The Secret (review)

The Secret. By City At Peace. Center Stage Theater, Santa Barbara, California. 25 May 2001.

Imagine a lonely writer in a silent garret struggling to get just the right word committed to paper. Now picture a dozen teenagers draped over couches and sprawled on the floor, yelling and screaming, and somehow creating their annual City at Peace production. This writing process might not seem typical, but this is not your typical play. The themes they discuss may be familiar enough--sexual abuse, suicide, bulimia, drugs and booze--but these are lived rather than imagined events for these writers. Among the palm trees, retirees, and often ostentatious wealth of seaside Santa Barbara, drug abuse and teen violence are growing facts of life. Each year since 1996, City at Peace has been scouring halfway houses, continuation schools, and probation programs seeking kids in trouble to make peace and create theatre. Over 300 of them, aged thirteen to nineteen years, have been through the program which consists of four hour sessions once a week after school and an annual three-day retreat for training in non-violent conflict resolution.

Run by former social worker and sometime stage manager Nancy Davis, and former stage and screen actor Jose Angel Santana, each session is part group therapy and part play acting. Early in the evening the group conducts personal check ins, and those are suf�cient to supply all the problems, crises, and conflicts that will be staged, critiqued, and often solved by the teens. The goal is not to �x the participants, say City at Peace founders, but to empower them to examine and change their own lives. Hanging over each meeting is the year--end public performance attended by a citywide audience that often includes parents, parole of�cers, and the teachers who know them best.

Scriptless until two weeks before performance this year, the teen collective talks and improvises under the watchful lens of Santana's video camera. In the end, the script for The Secret features �ve friends--Rose, Imani, Faye, Giselle, and Rico--swapping stories before guests arrive at a party they are hosting. Each has a secret to share: Imani (played by Chrissy Allen) has an abusive boyfriend, Faye (Megan Christopher) ran away from home; Rose (Monique Rojas) has a drug problem, and Giselle (Leti Gonzalez) is both bulimic and a victim of sexual abuse. The only boy, pint-sized Rico (played by Nikolai Lambert) was beaten up by a former girlfriend, a traumatizing event Nikolai often recounted during City at Peace meetings.

The characters' monologues break out into memory scenes as one actor relives a past crisis. Here the audience sees Imani's boyfriend, played by Matt Brown, strike her viciously; and Fredy Monroy, as Giselle's stepfather, �rst abuse her and then pathetically deflate when Giselle summons the courage to notify the police. The form becomes repetitious, the pace sometimes lags, and the acting is uneven, only Megan Christopher and Monique Rojas seem suf�ciently comfortable on stage to relax and enjoy themselves. Yet the audience remains mesmerized by stories they know are true and actors they know are real. Slowly the characters discover that the secret of the title refers not to their shared con�dences but to the strength and self-respect they have gained by facing their personal demons. This secret, the audience hopes, will stick with the actors as well as the characters.

The simple, realistic set of an apartment living room and bathroom, designed by Richard McLauglin, effectively frames the action. Unfortunately, Jethro Davis's lighting design often lags behind the action and blackouts last too long. Somehow director Santana orders the chaos. Having elicited the stories and coached the actors on their lines as late as two days before opening, he plunges into the daily crises of his actors' turbulent lives.

Conflict is never lacking at City at Peace, and this year one of the four leads was asked to leave the show just six days before opening night for physically attacking another actor...