'Burning Libraries' review: Kids stir melting pot

Burning Libraries: Stories From the New Ellis Island: Multimedia performance. By Helen Stoltzfus with Albert Greenberg. Directed by Stoltzfus. Through Sun. ALICE Presents, Z Space at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. Also Dec. 3-5. Laney College Theater, 900 Fallon St., Oakland. One hour. $20-$25. (800) 838-3006. www.brownpapertickets.com.

The stories are so short that some could almost be haiku and few are as long as a sonnet. They come from Mexico, Cambodia, Yemen, Guatemala, Vietnam, Liberia and the American South. As slim, even inconsequential as many can be, woven together they become an eloquent tapestry of Bay Area - and American - life.

For all the handsome packaging applied by director-creator Helen Stoltzfus, it's the childlike simplicity of the stories that makes the biggest impact in "Burning Libraries: Stories From the New Ellis Island."

That's the point. The movement-theater piece that opened Saturday at Z Space's Theater Artaud is a child's-eye view of our multiple American heritages - as told by children.

A project of ALICE Presents - the producing arm of Arts and Literacy in Children's Education (ALICE), founded by Stoltzfus - "Libraries" consists of 35 stories selected from more than 400 written by second-, third- and fourth-graders in Oakland public schools. Edited by Stoltzfus and husband Albert Greenberg, former core members of A Traveling Jewish Theatre, the stories come from the kids' interviews with family elders about their heritage.

These are the stories that have or are melting into our collective cultural pot. The mini tales can be as simple as a cooking lesson or a glimpse of fishermen casting nets into a foreign sea or as iconic as the great-great grandfather who arrived on a slave ship, escaped to an Indian village and married into the tribe.

Many are capsule accounts of the rigors of migration - on boats from Vietnam, in flight from the Jim Crow South or from Yemen to then-new Israel, on foot across the northern Mexico desert or through Cambodia to Thailand.

Stoltzfus packages the words - spoken on tape by a multicultural array of 18 narrators, young and old - in a seamlessly flowing mix of expressive movement, beautifully executed by dancers Danny Nguyen, a fleet-footed, rubber-legged Jesus Cortés, and versatile dancer-aerialists Susan Voyticky and Kerri Kresinski. A deftly handled child puppet completes the ensemble.

Greenberg's eclectic score draws on African, Mexican, Native American, and near and far Eastern patterns. David Robertson's lights paint the stage and bodies swathed in the aerialists' long strands of cloth, augmented by Ian Winters' projections.

At times, the packaging seems overdone and the music strains for effect. But the stories trump any overreaching. Joyful memories of a Mexican fiesta or Liberian celebration contrast with Khmer Rouge atrocities or the World War II catastrophe at Port Chicago. The breaking of a pot takes on unexpected significance in one family's legacy.

It's not just the wise child who knows his or her grandparents' stories. Sharing them makes us all a bit wiser, too.

E-mail Robert Hurwitt at rhurwitt@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle