A Shocking Lyricism

A playwright named Susan Rubin strides into Canoga Park High School, steeling herself for what lies ahead.

She has a track record to maintain.

No excuse-spouting, class-ditching teenagers, no matter how desperate their circumstances, are going to keep her from reaching her goal: In 12 weeks, each of the three dozen 10th-graders she’s about to confront will turn in a full-length play.

OK, so 60% get flunking grades, 90% have never seen a live theatrical production, and some will ditch half the time. She--no, not she, they--can do it.

Today, her first on campus this semester, Rubin compulsively greets students she recognizes at Canoga High. Her eyes magnified by thick glasses, her 5-foot-3 frame revved up on neurotic New York energy, Rubin prepares herself for studied nonchalance from tough, working-class kids, many of whom who view high school as the good times before they start the same type of uninspiring, low-paying jobs their parents toil at each day.

She knows she must listen to them, encourage them and believe in them, no matter how sullen and disrespectful they may be. As she takes over their English class a couple times a week, she must coax from them stories they unknowingly hold deep inside. She will hear from Sean, a small boy with a neurological disorder, taunted for being different; Katy, a tall, long-haired swimmer who writes to remember her dead mother; Eric, who sits with hunched shoulders in a black T-shirt thinking about how he wishes he was dead; Josh, a spiky-haired comedian whose humor forges a link to the father who abandoned him; and Anthony, a lanky, baby-faced boy who has failed before and just might fail again. If every student completes a play, she tells herself, she has succeeded. If even a single one falls short, she has failed.

Rubin, who makes her living as artistic director of the downtown L.A. Indecent Exposure Theater Company, has taught playwriting in Los Angeles Unified schools for five years, and she is proud of her record.

“I’ve had one kid in all the time I’ve been teaching who didn’t turn in a play,” she says on this first day at Canoga. “He had committed murder the day before.”

*

Feb. 22

The bell rings at 1:13 p.m., and the fidgety students fall into their seats for the first class after lunch. Hormones and high-voltage adolescent energy ricochet around the room.

“This is Susan Rubin, an accomplished playwright, and she is going to help you write plays,” the English teacher, Beth Kelley, says over the din.

The kids look at Kelley as if she is speaking Urdu.

Rubin strides to the front of the room as if she were the star of a wacky, one-woman stage show, all hands, elbows and facial contortions.

“I’m here to get you to write a play,” she announces. “Why would I come here to teach you to write plays?”

“So you can produce it?” asks one student, barely interested.

“So you can make money from our imaginations?” asks another.

Despite their cynicism, the frizzy-haired woman who dresses in black, loose-fitting clothing commands their attention. She leans forward with the bribe: “Let’s make a deal. I’m going to do my side. If you do all the work, you will get an A.”

She hands them a photocopied list of their “toolbox” containing the ingredients they will need to write a play: a theme, characters, a conflict.

“I’m interested in what makes you sad, what makes you happy, who you love, what makes you mad,” Rubin tells them. “How many of you get along with your family and siblings, just like in ‘Leave It to Beaver’?”

A boy raises his hand.

“Write that for me,” she says. “That will be hilarious.”

She asks them if they have ever encountered injustice. Some nod. Boys gaze into space. Girls apply lipstick, peering into tiny pocket mirrors. Rubin is losing them. But she keeps up the animated patter, addressing those who respond.

“Was it police? Your family? Friends? What was it?” she asks a boy curled up cross-legged and fetal-like in his desk chair.

“It was the way I was born,” says Sean, who has cerebral palsy.

“I want to hear that story,” she says, looking into his eyes. “That is an interesting story. I would bend myself into a pretzel if I could hear that story.”

They giggle.

She tells the students that all their plays will be published in a bound volume and read by professionals--people they see on television and in the movies. No, not Bruce Willis or Pamela Anderson.

Here are the rules: no curse words; about 10 minutes in length; and stay away from schlocky TV writing.

