CSUN TROUPE HEADING TO CHINA; ACTORS EXPECT THEATER ART TO TRANSCEND POLITICS.

Byline: Robert Monroe Daily News Staff Writer

The student actors got the news between the first and second acts: Warplanes from their native country had just inadvertently bombed their soon-to-be hosts' embassy in Yugoslavia.

American bombs were blasting the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade while theater students at California State University, Northridge, were running through their seventh on-campus performance of the musical adaptation of a Studs Terkel book.

The next day, television was filled with images of angry Chinese pelting the American Embassy in Beijing with stones. It looked like the audience at the Shanghai Center Theater could become the proverbial rough room for CSUN's production of ``Working.''

``Oh my God. Are we going to go? Are we not going to go?'' Lynn Heck said she and others in the cast wondered.

They will leave as scheduled today. Time has toned down the violence in China. The State Department has softened its travel advisory. Students and the professors taking their show on the road say they aren't worried. Art, they believe, will transcend politics. But some in the company said their confidence has been nicked a bit by nerves.

``Sometimes I wonder if it's such a good idea or if we're doing it because we've already paid for it,'' Heck quipped.

Leaders of the troupe, however, said their Chinese hosts distinguish between theaters of art and theaters of war.

``The arts ultimately are part of the very important way that individuals relate to one another at the human level,'' said Heinrich Falk, a CSUN theater professor who was invited in 1993 to direct three plays at the Shanghai Theater Academy. ``They transcend the momentary bumps and bruises of political differences.''

Owen Smith, a theater department faculty member traveling with the students, said the troupe obviously represents no political position.

``We're just a bunch of theater people,'' he said.

Heck, a 48-year-old graduate student, expects art to rise above political squabbles in the theater, but says that won't protect her if she walks down Shanghai's streets. The blonde joked that she has considered telling the Chinese she is Dutch, just to be on the safe side.

``I intend to keep my head to the ground, do the show and be very, very quiet,'' she said.

The play, which Stephen Schwartz adapted from the book in 1978, relates the stories of American blue-collar workers interviewed by Terkel. Falk said theater officials in Shanghai read the script before sending the invitation.

The play was a natural choice for the CSUN troupe - and not because of Terkel's leftist leanings. Director Michael Reno won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award for his 1981 production. While Reno said ideology was not behind the choice, the play's script, taken straight from interviews by Terkel of American workers, ``not only represented theater but also a cross-section of America.''

Cast members agreed the play's themes should go over well in the People's Republic.

``The educated ones will perhaps get some insight about Americans who they don't hear so much about, those Americans who are the backbone of our country,'' Heck said.

Actress Melissa Bustamante, a junior from Sherman Oaks, said she felt some misgivings about the trip for about a week. Then she felt comforted by the fact that no American living in China during the embassy assaults was hurt.

Even if the musical's theme is lost in the translation, the music itself ``is one thing they'll understand,'' Bustamante said.

The Shanghai trip will mark the second time a theater troupe from CSUN has traveled to a foreign country to perform. Last year, students performed the play ``Roosters'' in Mexico City.

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Photo

Photo: California State University, Northridge, stage designer Owen Smith oversees packing of costumes for a CSUN troupe's trip to China.

Andy Holzman/Daily News