O.C. THEATER / RICK VANDERKNYFF : Taking On Teens’ Head-Heart Battles

Octavio Solis has no doubts about the depth of teen-age love.

So when the main characters in his new play “Scrappers” agonize over their imminent separation--she’s going away to college, he has to finish high school--Solis is not about to trivialize their dilemma.

“Never do I question that the love isn’t true, isn’t real,” Solis said. “They’re totally in the moment, in a way that only adolescents can be. Adolescent love is so blinding, so pure.”

Solis discussed “Scrappers” in an office at South Coast Repertory, which commissioned the short play and is now touring it at area high and junior high schools. For Solis, the author of “Man of the Flesh” and “La Illuminada” (developed during his four-year association with SCR), “Scrappers” represents the first crack at a “message” play.

In “Scrappers,” Roberto (Mikael Salazar) and Luisa (Laurie Woolery) meet in a Southland scrap yard on the night before she leaves for an East Coast university. She’s been a model student and he’s floundered and now he’s thinking about quitting high school to follow her.

Enter Mays (Ruben Gonzalez), Luisa’s skateboard-toting younger brother, who at once provides the play’s Greek chorus and comic relief, singing his views of the lovers’ conflicts in an Eddie Kendricks-style falsetto. Then there’s DDTee, a rapping “career adolescent” who is finally planning to graduate high school at age 21, and who wants Roberto to take his place as school “chump.”

Roberto’s stay-or-go decision is the play’s central dilemma, but “Scrappers” also touches on issues of sex, drug use and abusive parents. Rather than preach a simple slogan such as “stay in school, wear a condom, don’t get involved in gangs,” Solis wanted the play to present a more complex message: “It doesn’t say, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that.’ It says: ‘Think about the future . . . . Think about consequences.’ ”

Solis’ “adult” plays weave often complex themes and story lines. “La Illuminada,” given a staged reading at last year’s Hispanic Playwrights Project at SCR, incorporates chaos theory, alchemy and Catholicism; “Man of the Flesh,” produced on SCR’s Second Stage in 1990, was an updating of the Don Juan legend.

“Scrappers” is a departure. “It’s really tough to write a work that’s going to give a message in less than 25 minutes without being preachy,” Solis said. “I don’t write these kinds of proselytizing works. . . . This was a tremendous challenge to me.”

His approach was to let the lessons flow from the material without forcing a clear-cut moral, which would have been a sure turn-off for high-school students. “They feel they know the answers, they’ve got it all sussed out,” the playwright said. The point, he said, was “just to get them to think beyond today.”

Solis, 34, a Texas native who lives now in San Francisco, said many of his high-school friends automatically followed their parents’ path of marrying young and immediately starting families.

“My mother, she had me when she was 16 years of age,” Solis said. “All my friends from high school have teen-age daughters. They’re leading happy lives, I’m sure, but they didn’t allow for other opportunities.”

“Scrappers” is the latest production of SCR’s Fall Tour program, which started about five years ago when actors and others from the company began informally visiting local schools to talk to students. That developed into a touring program of short skits, and eventually local playwright Roy Conboy was commissioned to write a play.

“Happy Birthday, Angel,” a look at gang issues, was performed for 16,000 students that first fall, and was toured twice more in the two years following. Solis was then approached about writing a new play for the program (SCR also sponsors the Educational Touring Project, which tours elementary schools with different plays in the spring).

“One of the ideas we wanted to cover was kids thinking about the future,” said Jose Cruz Gonzalez, director of the Fall Tour program among other duties at SCR (he is head of the Hispanic Playwrights Project).

The production of “Scrappers” draws heavily on SCR regulars, including Gonzalez as director, music by Michael Silversher, costume and scenic design by Cliff Faulkner and choreography by Linda Kostalik.

It is, however, upon the actors, two of whom have appeared at SCR in Mainstage productions, that the play really rests. Traveling by van, they perform at two or three schools each day, often with multiple performances, playing before as many as 1,500 students in a single day. They must set up and break down their own sets, and lead discussions with students after the performances.

“It’s kind of like the Marines of theater. They land on the beach and make camp,” Gonzalez said. On the second day of the monthlong tour (which ends Nov. 20), the troupe of four played before a vocal audience of about 1,000 inside a gym, an experience the actors recalled as more than a little trying.

“For us, this is ‘whatever happens’ theater,” Salazar said.

For many of the students, this is a first-time experience with theater. After a performance last week on the fortresslike campus of Century High School in Santa Ana, the actors asked the audience how many had seen a play outside of school; about 20 of a crowd of nearly 300 raised their hands.

Watching the crowd respond to live theater has been educational, Gonzalez said. When two people kiss on TV, he said, kids don’t react because it doesn’t seem real: “You have two people kissing on stage, they go bananas.”

Solis said he has been asked several times about why he would write for this age group. “Young people deserve theater in their lives as part of their cultural development,” he answered.

The playwright taught high school for four years, an experience he drew from to write “Scrappers.” “I looked real young, so kids related to me a lot. I was real frank with them and open with them,” he said.

“I took all that in,” he said. And while things are tougher overall for kids today, some things remain fundamentally unchanged: “I don’t think it’s ever been easy. That’s what being a teen-ager is all about, making mistakes.”