Classics for the Classes : Touring actors’ troupe brings dusty literary images vividly to life during workshops and performances at L.A. schools.

When a sixth-grader sees a teen-age couple getting married and says, “Why do they do that when they’re so young?” it ap pears that harsh reality may be dawning on young lives.

But the teen-agers are not the sixth-grader’s older contemporaries. They’re Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare’s tragic romance, and the student is in a workshop brought to his school by L.A. Troupe. Under an Equity contract, the group tours Southland schools with 45-minute adaptations of classic literature dovetailing with the students’ curriculum.

Next Friday, the group will be at San Fernando High School, performing “Macbeth” and “Edgar Allan Poe,” featuring works by the American writer. Burbank’s John Muir Middle School will host the company’s original piece, “Cultural Mythology” on June 17.

Recalling the sixth-grader’s comment, troupe co-founder Cherie Brown says, “That’s their reaction to these two kids when they find out how old they are. I really think it’s starting to get across, overall. Kids look at this and say they shouldn’t have gotten married. They should have waited. That’s the reaction we get.”

Brown and her partner, Koni McCurdy, have long been dedicated to bridging the gap between students and the classics, and to doing it theatrically, bringing the dusty images from the page into full-blooded reality before the students’ eyes.

Describing the workshops, which sometimes precede the performance and sometimes are held separately, Brown says, “We try to connect the issues, themes and messages that are in the shows to the workshop. We talk about the universality of the themes connected to the play but also connected to their own lives, so that it becomes one big story, one big idea that they can take away with them, based on the classical ideas that come out, for example, in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ”

McCurdy remembers going to one school for a “Romeo and Juliet” workshop, where they found the African American students sitting on one side of the room, and the Latino students on the other. By the end of the workshop, McCurdy recalls, they were all on stage together.

“They were working together,” she says. “The teachers couldn’t believe it. It’s because all of a sudden you’re giving them a focus. You say to them, in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ did it make any sense that these two families were fighting? They kept killing each other. Why did they do it? The students make the connection. They know what they’re doing.”

Brown adds, “In the end of the play we have this moment, ‘Come Capulets, come Montagues,’ whatever the lines are. And I said, ‘Let’s take the moment that they hold hands, and come together before we move on.’ The students visualize that. We try to hit the visceral as well as the language. Maybe on an intellectual level they’re not going to get everything, but it’s going to hit them somewhere.”

Brown and McCurdy’s techniques have evolved through long experience as professional actresses and teachers. Brown teaches part-time in the theater department at Cal State Fullerton and at L.A. Valley College. McCurdy teaches part-time in the Fullerton School District, bringing theater, music and dance to the schools in a program called “All the Arts for All the Kids.”

The classically trained performers met during the ‘80s, when they were appearing at West Hollywood’s Globe Playhouse in “Macbeth.” Brown was Lady M.

They were both interested in taking theater into the schools. McCurdy already had begun a program called “Traveling Burn Safety Show” for the California Burn Foundation (an educational program that continues to this day). When Brown started performing in the burn show, L.A. Troupe was born.

Their first show, in 1988, was a 45-minute version of “Cyrano de Bergerac” (McCurdy was playing Cyrano’s love, Roxane, at the time at the Globe) at a high school in Orange County. The duo went to educational conferences and conventions, making themselves known. They found their mentor in Sheila Smith of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Gifted and Talented Program, and the troupe was on the road.

McCurdy says: “They need programs coming into the schools that are very much educationally oriented. But they don’t play down to the kids. And for us, the most important thing is that we don’t change the language at all. What the kids see is the original, the original Shakespeare, the original Moliere. And that’s what Sheila Smith saw. We work very closely with the LAUSD.”

The work has peripheral rewards when a breakthrough occurs. Just before the January earthquake they had an elementary school workshop on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in which they told the story of the play. The quake delayed the rest of the workshop for about six weeks. Reviewing the story, McCurdy asked the students for the names of the four young lovers in the story.

“This one kid raises his hand,” McCurdy says, “and he knew the names. And they’re not easy--Hermia, Lysander, Demetrios, Helena. This teacher comes up to us and says, ‘That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. This kid is a crack child, and really slow.’ ”

That kind of result inspires Brown, McCurdy and their actors. And the kind of response they recently elicited at Taft High School in Woodland Hills in the question-and-answer period following their production of “Julius Caesar.” Several sophomores commented on how real the words had become, hearing live actors speak them. At the moment of Caesar’s murder in the Forum, there was an audible gasp from the audience.

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Janina Carranza, who had not read the play, said, “What I liked best was that it was all very true, very real. It made the story very clear, like when he was refusing the crown. And it wasn’t boring. It’s very dramatic. I’m looking forward to reading it now that I’ve seen it. It’s a good introduction.”

Stuart Stone, who said he was “bored” reading the play in his drama class, agreed. “I thought it was well-acted, especially the death scenes. It kept me up. It was exciting the way it kept moving. There weren’t any slow parts. Now when I read it in class, I’ll enjoy it more.”

Judy Hein, who coordinates special programs at Taft and arranged to bring the show there, is one of the troupe’s biggest fans. “We have students who have never seen a play, any kind of a stage production. This might be their first exposure to it. That’s valuable, and bringing to life a piece of literature that they’re studying is a wonderful way for a student to kind of be gripped by the story itself.

“It makes it far more interesting to the kids. It lends a feeling of reality to the words. It will be a far more vital piece of literature now. Shakespeare for this age student isn’t very alive. This takes them past that. They suddenly have real people, and the words on the page are more meaningful.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: L.A. Troupe, which performs classical theater in the schools.

Call: (818) 563-3092.