FAMILY : Serious Themes by ‘Young Playwrights’

Child’s play? No way.

A psychologist mourning the loss of a patient, a teen-ager struggling with his emerging homosexuality, sexually abused sisters: These serious themes can be found in “Young Playwrights L.A.,” theatrical works by playwrights ages 14 to 18, which opened Wednesday at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in West Los Angeles.

Presented by theater professionals, the event features “December Pairs,” a fully staged play by 17-year-old Jim Knable of Sacramento about an introverted young man who practices for marriage with an imaginary wife.

Knable’s play, previously produced at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, was a winner of this year’s California Young Playwrights Contest, part of the national, nonprofit Playwrights Project.

Also on the bill are rehearsed readings of nine plays, including “The First Note,” a drama by 14-year-old Sepulveda Junior High student Lissa Levy, exploring a confused teen-ager’s efforts to suppress his homosexuality after an encounter with an older gay man.

“I don’t really know how it all got started in my head,” Levy said. “It just seemed like a logical progression for a teen-age boy to go through this type of confusion because he’s worried about being normal sexually. The outside pressures, his own fears, his own envisionment of the world in a way, cripple him.”

Writing the play has “opened my eyes to a whole new world,” she said. “I watch people much more carefully now--their body language, what they say, their choice in words . . . . I was a people-watcher before this, now I feel I’m a people analyzer.” Levy is currently at work on a play she might enter in the Project’s statewide contest next year.

Levy’s work and the other readings on the program came out of the Project’s Dream Lab, headed by writer-director-actor Doug Kaback, the Music Center Education Division artist-in-residence who coordinates the Project’s Los Angeles events. Dream Lab participants were chosen from area public schools and developed their plays during Saturday sessions at the Music Center.

“The idea was first to create a safe place, a laboratory feeling where we could experiment and fail,” Kaback said. “A place where we could take writing, just a piece, a scene or a monologue and put it on its feet . . . .”

It didn’t surprise him that the budding playwrights chose to explore some pretty serious issues. “Some plays we’re producing are very lighthearted and fantastical, but the majority were based on serious issues.”

Working with young people is “enormously affirming,” he added. “A good part of what I do as an artist is to . . . let them find their voice and express the hilarity and the difficulty of their existence.”

Past participants in the Young Playwrights Project include Fulbright winner Karen Hartman and stage, TV and film writer Josefina Lopez, whose comedy “Real Women Have Curves” just finished a run at the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

* “Young Playwrights L.A.,” Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A., today-Friday, 10:30 a.m. and 8 p.m.; Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m., $10.; (310) 477-2055.