Just Reach One
by Melody Ermachild Chavis (to be published)

Every San Franciscan knows Sutro Tower, the giant antenna on top of Twin Peaks. But hardly anybody knows that the City's jail for kids is right below it. The Youth Guidance Center is a ramshackle cluster of aging pink buildings where hundreds of juvenile offenders live. Everybody calls it “The Hall.”

For 20 years I've been a Bay Area private eye, defending criminals. Most of my clients have passed through a youth jail somewhere, on their way to prison or death row. Tracing their life histories, I often go to juvenile halls to ask for records and to find witnesses. Typically, staff tell me, “Well, that's my signature on this document, but, sorry, I can't remember that kid. There are just too many.” I've taken tours and seen the kids in cages. I've never heard of anything good happening in these places.

Then last year, at an art exhibit, I met a dynamic, petite blonde woman named Robin Sohnen, and she told me she is determined to make something good happen. She invited me to come with her into San Francisco's Hall to see one-act plays written by incarcerated youth. A lover of theater, Robin Sohnen sold her home and quit her job five years ago to start Each One Reach One, an organization that teaches playwriting all over Northern California to kids who have never seen a play, much less written one. It's hard not to be inspired by Robin Sohnen. I felt like she had my lapels in her two hands and was pulling me into her world. Sohnen's passion has convinced dozens of talented theater people to volunteer with Each One Reach One. I decided to see an Each One Reach One performance because I was curious. Could it be possible that the authorities at the San Francisco Hall were fostering artistic potential in youth offenders? —Now, in this era of Zero Tolerance and Try 'Em As Adults?

And I had to see what magic could possibly induce the ill-educated, sullen and depressed youth I had seen in so many lock-ups to write plays about their lives.

On a windy Friday afternoon, I meet the Each One Reach One group at a back door of the Hall, under the high barbed wire-topped fence. We all follow the man with the keys, Tim Diestel, the Assistant Director of the Hall. We file past the office where a couple of scared-looking newly-arrested boys are being frisked and booked, past an open door that reveals a glimpse of cell bars, and into a large classroom furnished with plastic tables and chairs.

Soon, more keys jangle in locks and staff members escort two boys and four girls into the room. The teens shuffle, wearing flimsy plastic flipflops that serve as jail shoes. They are dressed in loose pants and yellow, purple or gray sweat shirts that identify their housing units. Improbably, these are the young playwrights we have come to meet. Smiling, they head straight for the adults who have mentored them every evening for the past two weeks.

Andre, a slight, light-skinned African American boy smiles shyly up at Dave, a tall white guy who wears glasses. Dave hands Andre a copy of his script. This is the first time Andre has seen his writing in typed form, and he eagerly pages through it, nodding approval as he reads. My excuse for being admitted to the Hall tonight is my “free-lance writer” persona. I approach Andre with my notebook open and my pen poised.

“My play is about two bears,” Andre explains to me. “It's about revenge -- about deciding not to try to get revenge.” When I ask how he chose his topic, Andre pauses, and then says, “Somebody in my family was killed, and now we have to stick really close together and take care of each other.”

Andre's mentor Dave, an actor and writer, is working with Each One Reach One for the second time. “This is what theater should be about,” Dave says. “Watching these kids' walls come down.”

Besides the young playwrights and the adults who have mentored them for two weeks, a dozen young actors are in the room who have never been here before. They are students in the Masters program at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater who have come in tonight to perform in the plays. They have never before met the young playwrights, and haven't yet seen the scripts.

It's time for casting, and then rehearsal.

Artistic Director Tom Kellogg quickly assigns two A.C.T. actors to perform each play. The noise level in the room approaches cacophony as six groups huddle intensely over six scripts. Two young black men, actors from A.C.T., tackle Andre's play about revenge. Andre listens pensively as the actors do a first read-through of his dialog between two bears. Andre looks a little dubious. One of actors says, “Let me hear you say this, Andre—how do you pronounce it?” When the actor gets it right, Andre smiles.

Across the room, two young white women cast in a play written by Moiney, a vivacious African American girl, are struggling to imitate her flamboyant body language. They all three wind up bent over laughing, as Artistic Director Tom Kellogg instructs, “I want to remind everyone this is a staged reading, not physically dramatized -- —you'll be sitting on chairs on stage. What's most important is that we hear the playwright's words!” Kellogg's charisma is so potent, whenever he calls out directions, there is instant silence.

