SCR Picks 6 for Latino Playwright Program : Theater: The two-week workshop is designed to test playwrights’ scripts before an audience.

Six Latino playwrights have been selected by South Coast Repertory from about 100 who submitted scripts for its fifth annual Hispanic Playwrights Project, a theater spokesman announced Thursday.

The playwrights are Arthur Giron, Edwin Sanchez and Jack Agueros--all from New York--Bernardo Solano from Los Angeles, Octavio Solis from San Francisco and Caridad Svich from South Gate in Los Angeles County.

Three of the chosen scripts--Solis’ “Prospect,” Giron’s “A Dream of Wealth” and Sanchez’s “Floorshow: Dona Sol and Her Dog”--will receive public readings Aug. 10 and 11 as the culmination of a two-week workshop designed to develop and test them before an audience.

The other three scripts will receive private, in-house readings.

Giron participated in the first HPP program during the summer of 1986 with “Charlie Bacon and his Family,” which subsequently received a West Coast premiere on the SCR Mainstage in 1987. His current script, “A Dream of Wealth” is described as “the epic story of the Imperial Fruit Co.” in Central America--an apparent reference to the United Fruit Co.--and focuses on the corporate “banana cowboys” who ran it.

Solis, who has an HPP commission for a future play, participated in last summer’s program with “Man of the Flesh.” Earlier this season SCR gave that satirical reworking of the Don Juan myth a world premiere on the Second Stage in the California Play Festival. His current script, “Prospect,” is described as the tale of “a young Latino Texan who lives in constant denial of his heritage” until he meets “a trio of unusual characters.”

Sanchez also participated in last summer’s HPP program with “Trafficking in Broken Hearts,” which later received a workshop production from the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. His current script, “Floorshow,” is described as a “dream play” revolving around a young man’s “mysterious relationship” with his mother, “a prostitute turned prophetess.”

The scripts to be read privately are Agueros’ “The News from Puerto Rico” about a man banished from his family, Solano’s “Scarlet Macaw” about a wealthy Colombian barricaded in his Bogota apartment, and Svich’s “Gleaning/Rebusca” about two Cuban-American women living “on the cusp between old-world values and new-world freedom.”

Agueros is a newcomer to SCR. Solano has participated in the HPP program twice before, with “Death and Life of Luis Rodriguez” in 1987 and “Imagenes” in 1988. Svich was an observer at last summer’s HPP program.