Willie and the Home Boyz

It was a night of unsettling contrasts.

At the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, a sedate, largely middle-aged crowd sat under the stars and watched a Shakespearean comedy without the slightest hint of hostility.

Not a shot was fired and no army of policemen was required to empty the place, even when the character Costard mixed up the love letters meant for Rosaline and Jaquenetta.

The most anger expressed was that the free pasta dinner served to the opening nighters was too sparse and the line for free wine too long.

Meanwhile, a couple of miles north on the Hollywood Freeway, a high-spirited, mostly young audience, partly composed of gangbangers, gathered to watch a movie called “Boyz N the Hood” and went berserk.

Shots were fired, people wounded and pandemonium unleashed.

Sheriff’s deputies moved on the Universal City Cineplex Odeon like sharks at a feeding frenzy, but, unlike sharks, they were there to restore order, not eat anyone.

The dichotomy was remarkable.

At one opening, a subdued, jazz-toned rendition of the Bard’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” at another, a demanding, compelling and sometimes violent rendition of a new bard’s “Boyz N the Hood.”

At one, white wine and ravioli, at another, a terrible hunger for vengeance and redemption.

Friday night was clear and starry. Cats prowl and witches dance on nights like this. Summer is in the soul of the city, twilight goes on forever and everybody wants to get out and move.

I was at the innovative, but somewhat languid, premiere performance of Shakespeare Festival/LA.

If there was any hint of trouble to those of us concentrating in varying degrees on the romantic farce, it was the persistence of sirens in the background.

We didn’t know it then, but these were the patrol cars racing to where the shooting was going on, followed quickly by explanations of how the violence wasn’t really anyone’s fault.

It wasn’t the fault of the movie, because the movie was about peace and family.

It wasn’t the fault of the cops, they were just there to try and keep people from getting killed.

It wasn’t the fault of the media, we’ve got to report what goes on and that’s what goes on.

And, God knows, it wasn’t the fault of the shooters, because they’re victims of social oppression.

Then who’s to blame, I hear you cry, for gunfire and violence every time a movie opens that attempts to depict a reality of life in a city that’s a microcosm of the whole damned world?

Shakespeare said, “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

A psychologist I know gave it a contemporary spin. The shooters, he said, were just beggars on the periphery of a white society sending up a few comets of their own.

“It was a question of wanting to be noticed,” he said. “Give ‘em credit. They were.”

I saw “Boyz N the Hood” the night following the Shakespearean comedy.

It was a coming of age movie, in its way, but not at all like the tepid banalities we’ve been subjected to over the past few years. There’s nothing sweet sixteen-ish about “Boyz.”

John Singleton’s movie takes place on a different level of reality.

Those of us who go to Shakespearean festivals and sip white wine can’t visualize what it’s like growing up in South-Central L.A. any more than we can visualize growing up on Mars.

Children find bodies rotting in alleys, helicopters sweep the skies all night and the territorial imperative is cause enough to fire the sky with murder.

What must it be like for a kid growing up in an environment where staying alive dominates the day, where dreams die whimpering in the hearts of children and shadows hide monsters no fiction could ever create?

Singleton tries to tell us about it by holding a mirror up to his own past and, simultaneously, a mirror to a portion of the city in which we live.

That life imitated art in some instances with the presence of violent homeboys at movie theaters everywhere is an irony we can do without.

But at least it projected into the crowd the kind of social travail that Singleton was attempting to depict on the screen.

If we ever stop shooting each other, we might be able to figure out just what it is a 23-year-old movie maker is trying to tell us. And we might discover that the blame for mayhem at movies houses rests on no one person. To paraphrase Pogo, we have met the enemy and it is everybody.