IN THE CLASSROOM:Taking a taste of playwriting

He’s only 7 years old, but Alexander Johnson has already penned a short story — and watched himself portrayed by an actor.

The Mariners Elementary School first-grader, like every other student on his campus, wrote a short story in class earlier this year. The teachers asked every student to come up with a narrative featuring three or more characters — and Alexander looked to himself and his favorite TV show for inspiration. In his first-person story, “The Ometrix,” he takes a camping trip along with Ben and Gwen Tennyson, the heroes of the cartoon series “Ben 10,” and discovers a magic watch that allows its wearer to turn into an alien.

Then, on Friday, a theater troupe called the Imagination Machine visited Mariners and performed some of the stories that students had handed in. Alexander’s piece was one of the lucky winners.

“It only took like a few days [to write], that was all,” Alexander said after the show, still wowed by his success. “And it only took two pages.”

The Imagination Machine visits schools around Southern California to bring students’ creative writing to life. The troupe at Mariners stuck mostly to the source material but added a few improvisational touches, using costumes, sight gags and funny voices to keep the audience hooked.

Second-grader Alex Payse and fifth-grader Oscar Rendon collaborated on “The Friendly Spider and the Spooky House,” in which a spider assists a haunted house in scaring trick-or-treaters on Halloween. Another team, second-grader Camron Elbettor and fifth-grader Victor Salazar, came up with “Boxing Kangaroo and the Space Alien Attack,” in which the hopping hero dissuades a group of Martians from annihilating the planet.

His clinching argument: “If you destroy Earth, there’s no ‘Harry Potter 7’!”

The first story performed was Caleb Detken’s “The Sleeping Monkey,” in which an ice cream store owner finds a monkey snoozing in the tree where he grows bananas to make sundaes. Caleb had no idea his story would make the program, but his mother, Margo Detken, had been tipped off in advance. She opted for a celebration that fit the nature of his story.

“We’ll probably take him out to ice cream,” she said.