Equal Billing for the Sexes : Theater: A bilingual stage company urges children to pursue their dreams even if they don’t fit into cultural stereotypes.

Tina, an aspiring basketball player, dreams of spending a day with Magic Johnson.

“I’d rather stuff a hoop than a cabbage for a soup,” she sings.

Tina’s friend George would love to enter a baking contest but is afraid the guys will laugh at him.

“I’d rather be a baker than a Dodger or a Laker,” he sings.

Tina and George, who ultimately defy sexual stereotypes and pursue their respective dreams, are characters from “No Contest ( Somos Distintos, Somos Iguales ),” an original bilingual musical touring local elementary schools with large populations of low-income Latinos.

The play’s message that it’s OK to break away from traditional gender roles may not seem revolutionary to the average child. But for thousands of Latino children, rigid sex roles are the norm, said actress Carmen Zapata, co-founder and producing director of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, whose offshoot, Teatro Para Los Ninos, produced the play.

In many families, “girls are taught that they should train themselves to be good wives and mothers and the boys are trained to be breadwinners,” said Zapata. “The parents keep the girls from getting the kind of education that would let them be anything other than a homemaker.”

Peggy Jaeger, a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Bassett Street Elementary School where the play was recently shown to laughing, clapping students, said the play’s message is an important one for Latino children.

“So many brains are not being tapped because the parents are not going to spend any time or money on the girl because ‘she is just going to grow up and have babies anyway,’ ” Jaeger said. Bassett Street Elementary School is predominantly Latino with a large population of recent emigres from Mexico and South and Central America, she said.

“Those girls that are brilliant--and there are quite a few here--get lost in the shuffle. The parents put all their efforts, money and time into the boys,” Jaeger said sadly.

Helping to solve such problems--as well as educate Latino and other children about Latino culture--is the reason Teatro Para Los Ninos was formed, Zapata said.

It was established in 1985 after Los Angeles school board member Larry Gonzales approached the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts to lament the lack of programs to teach Latino schoolchildren pride and self-esteem and to introduce Latino traditions, languages and values to other children.

Gonzales approached the Los Angeles-based foundation because it develops and presents theater to promote Latino heritage and culture. Zapata said she and two friends started the foundation 17 years ago because most of the parts for Latinos were “gang members, prostitutes and pimps.”

Today the foundation continues to create, commission, produce and perform English translations of many major Spanish-language plays, which are performed alternately in English and Spanish.

The foundation secured a grant from the Dayton Hudson Foundation to start the children’s bilingual theater and has since received money from the Anheuser-Busch Co. and Arco. To date, the teatro has presented four original plays to more than 700,000 local Latino schoolchildren. The messages of the plays have ranged from discouraging graffiti and gang membership to encouraging environmental consciousness, said Zapata.

The teatro also is working on a play urging troubled students to steer clear of drugs and gangs and to discourage suicide and teen pregnancy.

Written by Los Angeles Unified elementary schoolteacher Robyn Samuels, “No Contest” intersperses English and Spanish songs and dialogue and is performed by a cast of four actors, including blacks, whites and Latinos. The music was composed by Ronnie Margolis and the lyrics were written by Jeannine Frank and Samuels.

The play opened in February, and theater officials expect it will be shown to 100,000 or more children in greater Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties, said Nancie Graf-Sidiropoulos, coordinator of the children’s theater.

In the Valley, it is next scheduled to be performed at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday at Sylvan Park School in Van Nuys and at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. June 4 at Hart Street School in Canoga Park.

In the play, Zo, a friendly space alien (or “extraterrestrial amiga”) comes to Earth to learn more about life on this planet and encounters Tina and George. The two children try to help Zo learn the difference between girls and boys and in the process end up learning lessons in sexual stereotyping, courage and expressing emotions.

Additional lessons--in consumerism--come from another character in the play, Rich Dinero, a greedy toy maker who schemes to earn more money by making toys that break easily and can’t be shared by boys and girls. Dinero’s “cootie spray” makes boys and girls hate each other.

Dinero tries to drum up customers for his toys by holding a bake-off for girls and a basketball contest for boys. He scoffs at George for trying to enter the cooking event, sneering, “What are you? Some kind of a weirdo? You don’t want the boys calling you a sissy, do you?”

So Zo, the alien, enlists the help of children watching the play. She gets them to chant with her: “George is a girl. Tina is a boy.”

George and Tina tell Zo she’s got it wrong. “You can’t change a girl into a boy or a boy into a girl just by calling names,” they tell her.

“Then what are you worried about?” the alien asks.

Tina and George ultimately organize a boycott against the contests, and rally courage and resourcefulness to rescue Zo after Dinero kidnaps her. They get Zo back to her spaceship in time to make it home to see her family.

The children at Bassett school laughed, clapped and waved as Zo’s ship blasted off.

Afterward, George Morales, 10, a fourth-grader, said he liked the play and learned that “boys can do stuff that girls can, like cooking eggs and bacon.” His friends echoed his sentiments.

To complement the play, the foundation gives teachers written material that includes sample discussion questions (“Is it OK for boys to cry? Is it all right for girls to play football?”) and recommends games that require cooperation between girls and boys.

Zapata hopes that the play will “open minds and teach the Latino children that there are options” outside rigid sex-role stereotypes.

“The idea is if you plant the seed in their minds that they can do anything they want, maybe they will convince their parents or maybe they will find a way to do what they want,” the actress said. “Maybe one of the little boys will go home and say, ‘Hey mom, can I bake a cake?’ I don’t know what the answer will be but at least there will be that little illumination somewhere.”