“I’m looking for stories that are inside your heart,” she says.

“Can you just grab a movie and, like, redo it?” asks Anthony, who flunked 10th-grade English last year and is experiencing Rubin for the second time.

“No,” she says, “because I want to hear your stories. If I wanted to hear from Madonna, I would get her on the phone.”

They stop, genuinely impressed for the first time. She lets them believe it. She tells them to come to the next class with a theme. The bell rings and they scramble for the door, almost knocking her over.

*

Feb. 28

They bare their souls on crumpled pieces of paper that Rubin has to pry from their fingers. Whatever they present--trite or profound, indecipherable or legible, grammatically mangled or perfectly composed--she showers with encouragement.

“How many people have a theme?” Rubin asks.

Nine hands go up.

“This is a sacred art form,” she says. “Who will volunteer to let me read theirs out loud?”

A boy in the first row--the one who responded to her “Leave It to Beaver” question the other day--halfheartedly raises his hand. She reads it to the class:

I am going to write about how my family life is. My oldest sister that never likes to talk to me. Sometimes she tells people that she was adopted but she was not. She pits my little sister against me and she tells her bad things so she won’t talk to me. My mom I think she only cares about me when I get bad grades for example. . . My Dad he’s like only home on Tuesdays but the rest of the week he’s not home about 6 or 7 because he works a lot for nothing much at all.

Pause.

“He took a risk,” Rubin tells the class. “So he deserves a lot of respect. That was a beautiful, beautiful experience.”

The boy looks down.

“I’m talking to you. Did you hear?” Rubin says.

Then she turns her attention to the rest of the class.

“People in the front row, any volunteers?”

Kids scramble to put their papers away.

“Give it to me,” Rubin says, lunging for a scrap of paper one student holds. “If I feel it’s not all right, I won’t read it. . . .”

She convinces a girl to open her notebook. Rubin reads: The theme is about my uncle shooting himself in the back in the bathroom and why . . .

Anthony, the smart-aleck with a big, toothy smile who knows Rubin’s shtick, says he has a story about a mobster.

“I don’t want to read about a mobster,” Rubin says.

“But this is different,” he protests.

“You are too smart to write about mobsters,” she says. “Write about anyone in the world who doesn’t carry a gun or a firearm.”

She encourages them relentlessly, no matter how banal the theme.

“If that didn’t touch you, you are dead,” she says of a story about teenage love.

Slowly, she is wearing them down.

*

As a playwright, Rubin, who masks her age by telling you she’s “a baby boomer around 50,” has received mixed reviews for her work as a writer, producer and performer. Her real honor lies in being one of the few hundred souls who eke a living out of theater work in Los Angeles. She has worked in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where her original musical, “club termina,” played an extended run. She produced and performed “Harry Thaw Hates Everybody” and is working on her next piece, “The Tragedy of Persephone,” set to open here this fall. Her play “Immortality” was presented by the Los Angeles Theatre Center downtown in June.

Rubin was one of the first two teachers chosen by the nonprofit Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theater Projects when it started Playwrights in the Schools in 1995 at three Los Angeles high schools.

Teaching takes her back to the poignancy of being 15, when she yearned for someone to take her seriously and, instead, was given the dismissive nickname of “Bubbles” by her math teacher. She was, she’ll tell you, one of the smartest kids in her private girls’ school in Manhattan, and yet she remembers being encouraged to marry instead of attend college. She longed for someone to see her potential, to call her a writer. Now the words she treasures most from her students are: I am a writer. Susan made me think I am a writer. She earns several thousand dollars for each semester she teaches. Although the extra cash helps support her career, she is surprised each time by the depth of her emotional involvement.

She believes she gets under students’ skin because she is packaged like their mothers: dark hair, earrings, middle-age. There are few blonds in her classes at Canoga Park High. But instead of reining them in, like Mama might, she draws them out. She sees herself as a sort of doctor, healing by teaching them to write.

