SOUTH GATE : Updated Bard Finds Audience

The Bard is hip at Theater 6470.

In the company’s 40-minute “Riffs of Shakespeare,” Petruchio has a difficult time taming Kate, who punches him in the stomach and pulls at his ear as he pleads with her to marry him. Romeo lurks in the audience and speaks Spanish to Juliet when she calls for him. Gangs in “Henry V” drive lowriders and pack AK-47s.

“They are pretty funny,” said William Martinez, 17. “I thought this stuff was boring before, but now I’m interested.”

To capture the attention of today’s teen-agers, Theater 6470, a 5-year-old nonprofit corporation founded on Hollywood’s Theatre Row, has turned Shakespeare on its ear. This month, the seven-member company began a tour of 25 junior and senior high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District with a performance at Odyssey High School. The tour is funded by a $13,600 grant from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

Jill Holden, who founded Theater 6470 with fellow actor John Evans, said the parody draws themes from Shakespeare plays and sonnets that are familiar to younger audiences: love and passion, hate and war. “Shakespeare has so much to say about life today, we wanted to make it more accessible,” Holden said.

Students snickered as actors scrambled across the concrete gymnasium stage, throwing off a pink frock in favor of a green sash, a skullcap or a chiffon scarf. The group rapped love songs and flirted with one another to the tune of a synthesizer. Complicated sentence structures were traded for conjunctions and phony accents.

In one scene, Mercutio is slain by a Capulet armed with a plastic sword. He dies valiantly, loudly, with Romeo by his side. It’s important that death scenes are dramatic, said Valente Rodriguez, a company member who directs the audience in the art of dying obnoxiously.

During a workshop after the performance, actors asked students what they liked and didn’t like about the play. Students agreed Spanish verse was in, rap was out.

The company also solicited students’ suggestions about how to change the way it performs the marriage proposal scene from “The Taming of the Shrew.” Teen-agers advised Kate and Petruchio to speak Spanish to each other, act like slobbering monsters with their hands tied behind them, and have Petruchio be a 6-year-old while Kate was 12.

“Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing: They call me Katherine that do talk of me,” said Alicia Henriquez, 19, who acted out the proposal scene between Kate and Petruchio with a fellow student.

“It made sense when I got up there and did it; it was real,” Henriquez said.

The company was invited to Odyssey as part of an effort by administrators and teachers to expose students to the outside world. “We’re trying to bring community resources into the school to get the kids involved in the community and the community involved in the students,” said Bob Engel, special education chairman at Odyssey.

Teachers plan to introduce Shakespeare into their classrooms with the hope that this performance has given students a greater interest in Old World plays rather than modern-day mischief, Principal Lupe Paramo said.