Bruce Gevirtzman: Teaching It All

Bruce Gevirtzman, is a man who has known since age ten that he was born to teach. He stands there; solid, like a small bank vault, but his round, open face and direct gaze are like an exclamation point that commands attention. Along with his former student, 21-year-old Steve Cisneros, Gevirtzman is co-creator of Phantom Projects, a teen educational theatre group that is wowing Southern California audiences, especially high schoolers, with three stunningly hip plays about sex and abstinence, drugs and racism.

Phantom Projects will present all three Gervitzman works consecutively at the La Mirada Theatre this coming October, and January and May 2000. Out, Out Brief Candle, a play about teen drugs and alcohol abuse opens October 28.

Gevirtzman has been teaching English at La Mirada High School since 1973. In 1976, he began writing plays to be performed by and for his students. At first, they focused on general social and political issues. Gevirtzman, an admitted "nutball," spent years probing the Kennedy assassination. He found emotional release creating a play called The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (written well before the TV movie with the same title and premise), in which a jury was chosen from the audience to take the piece to one of two possible endings.

"My biggest fear was that the kids would get it wrong, that one verdict would come in and they'd do the other ending, which they actually did a couple of times in rehearsals." But as the playwright's eye scrutinized the teacher's world, it was only a matter of time before the plays became teen-oriented.

What sparked him?

"Watching kids suffer. Their ignorance on these subjects was baffling. "In '86, I was coaching baseball and some of my players were involved with drugs. I'd get really upset and go on tirades in my class because it angered me that they thought these drug dealers were friends of theirs. So I wrote a one-act, 50-minute show, and we did it in all the classes every day for three days. We did a couple of night performances, too, and those raised about $2500, which we put into a fund for anti-drug programs. Sometimes, I have former students tell me later in their lives what an impact I had on them. That's nice, because you don't always know at the time if you're getting through. I get a lot of letters from kids, too."

Gevirtzman is passionate about kids and their place in the world. He admires radio's Dr. Laura because "the bottom line for her is that kids are the most important consideration in any action. If you want to get married and lead a rotten life, abuse your spouse or whatever ... well, God bless you. But when you bring kids into the relationship ... how dare you? Because kids are the most important people."

He is also a self-styled "behaviorist." He believes profoundly that "everything comes down to a behavior. Not a feeling; not a thought; but a behavior." Love is the way you treat somebody, not how you feel about them."

Does that mean that love is a conscious choice? Gevirtzman pauses. "It is. If love is a behavior, if love is the way you treat someone, then it is a conscious choice. I don't think it matters if you say you love someone, or if you feel like you love someone; what matters is that choice. We're the sum of our choices. We make good ones and bad ones, but we always make them." This is the philosophy that vitalizes all three Phantom Projects plays. Its empowering effect on teens and parents alike is making the troupe a Southland sensation.

"The catalyst for The Assembly: No Way To Treat A Lady (Gevirtzman's script advocating teen sexual abstinence) was the movie Kids. "I came out of the theatre and staggered over to the snack bar. One of my former students was working there, and she said, 'You look like you just saw Kids.' I said, 'Yeah. I'm sure glad it's not really like that,' and she said, 'Oh, it is.' I talked to her about it for a bit, went home, and a couple of days later I had the script."

It's a runaway hit, praised by kids, adults, politicians, and religious groups of every stripe. Does Gevirtzman worry about his ideas being co-opted by religious groups?

"I'm a religious Jew. I go faithfully to synagogue. My wife is a Jew. We intend to have a Jewish family. But we don't have a single religious reference in any of these scripts. I just don't want the kids to think, 'Oh, here we go again.'"

Cisneros points out that 40% of Phantom Projects' audiences are from religious groups, and "a lot of our cast members are religious as well," but both actors and audiences keep specific religious agendas out of the post-show discussions.

"The abstinence thing has nothing to do with religious foundation, not for us," Gevirtzman insists. "I mean, 'Turning off drugs and turning on to Jesus or Buddha or transcendental meditation, for that matter, could be simply substituting one high for another, which would finally leave you back where you started. "With the abstinence approach, we're talking about a fundamental change in you, in the way you look at life, the opposite sex, the act of sex and, finally, yourself."

This is heady stuff. Gevirtzman admits he's a "moralist" who gets "judgmental, but only about people's actions and only when they're illegal, immoral or fattening." It's not the mindset one imagines would appeal to the average rebellious teen. So how does he do it?

"I don't step into their lives as some kind of personal guru. I don't always know if I'm reaching them. Sometimes you don't know for days or years. You walk out of the class swearing you should have been something else, a doctor or a lawyer or something, and those are the moments when you have to remember the one kid who might have gotten it that day. And this doesn't mean a social or a moral lesson; it could just mean how to write a better paragraph, or make a better oral presentation or how to understand a poem."

His voice rises and behind this 50-year-old man's passion for teaching, you can see the 10-year- old who set up a blackboard in his room and played teacher to neighborhood kids; when they weren't there, he'd teach himself; he recorded grades in a book of invented names and developed an imaginary curriculum.

He was born to this.

"In an English class, we're going to read, we're going to write, we're going to speak, we're going to use critical thinking. The mechanics of this can only be developed through practice and through interest. I always try to put the work into a context they can use in their lives. In my senior class, all the literature we use is from newspapers, magazines and student writing. We have to make you practice. We have to make you interested."

And one way he's kept them interested is with his plays. The icing on the cake is to have found his theatrical counterpart in a former student. He and Cisneros work easily as a team, each honoring the other's creative expression. Cisneros refuses to take any co-writing credits for the scripts, although he routinely tells Gevirtzman where cuts and rewrites are needed. And, when asked if there's a "boss" in this relationship, Gevirtzman heartily blurts, "He's the boss. I have no problem with that."

Arthur Miller is Gevirtzman's favorite playwright; Death of A Salesman, his favorite Miller play. He's played Willy Loman in one production and Howard in another. Would he ever consider abandoning the classroom for the stage, especially when Phantom Projects goes "all over the place," as it has begun to do? His smile chastens. The classroom and the stage aren't separate places for this man. He works with his audience every day. "You know what they say," he quips. "Don't quit your day job."

So what does he want for the future?

"I'd like to see these three shows work. For Steve's sake, financially, but also, obviously, for the kids. They're the whole purpose here. I'd like this to go. I'd like to see this go all over the place."

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