One Man’s World : Stage: “I Am Celso” stars a Latino Everyman whose musings appeal to people of all nationalities.

Ruben Sierra can’t seem to shake “I Am Celso.”

He began touring the one-man show in 1985, but, after four years of doing the play about a philosophical Latino town drunk, he gave it a rest. Now, after a year off, he’s ready to stage its San Diego debut, at the Kingston Playhouse.

It will be a co-production by the Bowery Theatre and San Diego’s first professional Latino theater company, Teatro Mascara Magica as its debut show.

It is also a homecoming for the play.

Sierra co-adapted the play with Jorge Huerta, artistic director of Teatro Mascara Magica, from the works of poet Leo Romero five years ago.

Huerta directed the show in staged readings at the Old Globe Theatre and UC San Diego, where Huerta teaches.

Since then, Sierra, 43, has traveled with the fully produced show to New York (where it was part of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival), Seattle, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Los Angeles and Oregon.

But the opening at the Bowery will mark the first time that Sierra gets to show San Diego the results of the very personal artistic process that began here.

Walking on the stage, Sierra picks up and gently fingers his own possessions that he uses as Celso on stage: a blue coffee pot, a trophy, an old wooden car, the crucifix on the wall, even the sheets and pillowcase on the bed.

His relationship with Celso began in the 1970s when he came across a collection of poems by Romero in a Chicano publication, he said as the interview continued in the adjoining Kingston Hotel.

“I started reading the poems, and I loved them. He talks about things we can all relate to. He talks about love, he talks about life, he talks about children, women, relationships, aspirations and drinking his wine. He’s a great storyteller and a man of the earth.

“He has a lot of universal qualities about him, and yet there is something very Latino about him.”

But Sierra acknowledges, with some pride, that others may not agree with Celso being strictly Latino.

“As we were working on the show, people would say to me, ‘He’s German,’ ‘He’s Irish,’ ‘He’s French.’ The original designer we had, Gilbert Wong, said, ‘No, he’s Chinese.’ ”

Another quality Celso seems to have is near indestructibility. Sierra said Romero, with whom he and Huerta worked closely on this adaptation, tried to kill off the character several times to no avail.

Sierra’s new addition to the show opening at the Bowery is a story Romero tells of Celso contemplating suicide.

“Celso is standing by a raging river bank. A priest sees him and he says, ‘Think of the seriousness of your sin!’ Celso steps back and the priest, ledge and all, falls into the water and drowns.

“Celso realizes he has just witnessed a miracle. The priest made the water holy. So he starts selling it for 50 cents a bucket.”

Sierra himself seems quite different from the rag-clad jokester he so admires. As of January, the longtime professor at the University of Washington (which is where he met fellow instructor Ralph Elias, now artistic director of the Bowery) was named dean of the School of Theatre at Cal Arts in Valencia, Calif.

He experienced his first great success in theater while still an undergraduate at St. Mary’s University in his native San Antonio, Tex. In 1968, he wrote a satirical show called “La Raza Pura,”

which means the pure race, with a subtitle of “Racial, Racial” (a take-off on the Paul Newman/Joanne Woodward movie, “Rachel Rachel” that had just come out).

It was a sendup of racial stereotypes that was risque for its time, Sierra said.

“We had a bomb scare, we had performances stop, and the police would come.” The show drew such attention from the local press that producers from the Public Broadcasting Service, which was then called National Education Television, checked it out and then, liking what it saw, put the show on the air.

Next thing Sierra knew, he was getting offers to do shows on local stations. Later, he decided to explore opportunities in Los Angeles. But, when agents told him they could get him work if he would change his name (Philip Ruben was the suggestion) and comb his hair so that he wouldn’t look or seem Latino, he said, ‘No, thank you,’ and went on to the graduate school at the University of Washington.

In 1978, he began a theater there called the Seattle Group Theatre with which he still maintains ties. Seattle Group Theatre produced the premiere production of “I Am Celso.”

An outsider might describe the theater as multi-ethnic, but not Sierra.

“We opened our doors to everybody, all the best people--white, black, brown, disabled. We didn’t think of ourselves as an ethnic theater. We thought of everyone else (in the predominantly white theaters) as ethnic.”

It started on a shoestring of $2,500.

“I got into a lot of debt along the way,” Sierra recalled. “I had 15 credit cards.”

He also did whatever he needed to do to keep it going.

“I’ve written acted, directed, produced, designed and sold tickets at the box office,” he recalled.

Thirteen years later, that same company has a budget of close to $1 million. Since Sierra’s move to Valencia in January, he has maintained a long-distance advisory relationship with the theater. Although he misses it and Seattle, he has taken Celso with him.

He couldn’t let Celso go anymore than Romero could, as he explains it, because the character is as much a state of mind as anything else.

“I think Celso helps you to look at things a little differently,” said Sierra.

“I think, after this play, you’ll look at the moon differently because of the way he talks about the moon. If you ever felt sorry for yourself, I think he can find a way to help you not to.”