Forty years ago high school students from Berkeley enrolled in UC , smoked pot, and participated in street theater on Telegraph Avenue protesting against the draft (with a supporting cast provided by Gov. Ronald Reagan and the National Guard.)

Eventually they graduated, deferred marriage while they explored the world, had kids when they were in their forties and sent them to Berkeley High.

This weekend those kids turned the tables on their parents and showed us, in a couple of one-act plays at the Berkeley Rep School of Theater, what it means to graduate from high school in 2008. Alerted to the plays by a glowing preview in the San Francisco Chronicle we caught the opening night of Perfect Score and El Soldado: the college admissions process meets Iraq.

Perfect Score - College Admissions from a teen point of view

Berkeley High School senior Katie Henry has written a wonderful play about college admissions from the viewpoint those most affected by it - the students themselves.

It follows four high school teens as they fret over college and struggle with parents, counselors and application deadlines. Hannah is the kid with a 4.0+ GPA who is desperate to get into Yale - where her mother once walked to classes on Science Hill before her untimely death when Hannah was in fifth grade. James is the rebel who cuts class and is disgusted by whole applications process. Alex bets his future on bending it like Beckham and scoring a soccer scholarship. Ivy, who has the best lines in the play, is the retro-hippie whose principles rub up against reality.

Katie Henry told the Chronicle that the play:

was fueled by “a lot of frustration about how unfair the entire college process seemed, and how difficult it was and how it shouldn’t have to be so difficult.” She was irked by the absurdity of some of the college-application questions - one asked which was more interesting, a gorilla or a guerrilla - and having to describe herself in 200 words.

“Those questions are real, and they are ridiculous,” says Henry… “I couldn’t describe who I was in 200 words. I didn’t know what they wanted from me. I didn’t know how to tell them what they wanted, and at the same time, I didn’t want to tell them what they wanted to hear. I was just angry and frustrated.”

Her anger and frustration are wonderfully articulated by the talented cast. Insights into the absurdity of the applications process include:

• Having to explain the on-line applications process to parents who know they couldn’t get accepted with their GPA’s if they re-applied today
• Wondering why you’re obsessively applying to brand-name colleges when you refuse to wear brand-name clothes
• Watching your Dad hands over wads of cash to a private college counselor who pats you on the head and spouts platitudes
• Being weighed down by college admissions books the size of telephone directories
• Pinning your hopes for a higher education on your ability to kick a ball between two wooden posts.

As absurd and frustrating as the college admissions process is, it’s not a life or death decision. But increasing numbers of 18-year-olds today do make life or death decisions - in Iraq.

El Soldado - soccer moms of soldier girls

Roxie Perkins’ play followed Henry’s on the bill. It’s a multi-media pastiche which combines a razzle-dazzle spoof on high school wrestling with the agonized soliloquies of a teen girl whose infatuation with a soldier boy leads her toward the recruiting office. The suburbia of mini-vans and manicured lawns is overlaid by images of desert warfare and death in the sand. Albany meets Al Amarah.

The two plays describe experiences of different universes of teens today. Forty years ago there was no differentiation. Getting into college kept you out of Vietnam. Today the war is being fought mostly by kids whose families can’t afford college.

These two plays show the two sides of the same coin - decisions faced by eighteen-year-olds in America. in 2008. As the house lights went up the generation that protested Vietnam applauded. Outside the streets of Berkeley were quiet. That might not last if Iraq turns into a hundred-year war. Be careful who you vote for in November, kids.