There were times she’s wanted to quit, or to slap some kids, or to lash out and tell them they were going to end up flipping burgers and they were squandering a wonderful opportunity. But she is tougher now.

“I’ve gotten more blase about kids who fold their arms and glare at me,” she says. “I can’t take it personally.”

*

March 9

In the fourth week of class, students bring in the beginnings of plays. As the kids bounce in from lunch, Rubin is silent, head bowed intently over Sean’s work.

They wait for her to entertain as usual, but she is engrossed.

“It’s so quiet,” one kid finally says in an effort to get her attention.

Rubin reads Sean’s scene description:

The curtain rises in a tavern. A group of elves lounge at one table. A group of dwarfs sit at another. Others sit at another table. At the bar sits the bartender. The door swings open and Bigears walks in. This is the story of Bigears, a funny-looking elf, who is ridiculed by his peers, but eventually earns their respect as well as the affections of Helga Stoompstish.

Elf No. 1: Hey, Shorty! Don’t trip on your ears.

Bigears: Hey, Stinky! Sit down so you don’t fall over.

Elf No. 2: Boss, he dissed you.

Elf No. 1: Those are big words for such a little elf.

Bigears: With the size of your brain, I am surprised you can think of that good of insults.

The class is impressed. This kid they never talk to can write. They also clearly understand Sean is using fantasy to tell his story. Four hands shoot up to volunteer.

Jeff wrote “How Could This Happen to Me,” about a boy in the hospital talking to his father, who has just suffered a heart attack. The boy and his father are alone. The father is silenced by the tube in his throat, and finally the frustrated teenage son has a chance to be heard.

He tells his sick father he dislikes the way he and his brother are treated, and he wishes he would die. He tells his father he wishes he had been born into a different, normal family, like his friends, with a nice father who did not hit or yell.

As she reads, Rubin infuses the words with drama. Jeff twists uncomfortably in his chair.

“That’s good,” whispers a girl who sits near him.

Two kids in the back pass notes.

Rubin fights to maintain focus. “It is written skillfully,” Rubin says. “He could have written, ‘Hey, Dad. You’re a big meany.’ ”

She asks for something funny, and Marvin, the class clown, volunteers. He sits in the back, always pulling someone’s hair or making lewd comments.

A beautiful morning on the ghetto streets. . . . Rubin begins.

It’s about three kids with different last names, talking about where they come from. But the dialogue quickly turns to turds, to the delight of the class, which titters uncontrollably.

There is one last play from Katy, a girl on the far side of the room. She carefully removes the sheets of paper from a binder and hands them to Rubin. The title is “Mother.”

The narrator says her life was going pretty well. At 13, she was about to graduate from eighth grade and she was spending the night at a friend’s house:

Little did I know the next morning, my life would change forever. . .

. . . I walked in the house and put my stuff down. My mom’s bedroom door was closed. I was going to go pee, but I decided to tell her I’m home. I opened the door and she was lying there with her arm hanging at the side of her bed. It was blue and red. She had foam coming out of her mouth. . .”

The work in progress stops when Katy calls 911. The class is stunned.

“How many people had goose bumps?” Rubin asks.

Katy slumps at her desk, her head resting on her arm.

“I am in awe,” Rubin tells them. “You are really smart kids.”

Katy still has her head down when the bell rings.

A girl in the front leans over and asks Katy the question everyone in the room wants to know: “Hey. Is that true? Was that your mom?”

Katy nods.

*

“I am so depressed, I am going to take the gas pipe,” Rubin says, growing teary. “I’m overwhelmed by what they are doing.”

She ignores the occasional disrespect. Instead, she reviews and savors the day’s victories.

“Jeff, he wasn’t going to write. I sat with him on my knees and he gave me this.”

“And the girl, she talked to Ms. Kelley about her theme and said she was writing this because she didn’t want to forget her mother.”

Katy’s mother did die, and she lives with relatives now.

