Getting a Lesson From ‘Guitars’

What the student wanted to know was: “What did the rooster have to do with it?”

The questioner was one of about 1,000 Los Angeles-area high school students who had just seen Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars” at the Ahmanson Theatre.

The play--executed in Wilson’s magical realism, where signs and portents are as valid as news reports--was performed four times this week as part of the Center Theatre Group’s Young Audiences Program.

After the performance Wednesday, the cast returned to the stage to field questions.

So what was the rooster’s role?

Its continual offstage crowing is an irritant to some of the characters, who wonder why anyone needs a rooster in 1948 Pittsburgh, when Woolworth’s has alarm clocks for $1.49. The bird is eventually butchered in a scene suggesting ritual sacrifice.

Tommy Hollis, who plays drummer Red Carter, one of seven characters (“guitars”) in the play, took a run at the question.

The rooster represents the black man after slavery, Hollis said. “He has outlived his worth.” The bird--God’s creation--has become worthless because of cheap, man-made alarm clocks, just as black men were displaced by mechanized farming.

The sacrificed, crowing cock, in Hollis’ view, raises questions about value, worth and the price placed on your head.

And the bird is more. Students could have seen it as a metaphor whose fate parallels that of Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton, the hard-living, hard-loving, risk-taking central character in “Seven Guitars.”

The bird is a magnificently plumed cock of the walk, the proud-strutting stud who desperately announces his manhood to an indifferent world whether it wants to hear him or not. He dares to separate himself from the sameness of the flock--to become like the shining biblical city set upon a hill. And by so doing, becomes a target.

Floyd, portrayed by Keith David, is a blues singer/guitarist whose music gives the lie to a world that would push him into its margins. His flamboyance is every bit as colorful and desperate as the rooster’s--with equally tragic results.

The Los Angeles run of “Guitars” has received mixed reviews, with even sympathetic critics suggesting that at 3 1/2 hours, it is as much a test of endurance as it is a theater experience.

But Wednesday’s student audience had no such problems. As part of the Young Audiences Program--a project bringing students to the Mark Taper Forum or the Ahmanson to see plays tied to classroom projects--the youngsters’ introduction to the theater began half an hour before the performance.

During the introduction, technical staffers at the Ahmanson lay bare the secrets behind some of their stage magic, with demonstrations of how directions are cued and how lights and sound can make a storm.

Actor/choreographer Debbie Allen greeted the students with comments aimed at preparing them for what she called “the deep tapestry that’s going to unfold in the next couple of hours.”

She explained the role of the set, costumes and props in establishing the time and place of the play. And the central role of the music.

“August Wilson’s work reeks with music,” she said. “It gets you in the mood. Those of you who know my work know I like music. . . .” A voice shouted from the audience: “You go, girl!”

Allen’s smiling response: “That’s right. And you go, too.”

The teenagers settled in for Wilson’s meditation on being and becoming--his exploration of dreams and desperation and the bedrock capacity to endure. Wilson’s stagecraft puts historical and cultural truths in the mouth of a delusional black nationalist who wields the sword of God with an awful vengeance and dreams of owning a plantation in Pittsburgh and fathering a messiah.

When this character announced that Jesus was a black man, giggles rippled through the audience. But the laughter evaporated as he continued to make his case, citing Scripture to support his argument.

The laughter returned when Floyd pointed out that he would get five years in prison for hitting a white man in the mouth, then added: “But Joe Louis does it in front of 100,000 people and gets $1 million.”

At intermission, a group of drama students from Canyon High School in Santa Clarita were looking forward to the second act.

Lamyia Good, 16, was transported by the acting. She said it made her forget she lives in the 1990s. “The people are really in character,” she said. But she was troubled by “all this stuff about guns,” men casually carrying pistols and showing them off.

Canyon sophomore Michelle Garcia, 15, was equally taken by the props. “The more they use them, the more you get interested in the play,” she said.

The first act offered a bit of history for Diana Russell, 15, who had never heard of heavyweight boxing legend Joe Louis. But she knew that he was a boxer by the intermission.

By the final curtain, when the deluded Hedley, played by Roger Robinson, lets incriminating dollar bills drop aimlessly from his hands, the students exploded in applause.

Students wanted to know whether the play will be changed before going to Broadway next month, how the actors prepared for their roles, whether they identified with their characters, how long rehearsals last, and whether the play changed the performers’ perspectives.

Michele Shay (Louise), clearly mindful of how violence plagues young lives, emphasized that “there are no consequences in theater. When Floyd gets killed, he gets up. That doesn’t happen in real life. Maybe if we reflect on that, we will become more loving.”

Leaving the theater, Montebello High School senior John Daciuk, 17, said he found “Guitars” enriching.

“I could see the symbolism of the 1940s--the rooster, the struggle for survival, to better yourself,” he said. “But at what cost?”