PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES / LINDA BLANDFORD : A Midsummer School Day’s Dream

There are no seasons at overcrowded, inner-city schools. Classes go out, classes come in. Children graduate on Friday, move grades on Monday. Hobart Elementary is never empty; no building rests. It is a fact not lost on the elderly curmudgeons nearby who phone to complain about the noise: laughter, fighting, mischief, games of catch and now, on top of everything--Shakespeare.

Every night for a week, in Room 52, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” not a line cut, not a magical escapade missing. Every night before “curtain,” the fifth- and sixth-graders scrape the tables outside and line up within borrowed bleachers, strobes and footlights, beneath hallowed pictures of the playwright.

Programs have been printed, small, neat tickets issued, the props collected: two trees and four plastic crates. At 7, the lights dim and Mendelssohn’s music dances over the darkened classroom. The music of a German Jew reared in a stuffed and overpowering bourgeoisie; the words of an Englishman hundreds of years dead, the place a court in Athens, a fairy kingdom in a thick forest, realized by children who see but a few scrawny palms, a scratching of grass, dust and litter blowing across unfriendly streets.

Not a line forgotten, not a passage flubbed. Impressions: of Khai as Puck, tiny, impish, yet commanding the stage--and of the great fortune that he is here at all, born in a refugee camp of Vietnamese survivors. Chan as Demetrius, suddenly full of passionate intensity, a boy of grace, but shy and fearful. Who knows what he has seen, what he remembers of Vietnam, of escape and death around him?

The beauty of Jung’s fiery Titania, the nobility of Pablo’s Theseus. Ji-Kwan carrying his signs (“Quince’s house,” “A wood near Athens”) with the solemn pomp of a man announcing Louis XIV. Children from lands of war, from a land of tigers--and in this bare room, the delight of Oberon, of Bottom entering as an ass.

Somewhere in Los Angeles this evening, children are home from summer day camp, golden children fresh from Kodak moments. Watch the children here: pale, drawn, too thin, too pudgy. But what courage is in this room: parents who come straight from work at 10, here to walk their children home, to wait outside the classroom door, timidly, to be noticed. As they long for them to do well, do they also fear losing them?

Watch the children of 11 and 12 who have learned to take care of parents with little English--to translate forms and cope with the system, and to do all this with the respect due to honored parents. They walk through cobwebs in this world. Poverty is darkness: to live in streets that are barely lit, in houses with dim bulbs, in furnished rooms stained by those who have passed through before. This classroom is the way out; hope is the light.

Fathers with rough hands, worn shoes. Mothers faded by struggle. And sons and daughters who stand before them reciting hundreds of lines of complicated Elizabethan English with understanding, with relish. Watch the shy, overwhelming love outside the classroom door afterwards--the heavy, hard hand landing, oh so proudly, on a son’s shoulder. The mother mute with joy, bowing to the teacher. Children of the gifted stream, a handful of the 2,000 or so who track through these tired classrooms--all here because someone noticed, someone cared.

Parents who sacrifice all, who work two and three jobs to get by. The fourth-grade teacher who saw behind Pablo’s dark silence and drew him out. Jim Messrah, the principal, raised in a storefront, who peers over the heads fidgeting from side to side, eager not to miss one gesture, one piece of business.

Their teacher, who turned away from God when he was 9 and his father died. One of these students will come back to visit one day--from Harvard or from Stanford. And the teacher who does not believe in God will have witnessed a miracle.