One of the most laudable traits of high-school students is their ability to seize upon a compelling notion and run with it. A profound reverence for the truth, whatever they might perceive that truth to be, has yet to be beaten out of them by experience and exhaustion. Perspective is for the olds, a cheap trick employed by parents and other boring authority figures to keep them down.
As most of us learn the hard way, ideals without perspective and values in a vacuum tend to isolate more than liberate, and they are no help when it comes to creating community. Which may explain why each of the characters in Yellowjackets, a new play by Itamar Moses and the first production of the Berkeley Rep’s 2008-2009 season, appear to move through the play in his or her own bubble of truth, largely blinkered, until the end, to the problems and perspectives of one another.
The play is set at Berkeley High, whose mascot is the yellowjacket and which happens to sit just a few blocks from Berkeley Rep. Moses, now 30 and a resident of Brooklyn, attended high school there in the early 1990s, at a time when political correctness, as well as its predictable backlash, was in full force. The kids in Yellowjackets are swimming in this PC soup, as they try to make sense of their racial, cultural, and socio-economic identities. The feeling of isolation that Moses creates is palpable, as students and teachers alike in this desegregated school self-segregate, becoming strangers in their own multicultural paradise.
The first half of the play’s first act introduces us to 23 students and faculty (played by 11 actors) in a series of rapid-fire, similarly isolated sketches. There’s Trevor (Craig Piaget), the terrified and frail freshman, enduring the taunts and threats of tough guy Guillem (Brian Rivera), who takes genuine pleasure in intimidating the easy-to-tease white kid he sits next to in ethnic conflict and cooperation class. We can tell we’ll want to keep an eye on these two, but should we also pay close attention to the comical Chinese mathematics teacher Mr. Ling (Kevin Hsieh), who can’t control his unruly class? Enjoy him while you can.
Then there’s principal Franks (Alex Curtis), his arm in a sling after getting caught in the middle of the strobe-lit fight between a pair of rival gangs that opens the play. Don’t concern yourself too much with Franks, but remember Rashid (Lance Gardner), the hard-ass student “cop,” and especially his kid brother, Damian (Shoresh Alaudini), who is the object of principal Franks’s ire. Rashid is always saving his brother’s bacon for one reason or another, and Damian needs a lot of saving.