CRITICAL EYE Urban Drama

Donna Moniot has Gloria Vanderbilt hair. And she wears a beeper. Moniot (pronounced MON-yo) runs something called the Junior Players, an entity that defies the sort of tangible here’s-the-stage, here’s-the-audience structure that we generally expect in a theater operation.

One cold, blustery afternoon, Moniot sits with finishing-school poise, clad in a perfect black turtleneck, elegant charcoal skirt, black hose and discreet black pumps. She’s dressed for a matinee at, say, the Golden Theatre off Times Square. Instead, she’s in a cramped little classroom on the second floor of the Dallas Can! Academy at Live Oak and Good Latimer, a private inner-city school where the GED or high-school equivalency degree is the brass ring. She’s watching black, Hispanic and white teenagers, age 14 to 19, “at risk” kids as social workers call them. They’re doing a theatrical improvisation. It’s about a girl who is stopped on her way home by strangers. The girl has wandered onto a gang’s turf. She’s being interrogated by a member of the gang, a boy. But don’t cry for her-she carries a pistol. “But she cool,” her friend assures the boy who has challenged her entry onto his turf. “She be down. It’s OK.”

No one has told these youths to choose this subject for their improv. No one has given them a plot or any dialogue or an imDrov “set-up” situation, They were asked to act out a scene about confrontation. They acted out what they know. That’s what Moniot’s all about-what these kids know, and acting it out.

Like the girl in that improv, Moniot’s Junior Players have left their own turf behind. They are at risk, and they may be mortally challenged. Unlike the girl in the improv. the Players are unarmed-except with words.

The Players are perhaps best known as the group that puts on those fine but modest instructional evenings of teen Shakespeare during the summer, in cooperation with the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas. They work with up to 1,000 kids a year, most of them between the ages of 7 and 14, offering the chance to get on stage, to walk the boards and see if the theater bug bites. Nonprofit and independent, they’ve been a very low-profile, unflashy outfit since 1955. They’ve quietly supplied a kind of serious community-theater niche for young people, mainly in after-school programs. They are completely extra-curricular. They’re not Junior to a larger group of Senior Players. And they have no theater building or venue of their own, just an office at the Sammons Center for the Arts.

Beginning last spring, Moniot and her Junior Players hit the streets and started mixing it up with the life that most of us don’t like to admit is teeming all around us in Dallas. They started doing what could be termed “urban-response theater.” Some even call it a “theater of revolution.” In Austin, a longer-established outfit for the same purpose calls itself a collective of Cultural Warriors.

Indeed, Moniot is bringing Austin’s Cultural Warriors commander-in-chief, Dana Ellinger, to Dallas on February 27 to give a workshop to any artists interested in what she and her associates call “turning natural, aggressive tendencies into productive, enriching art forms and spreading this cultural wealth to the community.” It’s not controlled or intellectual like Ibsen, it’s not poetic and arty like Moliere. But it’s a way of giving theater back to the people.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d gotten my daughter pregnant?” a teen-ager now screams into the face of a fellow student in Moniot’s classroom. “Hey, look,” the boy responds to her without missing a beat. He holds his left hand up, two inches from her eyes, fingers splayed. “I’m white. If I told you I’d slept with your daughter, you’d shoot me.”

The Dallas Can! Academy students doing these improvs under Moniot’s patrician yet supportive gaze are developing their own script for their own play, which they’ll later present as a graduation exercise from the school. The Junior Players have no official relationship with Dallas Can!, but have offered their program to its administration, which in turn, has been generous enough to let its students elect it in each Wednesday’s free-study afternoon session. In effect, the Junior Players are whoever is on stage in a given project at a given time, This time it’s Dallas Can! students.

Last spring, in March 1992, it was 15 Hispanic teens, age 13 to 17, who staged their own real-life drama in cooperation with the Dallas Parks and Recreation Department’s Juvenile Gang Intervention Program. Those kids took their show farther, to the Campfire National Youth Leadership Conference at UCLA in July. Last fall, Moniot put another urban-response theater project into place at Martin Weiss Recreation Center. Now her baby is the Dallas Can! project.

