Youths Bring Street Experience to the Stage : Drama: A production by Fremont High students, in which they act out scenes from their lives in South-Central L.A., is a show from the heart.

In some respects, the play performed Thursday night by Fremont High School students was a typical amateur production, replete with technical difficulties and makeshift props.

But in the end, it was an extraordinary show from the heart. The teen-agers did not merely recite memorized lines--they acted out scenes from their lives on the riot-scarred streets of South-Central Los Angeles.

The students hope that the message of the play, “Can’t You Hear Us Crying?,” can be carried around the city--especially to those who may be looking in fear at their neighborhoods after an anxious week of waiting for verdicts in the Rodney G. King case, the same incident that sparked last year’s civil disturbances.

“People in Los Angeles, they don’t know what we are going through,” said Aldolfo Lopez, 18. “This play lets us show that we have feelings, we hurt, we are bleeding. We are not this stereotype of everything that is bad.”

Drama teacher Sidney Butler, who has worked late into the night for weeks to pull off the production with little money, wrote the play when he decided that “performing something sweet, like ‘Oklahoma!,’ is not relevant” to his students.

During the hourlong play--a series of vignettes that hammer on racism, police brutality and no-win acts of street justice--police sirens scream, smoke wafts across the set of a storefront, and two characters are shot to death. There is no happy ending, with students asked to choose between hope and despair.

The eight-student troupe has performed the play twice for Fremont students and wants to present it to audiences at high schools throughout the city.

But there is no money for bus transportation and the financially beleaguered Los Angeles Unified School District severely cut back funding for extra activities such as drama last year.

“We are trying to make a statement on what is perhaps one of the hottest spots in the nation right now, Los Angeles,” Butler told the small audience of students, teachers, parents and community workers at Thursday’s performance.

What they unveiled on stage was scene after scene of inner-city youths confronted with tormenting decisions about choosing right or wrong in their angry and at times tearful dialogue.

There is Lollipop, played by Xochilt Esparza, 18, who pleads with a looter played by Felicia Walker, 17, to “stop shopping on other people’s misery. You think you are big stuff because you destroy. But what do you feel? Nothing but heartache.”

There is Psycho, a drug-crazed gangbanger in a tattered shirt who brandishes a gun and claims that people have a right to fight. Played by Damian Hill, 16, he runs off stage as gunfire sounds, only to stumble back into the spotlight and fall dead.

A social worker nun, portrayed by Maricruz Alvarez, 19, acts as the conscience of the group. She urges against racial hatred, alluding to a truce between gangs. “You put all of your gang colors down, but you picked up skin color,” she says.

But Blazer, played by Carmen Leyva, 17, waves a pistol, blaming her troubles on white people “who don’t have the right to be here. . . . This land belongs to Mexicans and baby, Mexicans are going to take it back.” She is shot in a gun battle offstage. Her last words are of hope: “Let us go in a different direction.”

In the end, three characters, including a rebellious youth played by Shenandoah Johnson, 19, run off in anger, incapable of taking part with the nun in a symbolic joining of hands. The three left on stage reluctantly say: “People care about us, but not enough . . . It’s not too late but too slow.”

The cast receives a standing ovation. But instead of taking bows, the troupe sits somberly at the edge of the stage, two still wiping fake blood from their faces.

“This shows that not everything is a happy ending in our lives,” Lopez said.

Angela Boyd, 18, whose character is kicked out of the house by an alcoholic mother, said she at first did not want to perform in the play. “You have to act out all this bottled up anger. It’s hard.”

Yet, even though it’s painful, the students said they want to share a dark part of their lives with others because, as Boyd said, “people will be shocked by our talent.”