Theater Review : Strong Acting Helps STOP-GAP Spread the Word

One of the abiding oddities of American culture is that for many kids, their first contact with theater isn’t in a real theater, where one is accustomed to suspending disbelief and surrendering to the powers of illusion, but in a classroom.

Often what they get there is therapy theater, actors doing interactive playlets with messages. Some theater people seem bothered that in therapy theater, the play is most definitely not the thing. Rather, it is a means to one of many ends: understanding AIDS, perhaps, or diversity education, or drug or rape prevention. It represents the extreme of an ideology, now dominant in U.S. arts funding circles, that art is meant to heal (and that artists who would rather disturb had best go elsewhere).

In any case, STOP-GAP, a troupe based in Santa Ana, has amassed 16 years of good indication that its kind of therapy theater does heal. Monday at South Coast Repertory, where 18 STOP-GAP actors served up a sampling of the scenes and playlets they will be bringing to Orange County and Los Angeles area schools in the coming year, the indication was right there on the stage.

Two boys named Tim, one 17, the other 16, and a 17-year-old girl named Louise, all of them in a drug recovery program, performed scenes from “Under Pressure,” about a young man driven to drugs through alienation from his callous father. From the scenes, it seemed as if the piece (by Robert Knapp, who writes most of STOP-GAP’s material) blames all the teen’s problems on the father, which may or may not be a good message. But the recovering kids themselves appeared and sounded confident and strong--a good, living message indeed.

At times, an observer could learn as much from the audience as from the action onstage.

Setting up scenes from the group’s newest play, “comPASSION,” STOP-GAP co-founder and director Don R. Laffoon asked for story ideas about AIDS from the audience. A number of young people said they felt the HIV-positive character should be a girl who had picked up the virus through sex.

*

That such a scenario is relatively unlikely might raise questions about the AIDS education being offered in local schools. (Laffoon was able to steer the plot around to involve the more likely cause of intravenous drug use with dirty needles).

Later during the same piece, a boy in the audience suggested that an AIDS victim in need of support and understanding might turn to his or her parents. His comment met with a chorus of guffaws.

*

One hopes that those who guffawed were still in the audience for the last scene of the evening, from “When No Means No,” a longtime staple of the STOP-GAP repertoire. The piece is about a woman named Susan forced to realize that she never has gotten over a rape she suffered as a teen-ager. Her mother’s advice about dating always (and incredibly) had emphasized kissing technique over security (another parental screw-up here). Finally in the play, mother and daughter come together in understanding.

Ah, so parents and families do matter, and maybe kids should talk to old Mom and Dad.

Interestingly, the scenes involving less pressing social issues featured the best, most energetic acting. Tracy Merrifield, Ron Santos and Patrick Vivanco were funny in “You Decide,” a story of peer pressure and dominance. An improv scene, “An I for an Eye for an Aye,” designed to teach the merits of assertiveness and compromise over aggression, got the most laughs, especially when Isabella Whitfield burst on as a rude customer in a toy store. The audience loved Whitfield--another reminder why actors, even in therapy theater, enjoy playing the bad guy.

* For information on STOP-GAP’s tour of Orange County schools and community groups, call (714) 979-7061.