who just died in the spirit of these young kids,” he said.

“Tracers”--starring DiFusco, Scott Conte, Steven Faughn, Wayne Haas, Alberto Ibarra, Carlton Pleasant, Michael Scheer and Dean Young--continues through Sunday at the Campus Theatre of Cal State Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff St. Performances are at 8 tonight and Saturday, and 5 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $7.50, $5 on Sunday only for seniors, faculty and staff, and $3.50 for students.