A Star Role in Helping Children : New but expanding Virginia Avenue Project teams up artists and disadvantaged youths

“I never thought I was any good with kids.”

When Leigh Curran says this, her friends and colleagues seated around her Venice living room nearly burst out laughing. It’s as if Florence Nightingale were to confess that she never thought she had much potential as a nurse.

But Curran is serious. Four years ago, as a New Yorker involved in theater and just a little curious to test her own capacities, she visited the 52nd Street Project founded by Willie Reale in 1981. Linking theater professionals with at-risk children and young teen-agers from New York’s Hell’s Kitchen district, Reale’s endeavor had been gaining a reputation for literally saving kids’ lives and opening new cultural doors. Curran dropped by to check it out and see if she fit in.

Now, Curran has moved to Southern California (a return, actually, since she grew up in Ojai) and brought some of 52nd Street with her. In less than a year, Curran has created the Virginia Avenue Project, the performer-writer-teacher’s L. A. adaptation of the work of Reale and company. Temporarily based at Santa Monica’s Virginia Avenue Park, the project, under the auspices of the Police Activities League of the Santa Monica Police Department, is on the move on several fronts.

It is readying the second evening of “Hot Air,” the project’s third program of “one-on-one” productions that pair a professional adult with a youth in a piece written by the adult. Like the first “Hot Air,” this edition will play at UCLA’s Little Theatre on Friday and Saturday.

The project has already attracted an unusually eclectic range of artists, from performer Dan Kwong (who appeared in “Strangers in Paradise” at Highways in April), to playwrights Richard Dresser and Leon Martell, who have written pieces for the upcoming “Hot Air.”

And, most crucially, Curran is attracting public and private support, raising more than $70,000 to date. “That is an incredible amount of money in just a few months,” said Marsue Cumming, a former 52nd Street Project director and another transplant to Los Angeles. Cumming, helping advise the Virginia Avenue Project, describes Curran’s progress as far outpacing the 52nd Street Project in a similar period of time.

“Actually, there’s no comparison,” Cumming added. “In New York, there’s always been tons of problems, either with money or people or bureaucracy.”

Although there are some similar, small-scale versions of the Virginia Avenue Project elsewhere--in Brooklyn and Buffalo, N.Y., and Roanoke, Va.--nothing has quite matched the speed of Curran’s effort, according to Cumming.

“The element that’s usually missing from these projects is the person,” Cumming said, “since it requires Leigh’s kind of total dedication and energy.”

Curran isn’t alone; although her operation is virtually bursting out of the tiny guest house office behind her home, she has recruited an experienced arts fund-raiser, Kendis Marcotte, as executive director. Both are awaiting the early 1993 opening of Santa Monica’s Police Activities League Youth Center on Olympic Boulevard, where project activities will be located.

“This was exactly what we were looking for,” said Patty Loggins, PAL’s recreation program coordinator and liaison to the Virginia Avenue Project. “When Leigh came to us earlier this year and told us of her plans to give kids a chance to write and perform and express themselves, we were ecstatic. Most of our activities for youth are sports-oriented, which is fine as far as it goes, but adding the arts opens up new doors for these kids.”

It may be doing more. Cumming flatly states that ongoing efforts to stoke the creative potential and self-esteem of youth from ghettos and barrios have saved lives: “I know in New York, there are some kids who would have been dead without the 52nd Street Project.”

And though Curran and Marcotte admit that the devastated Hell’s Kitchen area isn’t comparable to the working-class area of Santa Monica’s Pico Corridor, which PAL and their project serves, “that doesn’t matter, since the children come out of their own difficult situations--absent fathers, foster situations, single parents barely getting by,” Curran said.

Despite Virginia Avenue’s fund-raising success, Marcotte warily eyes conditions for sustaining funds, and finds that “support for educational arts programs is hardly permanent; the money comes and goes, there’s no continuity. And it’s continuity that these kids need.”

Above all, what that support brings is the kind of individual attention that Virginia Avenue’s youth may never receive in overcrowded public school classrooms. Enter the “one-on-ones,” which kicks into gear as the “Hot Air” performers spend two weekends rehearsing their mini-plays in the sylvan setting of the Thacher School in Ojai.

The sun’s heat is already starting to beat down Sunday morning on the oak-dotted campus, and pairs of adults and kids have staked out indoor and outdoor spots to begin running through their scripts.

In the shade of an outdoor amphitheater, Jody Price and Patricia Tennant, 7, read Madeline and Steve Sunshine’s piece about a writer-daughter and her mother. Like Richard Dresser’s “The Unmade Bed,” written for Curran and 10-year-old Adriana Torres, adult and child reverse roles and ages.

“It’s one way,” suggests Sharon Madden, whose “Creative Dramatics” class formed the pool of talent for “Hot Air,” “to allow kids to see themselves from the outside in, and play out fantasies of what it is to be an adult.”

As a way of extending this idea, Madden then leads Jody and Patricia in a “mirror” exercise, in which each mimics the actions of the other--sometimes adopting adult, sometimes childlike, behavior. This gentle, playful dialogue contrasts with the ego-bashing mano a mano between Leon Martell and Sergio Ayala, 12. Sergio is an action-adventure star, storming into Leon’s production office and demanding to know why the end of the movie includes a blatant on-screen ad for a cigarette brand.

In a satirical punch at Hollywood methods as well as a variation on the show’s theme of the “Hot Air” that often spews from grown-ups, Sergio’s star finds himself in a corner, wondering, “Do you get paid to lie, or do you just do this for fun?”

Fun is all actor Raphael Sbarge and Arezu Berzinji, 8, seem to be having in an adjacent classroom as they read breezily through Irene Mecchi’s fantasy of creativity and computers, “Make Me a Melody.” Soon, Raphael and Arezu feel confident enough with their scene that they walk down the hill toward the music rehearsal room (virtually all of “Hot Air’s” mini-plays include scored music) to test it out with Jody and Patricia as their audience.

While Arezu is doing cartwheels, Curran is hit with a minor crisis: Just done taping a song with Adriana for “The Unmade Bed,” she’s told by writer Lydia Hannibal that there is only one script copy of her scene with Deonja Trainor, 13.

“Oh, jeesh!” Curran exclaims, dashing off down a hallway.

Lydia, Deonja and Marcotte look on smiling, not seeming to mind, perhaps thinking that there are things a lot worse than putting a show together with friends.