Face to Face With Views of Prejudice

South Coast Repertory’s latest children’s play dramatizes three options for dealing with intolerance, whether it’s triggered by race, religion or by something as superficial as a hairstyle: Hate yourself; hate everybody else, or learn to get along.

“The danger,” suggests Richard Hellesen, who wrote “Face2Face,” “is that kids will pick up on either of the first two. But we trust kids more than that. They’re much more sensible than we give them credit for.”

In fact, the young students who clapped and whistled after watching the musical at Santa Ana College this week seemed to grasp the message of acceptance.

“You have to respect people,” said Erika Guerrero, one of 350 fourth- and fifth-graders from three Santa Ana elementary schools at the launch of SCR’s 1998 Educational Touring Production.

The outreach program, created in the late ‘60s, exposes youths in kindergarten through sixth grade to theater via plays that strive to help them understand or deal with social issues. Past productions have explored conflict resolution, generational gaps and immigration. “Face2Face” is expected to reach about 60,000 children in 100 Southern California schools during a tour that runs through May.

Classroom discussions about such topics as discrimination are one thing, “but with theater,” said SCR’s producing-artistic director David Emmes, “you get caught up in the emotional life of the characters as they face obstacles, which helps the children personalize the subject and gives the experience more of an impact.”

Combat-booted Bully (Eric Newton) of “Face2Face” had the greatest impact on those gathered recently to see the upbeat production, with costumes by Dwight Richard Odle and music and lyrics by Michael Silversher. The kids giggled as Newton contorted his face with rage and urged Benno (Elias B. Gallegos), who had been dumped by his peers for looking “different,” to seek “revenge to the max.”

“Different,” in this case, seemed to mean racially different. Gallegos, whose character reacts to the rejection by flogging himself with a stick, is the play’s only nonwhite person. But Hellesen, a former SCR script reader who now does that job for the B Street Theatre in Sacramento, said he tried to let the audience form its own ideas about why Benno is so objectionable (“I don’t have to know him; all I have to do is look at him,” says one character).

“I’d rather let the kids fill it in themselves,” Hellesen said in a phone interview from his Sacramento home. “If that’s what they see, fine, but it won’t always be. Every kid at some level feels different. With me, it was my hair color. I was a little redheaded kid with a big nose and glasses.”

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Because racial intolerance continues to plague society, Hellesen said, SCR decided to revive “Face2Face,” which first toured area schools in 1991. The Costa Mesa theater company selects each year’s Educational Touring Production after meeting with educators and others on its community advisory board. “This [intolerance] was the topic that came up,” Emmes said.

“Hopefully, as Orange and L.A. counties become more diverse,” he said, “we’ll realize that diversity can be a great strength. Perhaps ‘Face2Face’ will be a small part of helping to bring that about.”

Wilson Elementary School teacher Marlynn Kreucher, who took her fourth-grade class to the play, said her students grapple with all kinds of prejudice. In some instances it may involve race; in others it may be that somebody “just doesn’t fit into the mold,” she said. Either way, she’s convinced that theater helps her students.

“We come at least once a year,” Kreucher said. “It gives [the students] new ways to express themselves.”