Moiney, a solidly-built, dark-skinned 16-year-old girl with an expressive face, explains her decision to try Each One Reach One: “Drama just sounded good—I'm a Drama Queen, so I decided maybe it was for me.” She pauses, then lowers her voice and adds, frowning, “Sometimes I act out.” She brightens up: “I thought, I can act out here. I can do this.” Moiney's play is about the troubled friendship of a star named Hopeful and a cloud named Dream. “It's based on the fact that me and my best friend fight all the time,” Moiney says. Each One Reach One has attracted a lot of high-powered talent. Artistic Director Tom Kellogg runs his own theater company, fofo, in Los Angeles. Kellogg tells me, “Robin opens the doors, and I come in with the artistic process.” Kellogg has created a unique approach to playwriting, founded on New Yorker Daniel Sklar's “Playmaking” technique. “I added my own outlook and experience, and what I learned from the young people themselves,” Kellogg says. The first week of the workshop is spent teaching the kids, through improvisation, concepts like character, metaphor, and monologue. The blackboard is covered with words like “conflict! crisis! urgency! consequences!”

The second week the young writers invent two non-human characters, and give them a conflict to resolve. Kellogg says that writing about ravens or lions provides a mask for the young people, giving them freedom. “I believe the non-human characters bring the writer—and the audience—directly into the unrestricted world of metaphor.” Both the youngsters and their mentors are as racially and culturally diverse as San Francisco. Kellogg says, “It's powerful when we walk into the room and the young people see that we are all working together as artists.”

One of the mentors, Kelvin Han Yee, is Associate Artistic Director of San Francisco's Eureka Theater. Yee calls Each One Reach One, “Absolutely the most meaningful part of my life.” He has worked with the program for twelve sessions. Yee gestures towards Karima, the round-faced girl he has been working with this time, and says she was very shy at first. You would never know it now. Karima, sits talking nonstop, gesturing with her fast-moving hands to two young women actors, who lean towards Karima nodding their understanding.

Yee confides, “Karima's play is all about how people don't listen to her, don't ever have time for her. It's happening right now! Money can't buy this!”

Karima's play is set in a room at the Blue Heart Hotel, where every single thing including the bed is blue and heart-shaped.

Watching the rehearsals, Robin Sohnen says, “So few youth programs have this kind of one-on-one relationship. The kids can't believe an adult is enough interested in them to come back every evening for two weeks. In a classroom, these same kids would be lost.”

“We never know each evening if the kids will come back to this program,”Sohnen says, “but when they do, they all succeed.”

Showing up is hard to do in the volatile atmosphere of juvenile hall. Kids can be transferred, get bad news from home, feel too tired or discouraged to come. During this two-week session, several youths who started the program were released. But every evening for two weeks, these six kids have shown up, and so have their mentors.

Delma, a pretty Latina 15-year-old with big brown eyes says, “I thought it sounded like fun, but the first few days, I was, Oh my God, how am I going to do this? They wouldn't tell me what to write!” Delma exclaims. “They didn't give me no suggestions. It had to come from me. And then I got the hang of it. My play is some true, and some from my own imagination.”

Delma's play, “Mountain Ice,” is about the emotional friendship of “Wild Ice” and “Big P,” two polar bears who wrestle with betrayal.

Big P has given away the secret of Wild Ice's safe place to stay.

Wild Ice: “I thought you were really my friend. I feel empty, now that you've done this. I really trusted you very much. You were like my big sister.”

Big P: (Tears come out of her eyes when Wild Ice says that she was like her big sister.) “I am very sorry. I feel ashamed for what I did...You know, my place is kind of big. My family is okay with you coming over and staying with me because they know that you are the only one I trust and that you are my best friend and that you don't have any parents.” Delma's play ends with a hopeful message, “With each other, we can make it.”

Delma's mentor, Latania, a slim black woman who wears dreadlocks and glasses, is an actor who teaches youth drama and works as a counselor at a residential youth treatment center in the East Bay. She answered Sohnen's call for mentors in a newsletter for actors.

“As a counselor,” Latania says, "I'm forced to focus on kids' problems. Here, we all become just artists working together. We showed them how to put their feelings on paper. They don't have to write— if they can't, we write it down for them, and we don't correct their language. You can see the kids' pride. I actually saw a transformation. It was therapeutic, and they brought that out of themselves. This is all Delma's own voice.”

After an hour of fast-paced rehearsal in small groups, Tom Kellogg calls for a quick staged run-through: two actors sit facing the audience, and up on the stage beside them sits the young playwright.

Karima is so embarrassed in front of the group that she alternates putting her hands over her eyes and her ears. Kellogg encourages her until she sits smiling proudly with her hands in her lap as the actors bring the denizens of the Blue Heart Hotel to life.

