With Eyes to the Future : ‘Ashes’ Stages Youth Reaction to L.A. Riots

“The eyes of a child are very clear,” says actress-director Robin Thorne. “Hopefully, these children, when they get older, will still have those clear eyes. It’s very easy to get clouded, very easy.”

Thorne is talking about the insights she has found in a collection of writings by young people from throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, based on their reactions to the recent Los Angeles riots. The pieces have been gathered together by Words Across Culture, and will be presented by professional actors and directors in a performance at Barnsdall Park’s Gallery Theatre on July 6. The program is called “Out of the Ashes.”

Thorne, a collaborator in the presentation, has been most impressed by the wisdom of the young authors.

Producer-organizer Lauren Schick formed Words Across Cultures to use theater as a tool for better communication between cultures. Schick is concerned with cross-cultural communication and the gradual influences one culture and language bring to bear on another.

“There are cultures in the United States whose voices speak in English, but it’s a different English, and it’s a different voice,” says Schick, who teaches English as a second language at Poly-Languages Institute in Pasadena. “Sometimes the rhythms will be different, and syntax will change according to the influence of another language.”

In the student writings that make up the current program, there are examples from many ethnic sources: African-American, Asian-American, Latino, and from one student who is Egyptian-American. Each of them, Schick explains, shows language changing and evolving along with ideas, and “there are times when it is what one might call a ‘youth dialect.’ One of the pieces is written as rap. It’s obviously a language that has its own grammar, its own internal integrity and cohesion.”

It’s important, Schick believes, to pay attention to these voices of the young, writing and talking about the riots. Of the 90 students represented in the material chosen for “Ashes,” some viewed the unrest from the windows of their homes, some from long distances that still didn’t seem safe.

Frank Young, a 17-year-old 11th-grader at Thomas Jefferson High School, says calmly and deliberately of the riots: “It was basically a waste of time and helped to accomplish nothing. . . . If anything good came out of this, it will be that people have begun to actualize that there is a real big problem.”

Gloria Ramirez, an 11th-grader from Manual Arts High, says she believes racism could be solved. “But everybody has to work together, or else nothing will work out. Young people will always carry this in their lives. They will always be scared this will happen again.”

In El Monte, a good distance from South-Central Los Angeles, 10-year-old Carol Chau, whose heritage is Vietnamese, watched the rioting on television, and admits its effect on her. “I was scared,” says the Parkview Elementary School sixth-grader. “I didn’t think it would go all the way to El Monte, but I still was scared.”

Schick was particularly impressed by the words of a 19-year-old Fairfax High student from El Salvador, Fredy Hernandez. “He discusses the fact,” Schick recalls, “that the smoke rising from the buildings reminded him of the smoke rising from the hills of El Salvador after the bombing. And that the lack of jobs here, and the hopelessness that people feel, feels like El Salvador. He doesn’t understand this country’s foreign policy, he says, because democracy has failed in Los Angeles.” Schick shakes her head sadly, and continues: “Those kinds of visions these students have are so important.”

Words Across Cultures’ artistic director Joseph Megel welcomed the group’s decision to collect the student writings, he says, because “we needed to hear voices that we weren’t getting in mainstream media. We found the students’ voices to be incredibly perceptive. They express with sophistication and understanding. They touch upon so many perspectives, and so many wise ones.”

“Out of the Ashes,” Gallery Theatre, Barnsdall Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. July 6 only, 8 p.m. Advance reservations, (213) 660-TKTS.