HOW COULD THEY?

My name is Annabelle Hunter, and I am a rather kind, outgoing and expressive beautician,” 11-year-old Katya Hammerstein recites, “but the thought of helping was pushed to the back of my mind, because I was frozen on the spot.”

Hammerstein and her sixth-grade classmates are portraying the roles of 38 witnesses, each of whom listened for more than 30 minutes but never responded to the screams of a 28-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese as she was stabbed to death in her Kew Gardens, Queens, apartment in 1964.

For 36 years, Phoebe Faulkner, a teacher at John Burroughs Middle School in Hancock Park, has taught her class about the notorious death of Genovese. The students create a witness to play: a janitor, maybe, or a fortuneteller, pharmacist, Vietnam vet or fired tollbooth operator. The yearlong assignment culminates in a four-part essay in which the students attempt to explain why their characters chose not to help.

Faulkner, an English and history teacher, links the actions in Kew Gardens with civilizations from the Neanderthals to the Greeks to the Assyrians. She asks her students to consider what ties the fabric of humanity together, and to look at the lack of compassion that can tear it apart.

“If I’m teaching about Mesopotamia, I use the Kitty Genovese story as an example of failure. You can look at a civilization and see that a civilization is made whole by the networks that people weave. And you can only weave a network if you are willing to forgive and forget.”

Sitting in on the class this morning is David Simpatico, a playwright and librettist from New York City who heard about Faulkner’s teachings. Simpatico and his composer, Will Todd, are writing a musical drama, “The Screams of Kitty Genovese,” which is being workshopped in London at the Royal Opera House, the English National Opera and the Eugene O’Neill Festival in Connecticut.

The children listen intently as Simpatico reads his libretto, which recently won the Jonathan Larson Award, with lyrics such as, “Four walls can’t hold me--I’m young and alive,” about Kitty preparing to meet her friends on the night of the murder.

“Faulkner is the teacher you always wanted,” Simpatico says. “She gives her students a uniquely holistic approach to the world: Past, present and future are bound up in a single curriculum. She’s an amazing teacher.” When the show opens in New York, Simpatico hopes to fly Faulkner out for opening night. He describes his meeting with her as a “life-changing experience.”

As do the children. “I learned that if people are suffering, you should help them,” says student Aleksander Yelenskiy, who plays a dumbstruck pharmacist.

“We learned about the human heart,” says Hammerstein, the beautician, “but not necessarily in a scientific way.”

In the L.A. Unified School District, mired more in failure than successes lately, this is a miracle: the bringing together of a teacher and librettist in a classroom of bright, articulate students to honor the woman no one helped, with everyone, perhaps, picking up a sense of humanity to keep for the rest of their lives.