It's almost “curtain time.” Tim Diestel, the Hall's Assistant Director, escorts our nervous, high-energy group on the short walk from the classroom to the chapel, where we're going to perform for other locked-up youth. Diestel tells me, “These kids are a tough audience. Entertainers come in here sometimes and completely lose them. They'll talk, sleep, whatever. We'll see how this goes.”

The wooden pews quickly fill with about 80 boys and girls 14-16 years old. They file in walking, as required, single file, in silence, with their hands clasped behind their backs.

I look for a seat at the side of the hall with a few other invited guests and staff members. I wedge in between a woman holding tiny twin girls on her lap, and a woman staff member in uniform whose walkie talkie murmurs softly.

Chief Jesse Williams opens the evening. He is the man who could have said no to all this, but instead he said yes. In an effort to make The Hall a better place, Williams has also invited the San Francisco ballet and the opera to come in later this year. Williams addresses his young charges: “Maybe one day you'll come back here as part of American Conservatory Theater. It's time for us to show the talent you have.”

Joseph goes first. He's a short boy with big brown eyes and dark skin, his hair in braids. Two young actors bound confidently onto the stage and take seats for the dramatic reading, and Joseph solemnly joins them. The woman sitting on my right and the tiny girls on her lap wave proudly at Joseph, and I realize they are his mom and little sisters.

Joseph's play, “Joe and Shiny's Duel for Dreams” is an argument between Joe the dog and Shiny the television set. They live in a cash-strapped household. The hound wants dog food while the TV wants cable. The dialog is truly clever and the chapel fills with laughter. Joseph himself looks surprised to find he has written a comedy that works! He takes a bow, a look of pride pushing away his shyness and nervousness. Joseph's mom hugs him and his sisters wrap themselves around his knees as he accepts a framed certificate from Robin Sohnen.

Next we see “For The Love Of The Family,” the poignant tale of Africa's last guinea pigs, who live along the Nile, written by a girl named Lathritaha. One of the guineas laments: “I used to always tell my mother I want to be a dog! Because we guinea pigs are basically extinct animals. But dogs is a continuing family. When dogs have puppies they have them by the pound. In big groups so there is always family left behind when one dies.”

The woman in uniform on my left is here to keep order, but you could hear a pin drop in this room. I think about how this girl's words of longing for a secure future might not ever be heard if she were just another kid in the crowd shuffling along in line. I glance at the guard and our eyes meet. Hers are filled with tears too, and we quickly look away.

It is Andre's play about revenge that most rivets the audience. The kids lean forward in their seats and don't take their eyes off the two young black actors slouching in chairs on the stage. The two "bears" confide in each other:

“You know this is the day you got shot, right?”

“Yeah, I know. One year ago. Me and you was playing around on the other side of the forest where we was not suppose to be, and a poacher came from outta nowhere and shot me. I don't want to talk about it....I think about it every day. I touch my bullet wound, I think of how I could have died. I feel hot and ready to cry.”

“If I could take back time, I would've took the bullet for you.”

“If you would've took the bullet, you probably would've died, and I would've been by myself.” “I'll never leave your side except when you want to be alone.”

-“When I'm alone is when I think...Now I really had a chance to think about what happened and how it happened, I don't think I need to take nobody's life no more.” The play ends when the two pledge to stay together “til the end.”

I wonder what lies ahead of Andre as he heads back out to the streets of San Francisco. Right now, real respect for him is shining in the eyes of every youth in this big room. It's hard to imagine how else Andre's message could gain the applause of these 80 kids.

After every young playwright has received a certificate, they all gather around signing each other's programs as if they were yearbooks at a graduation.

“You were amazing!” Robin Sohnen exclaims as she scoops Karima into her arms. “Two weeks ago,” Robin tells her, “writing a play seemed impossible. Now, you have done the impossible!” Karima grins and hugs Robin back.

Kelvin Han Yee tells the young playwrights: “Once you have stepped into the circle of artists, that creative fire has been lit for a lifetime. Once you've recognized it in yourself, you have to honor it, you can never ignore it.”

Tim Diestel, Assistant Director of the Hall, says he has never seen the kids so attentive. “For them to see what each other can do was incredible.”

For the protection of both kids and mentors, no personal information is exchanged and no subsequent contact is allowed. Both Dave and Andre are sad that this the last time they will be together. Dave tells me he's going to think good thoughts about Andre, and keep on working with Each One Reach One.

Andre looks straight into Dave's eyes and says “Thank you.” Dave replies, “I've been happy to do it.”

I drove down the hill towards the lights of the City below, thinking that Robin Sohnen is right. She had told me, “If we just reach one, it's all worth it.”

© Melody Ermachild Chavis, May 2001
hosted by www.each1reach1.org

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