Each such stint, which can last for weeks or months, requires a director-facilitator. At the Dallas Can! project it’s actor Alonzo “Gonzo” Garza of Teatro Dallas, the Minority Actors Guild, Theatre Three and other local venues who is tentatively feeling his way along as director trying to determine how to turn these kids into Junior Players on a stage of their own drama. Only Vanessa (all the teens names have been changed) has come in with a written script, as requested. The others madly write at their desks as they brainstorm.

Vanessa’s script ends with a song. When she reads it aloud, it turns out to be an anthem of allegiance to Dallas Can! Academy. “You helped me find a way. . .1 didn’t have an education…you’re my one and only, Dallas Can!”

Dallas Can! clearly has captured the serious intentions of its student body-and one of its techniques involves a church-fel-lowship-hall load of heady aphorisms. “We love you!” is chanted by a whole class, at an instructor’s prompting, to visitors in the cinder-block facility. A “can opener” inspirational lesson starts the afternoon before the Junior Players group breaks away from the others-it’s a story about how the businessman who stays in his office past 5 p.m. gets the “big deal” because he’s by the phone when it rings at 7:30. Later, an improvisation suddenly gels silly when a student suggests that a peer’s problems can be solved by a quick enrollment in Dallas Can!

This isn’t the Dallas Can! program’s fault: So advertising-conscious has television made today’s youth that they’re ready to kiss up to whatever corporate identity is handy. And the Dallas Can! walls boast oversized donation checks from the same sort of indispensible charitable entities that are on the non-profit Junior Players’ “Honor Roll” of contributors: Kraft General Foods. Southwestern Bell Foundation. JC Penney, Bank One, and so on. How to stroke the commercial hands that feed you seems to be one of the lessons these kids are learning.

But tellingly, Moniot is not kissed up to. She works with these sneakered kids and the jeans and T-shirted Garza without a trace of condescension. And it comes across. The youngsters are almost eerily comfortable with her. Most of what makes Moniot tick, though, is a dogged dedication to what she’s doing. It comes from a childhood of theater-going. She’s been an informed audience member all her life and can keep up with conversations about breaking Broadway and off-Broadway news. She makes theater trips to New York and elsewhere with her daughter whenever possible-yet she’s managed to remain “in the world” enough to make her art form “of the world.”

“I just think we can make a difference doing this kind of thing,” she says. “’We’ve never made such a show of it because I haven’t even been sure it would work.”

Moniot’s teens at Dallas Can! each make a point of denying actual experience in the issues that they paradoxically volunteer as subjects for their improvs. No one here has ever carried a gun. No one here has been pregnant or has gotten anyone pregnant. And no one here has any gang connections. Hell no. Just friends of friends. Happily, no one here is inhibited, either. One girl, Janis, is a natural-born casting director, wanting to know who’s going to play a drug addict in her playlet-“I need a girl that’s real skinny.” Carl proposes that the group’s final script bounce from one story line to the next, “like in a soap opera.” The kids flip in and out of a patois that defies the comprehension of Wasp ears until a phrase like -i5-0. 5-0, be cool, fools!” flies by in an improvisation (hat includes the arrival of the police. The kids don’t judge each other’s performances. They don’t belittle each other’s suggestions. They aren’t fazed by their group’s multi-ethnicity. They seem a lot farther along, frankly, than a lot of better-heeled theater people I’ve watched squeeze and contort themselves into new, politically correct concepts of non-traditional casting. And they want to do this play.

“My boss,” one boy improvs to a girl who plays his guidance counselor, “my boss at McDonald’s blows kisses at me and touches my butt.”

“I want my son to know,” says another girl, playing the boy’s mother, “that there’s nothing wrong with him. And then 1 want to know how we’re going to get the police in on that man at McDonald’s.”

The Communities Foundation of Texas’ newsletter in July reported that there are more than 200 youth gangs in Dallas. They comprise a total membership of more than 4,000 kids. Each day. the foundation’s report says, one Dallas child is shot as a result of gang activity.

After Garza and Moniot put the group through their improvs this particular after noon, they ask the teens to name their own theater group. Derivative phrases fly fast. No one can agree to anything and nothing seems right for almost 30 minutes. “Truth or Dare!” “Nobody’s Perfect!” “Hard Times!” “Even Good People Come Down!” “Be All That You Can Be!” Then one girl quietly speaks the name they all instantly agree is perfect: Their theater group, presented by the Junior Players at a mid-year Dallas Can! Academy graduation ceremony, will be called Reality.