Student’s Bus Ride Home Inspires Play on Racial Tension : Drama: La-Keisha Howlett has turned her experiences into ‘Black Talk.’ The skits plead for racial tolerance.

To get a view of racial tension, take the No. 482 bus to downtown Los Angeles. Then Line 55 south to 12th and Main streets. There, catch the No. 56 to the corner of Wilmington Avenue and 103rd Street in Watts.

So goes La-Keisha Howlett’s 90-minute RTD commute home from the Los Angeles High School for the Arts. She sees a panorama of violence, meanness and racism: precisely the inspiration the 18-year-old needed for “Black Talk,” a show that the high school senior acted in, helped write and co-directed.

With a multiracial cast of 42, she sought to portray what it is like in black neighborhoods, for black youths. The play was staged for two performances last month to a mostly non-black audience of fellow students at the high school, located on the campus of Cal State Los Angeles, east of downtown.

The play was simple, with no backdrops or furnished sets. Some scenes were written by students. Others were from the works of black writers such as Alice Walker and Langston Hughes. The skits demonstrated a need for racial tolerance, largely by depicting hatred, anger and hope, and a world in which whites demean blacks, blacks demean blacks, and blacks demean other minorities.

Howlett recently spoke of the play, her experiences and herself on the bus ride home from the high school.

The idea of a play about racial tension, Howlett says, “was easy to relate to.”

About a year ago, Howlett got on the bus and started to sit beside a woman in her 50s. “I don’t want you sitting here, nigger,” the woman said. “Could you move to the back of the bus?”

“I just got up and moved to the front of the bus,” Howlett says. “I thought all that was over a long time ago.”

The bus passes through a depressed area along Long Beach Avenue near 55th Street. Howlett tells what she witnessed from the bus.

“I saw this black guy beating up this Mexican for no reason. I said, ‘Look! Look!’ and everybody looked at me like I was crazy.

“Maybe it’s their conscience telling them you shouldn’t care about certain things if they don’t concern you,” she says.

Howlett does not buy that logic anymore, not after what happened to a friend of hers. He died in the cross-fire of a fight over drugs some months back. Howlett, who was shopping in a Watts market at the time, had heard the nearby gunfire, and thought at first that it would not concern her.

She has seen gang members run on the bus, spray-paint around the cabin and dash out the back door. “I couldn’t believe somebody would actually do that,” she says.

She once saw a friend vandalizing the bus. “He was tearing up the seat, writing on it with a marker.

“I said: ‘Why are you doing that?’

“He said: ‘I don’t care.’ ”

That friend, who should be graduating from high school, is stuck in ninth grade, when he goes to school at all.

“Look, they wrote on the church,” she says, as the bus passes the graffiti-covered Full Gospel Assembly. “Can you believe it? They don’t even care about God.”

Her own church, the Friendly Temple, is around the corner from the modest three-bedroom house her parents rent. Her mother and father, married for 40 years, have 12 children. They are Mississippi natives. Her father cleans and sweeps for a caterer. The family keeps chickens and rabbits, raises vegetables and grows roses in the back yard.

The bus nears Howlett’s neighborhood now, and she hums a few bars from a gospel favorite, “With My Whole Heart.”

She says she is optimistic about her future as an actress, an ambition that began in grade school. Howlett auditioned successfully for the arts magnet high school before she began 10th grade.

A serious vision impairment compels her to wear thick glasses, but has never hindered her academic or dramatic progress, she says. She would risk further eye damage if she read regular books, so the school has purchased texts with enlarged print for her.

Three years at the arts school has improved her acting, she says. It also has pulled her away from the life she helped portray for schoolmates.

“I am the same old person,” she says. “But some people (in Watts) say, ‘You’re too good for us, so we don’t want to be around somebody who doesn’t want to be around us.’

“I don’t really handle it. I just turn my head the other way. That’s their opinion.”

Howlett has applied to colleges in Florida, Mississippi and Massachusetts. “I want to explore other parts of the world,” she says. “That’s what I want to do, go explore.”

One of her teachers came away from “Black Talk” with the theme that “we are all colors, just different colors,” Howlett recalls. “I don’t know exactly what she meant by that, but I found it very interesting.”