A Boy, AIDS and a Lesson in Life

The “Dear Parent” letters minced no words in explaining that children from the third grade up were going to see a play about AIDS and that classes would be discussing AIDS--how you get it, how you don’t.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, said Dolores Chavez, program manager for the Mark Taper Forum’s PLAY (Performing for Los Angeles Youth). “We came into it with apprehension--’Let’s put it out there and see what happens.’ ” Now more than 10,000 children have seen it.

The play is “The Yellow Boat,” David P. Saar’s tragic yet inspiring story of the death in 1987 of his 8-year-old son, Benjamin, a hemophiliac who contracted HIV through blood factor transfusions.

Pretty heavy stuff for elementary school kids? Death is never easy to deal with but, as the play’s director, Peter Brosius, said, urban kids today “have been through all kinds of deaths,” from divorce of their parents to death of a pet to gang violence.

And while some of the youngest children have only the vaguest understanding of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, they know their teachers may no longer routinely tend their bloody noses. As one child playgoer put it, AIDS is “when your blood is no good.”

And many can tell you right off that AIDS killed rapper Eazy-E.

It was a rapt, wiggle-free, giggle-free audience of about 400 from nine elementary and middle schools at a performance of “The Yellow Boat” last week at the Natural History Museum’s Jean Delacour Auditorium.

“Once upon a time, there was a mom, a dad, a little teeny baby,” began Joshua Fardon, a 29-year-old actor who convincingly plays Benjamin from birth to death, stepping outside himself with the help of a cloth doll that all but breathes and talks.

“The Yellow Boat” takes its title from a bedtime story told to Benjamin by his parents. The boat (a claw-footed bathtub painted yellow) is, at first, a magic vessel on which he can sail to the sun. Later, it becomes his hospital bed and, finally, it takes him up and away on his final journey.

“A big issue,” said director Brosius, “is always what’s it like to have people turn against you, the fact that your best friend could betray you--and then come back.”

That’s what happened to Benjamin when no one came to his seventh birthday party. Even his best friend, Eddie, stayed away.

Later in the play, Benjamin gets a big laugh while putting across a big message about AIDS. A very nervous Eddie edges into Benjamin’s hospital room. Look, Benjamin says, “You can’t get it just from sitting next to me. It’s not like cooties.”

With an ear finely attuned to 8-year-olds, playwright Saar has Eddie ask the dying Benjamin, “Hey, Benjamin, can I have some of your Legos?’

“Sure,” Benjamin says, “but not the castle.”

The questions Benjamin asks his mother and father must have been asked by hundreds of terminally ill children. “Will it hurt?” “Will you put me in a box?”

From the time he was a toddler, Benjamin (who grew up in Arizona), loved to draw. In the play, he describes his feelings in terms of colors. His pain is like “pins of acid dripping green and purple and red.”

During his illness, the real Benjamin painted scenes from life--his own body with dozens of those pins of pain stuck into it. The tubes that delivered the deadly blood. A doctor in green scrubs and a pair of horns. The art is displayed in the auditorium.

At play’s end, the cast mingled with the kids, encouraging questions. “Does AIDS feel bad?” one child asked. “Yes, it feels very bad,” Fardon said, “but Benjamin made himself feel better through his drawings.”

“How did it feel to die?” a little girl wondered. Fardon used the question to explain that, while the play was very sad, it was also about making the most of a short life.

Saar wrote 19 drafts of “The Yellow Boat,” Brosius said. At first, “He had a very moving play about a child who died. He wanted to do a very moving play about a child who lived.”

After seeing the play, one child wrote, “I give you a 10+10. . . . When one of the actresses started to cry, it almost made me cry, too, but I held on. The play was better than ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ ”

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“The Yellow Boat” has been seen by classes from about 100 L.A.-area schools. There will be a special family performance at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at the Natural History Museum to benefit Caring Strokes, Hemophilia Foundation of Southern California and Childrens Hospital. Admission is by donation of new art supplies. Reservations: 213-972-7589.

There Actually Was Life Before Chocolate

The lecturer had only to mention her topic to elicit a spontaneous burst of applause. Chocolate.

Janine Gasco, an anthropologist who teaches at UC Irvine and Occidental College, was sharing with her Southwest Museum audience “The Early History of Chocolate,” a confection for which she has “a personal passion.”

First, the statistics: As of 1990, per capita annual consumption of chocolate in the United States was 10 pounds annually “and going up as we speak.” Now, lest there be any question, Gasco observed, there is no satisfactory substitute for the real thing, dark, rich and caloric. She quoted a lecturer she’d once heard:

If you mix carob with sugar and vegetable oil, you get a reasonable facsimile of chocolate. “The same argument can be made for dirt.”

Although the cacao tree was first grown commercially in Mexico and Central America, chocolate made its way to Main Street, U.S.A., by a circuitous route: GIs in Europe in World War I acquired a taste for it.

Between World Wars I and II, Gasco noted, 30,000 different candy bars hit the market. Today, West Africa leads the world in cocoa bean production.

Long before M & Ms, chocolate drinks were prized by the Aztecs and played a role in a multitude of rituals and ceremonies, including human sacrifices.

But the Spanish conquerors were slow to take a fancy to chocolate. Jasco’s research turned up a 16th-Century document in which one Spaniard dismissed it as “more suitable for pigs than humans.”

But by the mid-17th Century, Europeans were becoming chocoholics, and soon it was a fashionable beverage in England and France. London’s first chocolate shop opened in 1657, and chocolate shops quickly became centers of political discussion and, later, evolved into clubs.

It was only a matter of centuries before there would be a Godiva on every pillow in every four-star hotel from Mexico to Malaysia.

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.