A Place For Us

Last Saturday night, on the eve of Easter 2008, Mark Dressler, The Park Avenue Players and the Laguna Beach High School orchestra brought down the house on closing night of Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story." Dressler's commitment to the drama program in the Laguna Beach Unified School District is unparalleled, and I have learned one thing from his commitment to teaching drama: He is not really teaching drama. He reminds us all, participants and observers alike, that the stage is a microcosm of the spectacle of life.

The themes of gang violence and racial tensions in West Side Story are unfortunately relevant today. I'm sure Dressler has discussed this with his students. Not far from our utopia, Los Angeles gang violence and fatalities soar while we lament the plummet of property values. Just a few weeks ago, Jamiel Shaw Jr. a young black man who was not in a gang, who was a good student, an excellent athlete, and who was adored by his family, was shot in the head and in the back by two Latino gang members when he did not respond quickly enough when asked what gang he was in. This murder has not only broken hearts and increased fear, but has fanned the flames of resentment because the killer, Pedro Espinoza, is in this country illegally and was released from jail the day before he killed Jamiel Shaw Jr. He should have been deported, but was not. Some argue that one of the reasons for this is that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has declared Los Angeles as a sanctuary, the kind of place that Maria and Tony imagined and longed for in West Side Story.

Does such a place exist? Is sanctuary possible? This elusive search for the type of geographic and temporal utopia expressed in the lyrics of one of the songs from West Side Story makes the words even more poignant: "Somewhere we'll finda new way of living, we'll finda way of forgiving… " Can we ever forgive senseless death? Can we ever move beyond hate?

During the dream sequence when Maria and Tony imagine a life of peaceful coexistence, I wondered what sort of utopia crossed the audience's collective mind: Did they contemplate the sense of hope and utopia that America, California, and Laguna Beach have offered throughout history? For my Irish grandparents Ellis Island was utopia. For my parents the warmth and promise of California offered sanctuary. For early settlers, Laguna Beach was a safe haven for artists and free spirits. Each place was once the type of utopia described in "Somewhere." As I watched the dream sequence of the play, where people of different backgrounds smile and dance, I am reminded of some of the lingering promises of Laguna's utopia: the "Juntos" program, the Cross-Cultural Council, the Boys and Girls Club and the volunteers who feed the homeless at Heisler Park.

But as I watched some of the fight scenes in the play I was also reminded that in our town we have our own turf wars. The Minutemen and some immigrants rights activists convene their own war councils, and many of us will bear witness to their rumbles, spilling over Laguna Canyon Road while the local police stand by protecting the status quo. I watch this spectacle as much from my car as from my seat in the Artists' Theatre. I probably spend too much time in the audience.

So the end of the play and the end of March 2008 present tragic, yet familiar pageantries: Bernardo and Tony die; Anita's joy and Maria's sweetness evaporate; Jamiel Shaw Jr. has been killed as senselessly as any of literature's most tragic characters. The 4,000th American soldier in the Iraq War has sacrificed his young life, and we may never know how many Iraqi civilians have perished. Around the world, and even in our quiet sanctuary of a town, the kind of hate Maria denounces in her final monologue abounds. As the curtain descends on an American tragedy, protocol dictates that we applaud. Instead we would all be a little wiser to do what the woman sitting next to me did on Saturday night: She cried.