Rubin shakes her head incredulously. “I can’t believe they are letting me read these scripts out loud.”

*

March 14

As Rubin hoped, a weird kind of public redemption is occurring.

Most plays are unfinished, and many students have not turned in anything at all. But today, real actors are coming to read excerpts from some of the plays. The actors, Paco and Jenna, are young, fun and professional. The kids yell out questions.

Jenna perches on a stool. Paco squats on a chair.

This is what happens in the real world, Rubin tells the students: If the actors read it and it sounds good, it is good. If not, it probably needs to be reworked.

The actors read Sean’s play about Bigears. Sean, a voracious reader, delights in wordplay; his dog’s name is Luke Skylicker. His work is titled “An Outcast’s Tale.”

In Scene II, two carnivorous dragons are mocking Icebreath, a vegetarian dragon, for eating broccoli. Icebreath retreats and delivers a soliloquy:

I can’t go on like this. Shutout because I won’t eat meat. Teased and tormented because I am different. This cannot go on. I am not going back.

Sean says later that he is teased for anything anyone can think of--his hair, his voice, his size, his choice of clothing.

“I wish I could find a place where everyone is accepted no matter who they were and there was no teasing whatsoever,” he says. “But I have never found that place. It probably doesn’t even exist.”

For a day, the outcast is embraced.

“That was cool,” says one student.

“Nice play, dude,” says another.

Eric, a pale, sad-looking boy in the front row volunteers next. His play is called “Depression.”

The maudlin story about teenage love opens with Eric and Adrienne talking on the phone on their anniversary. As the scene begins, Adrienne dumps him. Eric, the character, tries to slit his wrists with a kitchen knife in despair. The class releases a good-natured, sarcastic “Awwwwwwwww,” and even Eric smiles at the melodrama. Students laugh when Eric, the character, throws the phone out the window in frustration.

In the earlier draft, the character rode into a canyon and looked at the stars, feeling sorry for himself. This time around, Adrienne, the heartless girl who rejected Eric, is killed in a car accident. The class is into it, and Eric looks considerably happier.

This is what Rubin has told them again and again: When you write, you are God. You have complete control over your characters.

“The accident is his way of getting her back,” Rubin says. “What he did came from his heart. He eliminated her--as a playwright.”

She flashes a mischievous smile.

“This is Eric’s story, and he got her good.”

*

Rubin’s joy is tempered by the grim lives her students write about.

“It’s a hard life to go into and keep pumping hope into. I need breaks from it.” She tells herself to lower her expectations. Sometimes after class she goes to her car and sobs.

She works with a second class at Canoga High, and after one bad daythere she called the head of the

playwriting program. “I have been totally defeated by the students,” she told him.

But days pass, and she tries again. She realizes that regular teachers have it even tougher, and that only strengthens her resolve.

*

March 21

The week starts badly. In the second and final round of the actors’ readings, Rubin runs out of plays. The first two of the day are almost indecipherable and so littered with cursing, the actors can barely read them. Rubin repeats the no-profanity rule, even if people talk that way in real life.

Then a play appears from Josh, who has produced little so far. “Time War” opens with Albert Einstein speaking.

Einstein: Ladies and Gentleman, I, Albert Einstein, am about to reveal a secret that will help the world. . . . I shall write it for you on the board. (As Albert writes E=mc squared on the board he suddenly feels very strange, as he gets to the =’s he disappears in thin air. Time has stood completely still. Albert has gone back into time to fight face to face with the great Gods of Greece.”

There he will meet Skeeter, a hapless high school student with a quick wit who can manipulate Einstein as a sidekick and dares to challenge the Greek gods, from Zeus to Neptune.

It is hilarious and fun, with an intriguing plot. The class is mesmerized.

“I’m not an orthodontist, but how many teeth did I have to pull to get that one?” Rubin asks.

In front of the class, Rubin tells Josh he is smart.

“I’m smart!” Josh repeats to no one in particular. “That’s the first time a teacher ever told me that.”

