Sirens blare and a slow heartbeat pounds. A projection screen on stage flashes an all-too-familiar and unsettling scene: a steady downpour descends on a makeshift memorial of cardboard boxes housing flickering candles and damp letters.

This is the cold aftermath of violence that Bronx activist and playwright Lyn Pyle begins with in her educational theater and video piece “Ain’t Easy,” a 2-year-old production now playing regularly at Hostos Community College in the south Bronx. The actors are now presenting workshops in local schools as well.

In this case, the anonymous opening scene is actually footage of the memorial of Kamal “Peanut” Singh, a teenager from the Knox-Gates neighborhood in Norwood who was shot to death in 2003. Pyle, who helped found the COVE, a Knox-Gates community youth center, knew Singh well because he frequented the COVE growing up.

Singh’s death, compounded by the seemingly self-perpetuating cycle of violence in the Bronx, prompted Pyle and her theatre group, Mass Transit Street Theatre, to invite youth to tell their violence-related stories a few years ago. About seven teenagers responded to Mass Transit’s invite. From those seven stories, Pyle chose five to be used in “Ain’t Easy,” which she wrote with the help of “story midwife” Karen Wilson.

“It was amazing how typical and how telling just that small sample of stories was,” Pyle said.

The result is a piece that follows five young people, ranging in age from about 15 to 24, as they confront violence in specific everyday situations.

Four of the characters are separated from another more somber figure, named Pito, who is now in prison reflecting on how he ended up incarcerated. Later, we find out Pito, based on a real person, stabbed somebody to death after an avoidable confrontation escalated out of his control.

The other characters work through their own set of confrontations, some successfully, some not so successfully.

Jonathan Jones, played by 17-year-old Brooklyn native David Florian, is at a party and gets disrespected by someone. Jones doesn’t really want to fight, he says, but he’s with his cousin, a hard case who eggs Jones on. Finally, he snaps and decides to fight. He loses, badly.

On the other hand, Anton Negroni (Nelson Felix) stays out of trouble by focusing on his passion: basketball. Christina Calderon (Ana Collado) works as a conflict resolution counselor, but struggles to overcome violent tendencies herself.

Rapper Aisha Norris, a former COVE staffer, who talks about her experience as a performer being pushed to be more “gangster,” provides interludes between character monologues with insight-heavy rhymes.

The play moves swiftly and is punctuated onscreen by scenes of war and statistics about gun violence. At one point, a conflict resolution flow chart appears, shifting the stage into a classroom.

“It’s good, it’s inclusive, it’s useful theatre,” explains Florian.

Following the performance, Norris and the other actors engage the audience, made up of mostly middle-school age youth, in a discussion. Some giggle nervously with friends, some speak up and talk about which characters they like or don’t like, what they did wrong, what they did right. The audience becomes a room of boxing analysts dissecting a prize fight, only they’re trying to find out how the combatants entered the ring in the first place.

“The kids giggle a lot, they’re with their friends,” Florian says. “But I think once they get home [the lessons from the play] sinks in a little bit hopefully.”

A couple of Knox-Gates youth, COVE regulars, showed up to a performance at Hostos last week. Recently, another act of youth violence rocked the troubled neighborhood when a teenager, Michael Santiago, was shot in the back by rival drug dealers. He’s now paralyzed.

Marcus Decker, 11, is a sixth grader at PS 95 who lives in Knox-Gates. He doesn’t know if a play like “Ain’t Easy” would help stop the violence in his neighborhood. “They like to get into fights,” he said.

He deals with it by avoiding it altogether. “I just stay inside,” he said.

Ed. note: For details on future “Ain’t Easy” performances, see On Stage in Out & About on p. 22.