Youths to Present L.A. Riot Play for Clinton Inaugural Festivities

At 18, Thomas Jung has journeyed outside California only once--on an automobile trip to Oregon with a buddy. And he has met only a few people of note--a handshake with actor Dustin Hoffman and singer Paula Abdul.

But in less than two weeks, the Granada Hills resident, along with 15 other students and graduates from Van Nuys High School, will travel across the country to perform before, and possibly meet, President-elect Bill Clinton during his inaugural celebration.

“It probably won’t sink in until we’re on the plane heading for Washington, D.C.,” said Jung, who has never been on an airplane.

He and his fellow travelers, all thespians, have been invited on the expenses-paid trip to present an original skit about the Los Angeles riots that premiered before millions of television viewers last month. Patrick Davidson, a producer who worked on the telecast and who is organizing some of the inauguration festivities, was so impressed that he asked the ensemble to give an encore in Washington.

“We were discovered, so to speak,” said Van Nuys High drama instructor Robin Share, who wrote the seven-minute series of vignettes for last month’s telecast. Produced and broadcast nationwide by the Disney Channel, the telecast honored Share as one of the country’s top teachers.

Entitled “One Day in L.A.,” Share’s sketch will be staged at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of the Presidential Inaugural Celebration for Youth, an event that also features presentations by the Joffrey Ballet, pop group Boyz II Men and other recording artists. Organizers have scheduled the fete for Jan. 19, the day before Clinton is sworn in.

The day had been set aside for a reception for the future First Lady, but Hillary Rodham Clinton wanted an event for young people.

“One Day in L.A.” centers on the experiences of youths during the riots, including several of Share’s drama students who had just taken the stage for their opening performance of the musical “Guys and Dolls” when the violence erupted.

The cast was forced to stop the show as parents yanked their children from the audience. Some of the actors--with no time to remove their makeup--were ordered to catch buses waiting to take them home, a few of them in the heart of riot-ravaged neighborhoods.

Share listened to the stories of students as they trickled back to school.

“At the very beginning it sounded like theater--like there was a play in it,” she said.

In the skit--which the company rehearsed for the first time in weeks Thursday evening--the students experience a wide range of emotions, from fear to anger to defiance.

Jung, a recent graduate who now works as a photographer, is handed a gun by his fictional parents and told to guard the family store.

“I actually drew my inspiration from . . . a friend of the family’s--a man who is one of the nicest, quietest people I know,” he said. “He owns a small business within a swap meet in L.A., and during the course of the riots he had to use a gun to defend his business.”

The vignettes culminate in a song, “Morning Glow,” from the musical “Pippin.” Student Rowena Roberts, 16, launches into the piece after a night spent watching the fires outside her window.

“We sit looking at the sky. It’s so red and it seems to be getting brighter” from the flames, said Rowena, a junior from Lake View Terrace. “But my mother turns to me and says, ‘I don’t think that’s fire--it’s the morning.’ ”