*

April 11

There are just five weeks until the school assembly where the best plays will be performed. Rubin resorts to anything to wring plays out of the kids.

“No one is going to fail this project,” she tells them aggressively. “Or I am going to move into this school.”

She brings in another playwright to talk to the class, and she takes those who have not produced into the hall for individual conferences. She sits on the dusty hallway floor, Indian style. Alone with her, their crowd-pleasing bravado crumples. Many are humble, obedient, shy.

She talks with them about their lives until she hits on something they can write about.

Paul is big with sweet-looking eyes. So far he has produced nothing. He often misses class. When he does show up, he sits in the back. Now, alone in the hall, he hardly speaks.

Rubin leans forward, locking his gaze. He talks with the barest trace of an accent. He looks slightly African American. She asks him about racism. Talking face to face he looks ashamed when she asks why he has not written a play.

“I’m all lazy and whatnot,” he says. “Sometimes I think I am going to sit down and do it. . . .”

“So you have a little bit of a problem,” Rubin says. “What’s your first language?”

“English.”

“Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“Tell me about your parents.”

“My mom is from Mexico. My dad is black.”

“Have you ever been arrested?”

“I was in Mexico. I had a gun.”

“You are a person who has had a lot of life experiences,” she says. “In Scene 1, I want you to tell me how you got the gun. In Scene 2, I want you to tell me how you got caught.”

He nods and gets up to leave, relieved the session is over.

“They don’t pay me enough for this,” Rubin says before the next student comes out. “I should be getting $135 an hour!”

She knows her job would be easier if she chose higher-achieving kids, such as those whose parents send them to magnet schools. But the payoff here is greater.

“The magnet kids write from the head. The riskier kids write straight from the heart. I’ve had kids turn in things at Canoga Park where the lyricism shocks me.”

*

April 25

Just a few plays yet to be written. Six to be exact. But the individual hallway conferences are not paying off.

Paul still has not written anything. Damian, who melts like chocolate when Rubin looks into his eyes, says he is going to write a three-part play about lost opportunities. But nothing so far. Bruno sits in the back of the class--when he comes--and always says he left his play at home. He says it again. Rubin rolls her eyes.

They are in final countdown, and Rubin tries another tack. She pairs successful young playwrights with the unsuccessful.

Ceci turns in her play, then gets embarrassed and grabs it back. She sits on it, refusing to hand it over to Rubin, no matter what. Rubin finally pulls it out from under her.

“It doesn’t make no sense, though!” Ceci wails.

“Life never does,” Rubin retorts.

*

May 9

Rubin selects Josh’s play for the big assembly at the Skirball. Sean looks crestfallen.

Excerpts will be read from several others at the assembly. Anthony, the repeat playwright student, wrote a suspenseful 17-page play called “Needy Souls” about a haunted house. Eric, the depressed boy, wrote a second play in the horror genre. He eagerly lopes alongside Rubin when she comes through the door each week.

“Susan, did you read it yet, did you read it yet?” he says. “What did you think?”

Today, Josh will work with the directors, and the others will turn in their final drafts.

Buoyed by their attention, Josh steps into his new role with passion. The professional actors and the director crowd around him, asking how he wants it played.

“What about the tone?” asks the director.

“What about Skeeter?” asks the guy who will play the character.

“He’s like a high school student,” Josh answers. “He talks, you know, like us. Like a high school student. Like me.”

When the actors read, Josh asks to sit in the front row. He can barely contain himself. As the class laughs, a slow smile creeps over his face. He tries not to care, but he steals looks around. He starts to laugh, his body convulsing, his foot stamping the floor.

The class claps enthusiastically, and Josh raises his arms in victory.

“I want to commend you for taking different genres and making it work,” the director says to Josh.

The students start pulling their plays out of backpacks and books. English teacher Kelley watches the mountain of paper grow in her hands like a big cake.

Kelley holds the stack up to the class.

