FAMILY : Historical Saga ‘Waltz’ Inspired by Prop. 187

The Actors’ Gang, the eclectic, risk-taking theater company headed by actor Tim Robbins, has opened its doors to Shadow Klan, a teen theater workshop program under the direction of Actors’ Gang veteran Brian Brophy. The teen-agers, along with members of Actors’ Gang and the Classical Theatre Lab, are presenting their original play, “Waltz de la Tierra,” next Tuesday for a five-day run.

A turn-of-the-century historical saga inspired by concerns over Proposition 187 and filled with family strife and romance, “Waltz de la Tierra” was written by high schoolers Rosibel Guzman and Nhu Quang, who wrote the group’s 1994 debut play, “Lonely Souls.”

“English is my favorite subject,” Guzman said. “I like writing stories and this was like a new way to write. It gave me more experience in how to view things, how to change things, how to work with a group and compromise.”

“It’s been a real collaborative process,” Brophy said. “The writers would bring the stuff in and we’d start to find the scene. We’d talk about the issues and I would teach them the Actors’ Gang style--presentational, high energy, high stakes, emotional and physical--as a dramatic structure to work within, so we shared a common language.”

The Shadow Klan teen-agers, mostly Latino and Asian American youths ages 13 to 18, based the play on the postwar economic, political and social factors that overwhelmed California’s Mexican American land owners in the mid-19th Century.

In the play, set against a backdrop of encroaching industry, a Midwest lawyer schemes to secure the vast Hermosillo family ranch for his investors. Hermosillo’s absent son returns home to find the land sold and his sister married to the lawyer’s son.

“Since we work around the area of the inner city,” Guzman, 17, said, “we got the idea to see what was there a long time ago. We did research at the library and found out how the old buildings looked and the history that went on.

“Back then the people from the East were coming here and taking the land away from the Mexican American families already here. We wrote the major conflicts going on around the period and went on to how they felt about the changes in the 1900s, as cattle and farms became businesses and trolleys.”

“The natural impulse,” Brophy said, “was to trace back 187 to see how the issues of land still grip us today.” The group explored “the launch of the rancho, the effect of the industrial age upon the rancho, the inability to change with the times, economic issues, natural disasters, fighting squatters, how the land is now owned by the city.”

“The questions in the play--is this a good thing, a bad thing, a steamroller of inevitability?--we’re not answering those questions, we’re . . . eating at the edges of them. They’re still questions we’re grappling with today.”

Shadow Klan “came out of a collaboration four years ago with some kids from Berendo Junior High,” Brophy said. He directed the students in a production of Luis Valdez’s “Buck Private,” put on by the nonprofit downtown Inner City Arts program.

In 1994, when Brophy received a grant from L.A.’s Cultural Affairs Department to develop a teen theater, he went back to the young people with whom he had worked.

When the grant ran out last fall, the program might have dissolved, “but with the fresh controversy of Proposition 187 uppermost in their minds,” Brophy said, “the teen-agers wanted to keep going. They said, ‘We want to do a Western.’ I was like, um, OK.”

Brophy has been asked about the group’s name more than once. “It came out of an identity thing,” he explained. “They didn’t want to be the ‘Actors’ Gang Teen Company.’ ” Brophy said he mentioned “possible negative connotations of the word klan “ to the group, but “that hadn’t crossed their minds.”

Brophy said that he and other professionals involved are contributing funds and services. “I just feel this needs to continue,” he said. “If they show up, I’ll show up. It informs my work as an artist as well--that raw vital energy, humor and commitment.”

Opening night will be a fund-raiser for the company.

* “Waltz de la Tierra,” Actors’ Gang Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Tuesday-May 20, 8 p.m.; $5-$8, except Tuesday fund-raiser and party, $25. (213) 466-1767.

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Myths and Legends: Creative teens are also involved in “Mythology,” original plays based on myths and legends exploring contemporary concerns. Written by playwrights ages 13 to 18, the free show will be presented this weekend at Immanuel Presbyterian Church.

The teen writers are members of HOLA Youth Theatre, part of Heart of Los Angeles Youth, a multicultural program serving at-risk youth in L.A.’s mid-city area through arts, education and sports. HOLA Youth Theatre, like Shadow Klan, the Santa Monica-based Virginia Avenue Project and other programs, brings young people and theater professionals together to create theater.

* “Mythology,” Immanuel Presbyterian Church, 3300 Wilshire Blvd., tonight and Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m.. Free. Reservations: (213) 389-1148.