“Look at this stack of plays,” she says proudly. “Look at what she has helped you guys find in yourselves. I am so proud of you I could cry.”

As the students file out, a friend of Josh’s pats him on the back.

“His mother is going to faint,” she says. “This is the first time he has done anything right.”

*

May 17

The assembly should be climactic. Excerpts from six plays are to be read in the school auditorium in front of other classes. It is a chance to show off what they have accomplished.

But things go wrong, and some of the best plays go unread.

Sean was unexpectedly yanked from Canoga High in early May and transferred to a private school by his parents, who said he was picked on too much.

The day before the assembly, Anthony got in trouble for bringing a Slurpee to class, which is not allowed, and then grabbing it off Kelley’s desk after it was taken away. So Kelley pulled his play, “Needy Souls.”

Then one of the actors is a no-show, which delays the start by 30 minutes, and forces Rubin to stand in. Marvin, the class clown, hoots at her throughout the performance.

“Take it off, Susan. Take it all off.”

*

May 26

The day dawns clear and sunny. Students from five schools across Los Angeles board buses and head to the Skirball Cultural Center for a final assembly where 11 plays will be read.

The kids sit at museum cafe tables in the sunny courtyard. Josh, his hair newly shorn for the occasion, is visibly excited. This is his first school field trip since fifth grade.

Students crowd around Rubin, pelting her with questions: Are the actors going to wear costumes? Are they going to have sets and that kind of stuff?

Josh is emboldened by the day. When cast members from Comedy Sportz, which performs its own material for the students halfway through the morning, ask for volunteers, he is first to raise his hand.

But his play is the last performed; by the time the actors get to it after lunch, the audience is tired. Josh laments the few laughs. He wishes he could have made it funnier.

His father was funny.

Josh’s parents never married. He was raised by his grandparents. He has not seen his mother in years. His father came to live with him when his diabetes got so bad he could no longer live alone. Eventually his father lost part of both legs and all his fingers to the disease and was confined to a wheelchair. He died when Josh was in junior high school.

“He used to call his legs his cannons, and his fingers his shotguns,” Josh recalled later. “He just had the thumbs.”

His father used to do Donald Duck impersonations. Josh likes to do voices, too. “We’d get together, and we could put on a show,” he said. “We’d start throwing jokes left and right.”

A tear leaked down his cheek behind his wraparound sunglasses. His father would have liked his play, he said. He plans to take Rubin’s advanced playwriting class next year in English class.

At the end of the day, the students rise to give the actors a standing ovation. “Keep writing,” the actors shout back to the students.

*

Two weeks later, a book of the plays written by Kelley’s 10th-grade class arrives. The blue cover announces, “New Scripts by Young Playwrights.” Inside are 27 typed plays. Kelley is astonished by the success rate. Of the original 34 students, four dropped out or transferred, including Sean.

Three students who almost never showed up did not turn in plays. But everyone else did. For some, it was virtually the only work they did in English class.

The hallway consultation with Paul, who was absent 27 times, paid off. He turned in a play titled “Racism and Survival” about being left behind in Mexico City, unable to speak Spanish, by his mother.

The promise of an A was a motivator, but ultimately it did not help students pass. There were 11 Fs, eight Ds and no A’s.

Josh received a D because of poor or incomplete work on exams and other compositions. “I’d like to have given him a C,” Kelley said. “I’d like to say he became a perfectionist and that it carried over into his academic work, but it didn’t.”

Rubin’s idea of success changed during the semester. She no longer blames herself for not getting plays from students she never saw. What matters more was whether she got through to them.

“If Anthony had come up to me like Eric did, that would have been success,” she said.

It eats at her that Anthony--smart, loquacious, charming--is slipping through the cracks. He should be going to college. Someone should lift him up by the ears and tell him that.

“My real issue is, ‘Did you hear what I said? Your life is important. Your writing is a suitcase filled with property. Writing is something of value that is yours.’ ”