HEBERT: ‘Ruby’s Bucket of Blood’ : A Long Look Inward to Find ‘Ruby’s’ : Stage: Julie Hebert’s latest work gets its world premiere at the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

When Julie Hebert was a little girl, she used to pretend she wasn’t Cajun. She wished her name were not pronounced in the French style: ay-bear . She wished the Anglican children in her Louisiana elementary school wouldn’t make fun of her.

“I wished I had blond hair and my name was Taylor,” the dark-haired, dark-eyed Hebert said. “I remember riding around on my bicycle, practicing saying ‘Hi’ (like the Anglican kids) instead of ‘Hey,’ the way the Cajuns do.”

It was not until she left her small native town of Berwick, two hours southeast of New Orleans, that she started to develop pride in her background. She was living in California, trying to make it as an actress, then later as a director and finally as a writer, when she began to appreciate the richness of her heritage. How the Cajuns came to this country from the French Canadian colony of Acadia in the 1750s, after being kicked out by the conquering British.

How they were accepted in Louisiana--but only in the swampland--”as a human buffer zone between the main population and the Indians,” as Hebert puts it.

How instead of being killed off by the Indians and the alligator-infested waters, as expected, they intermarried with the Indians and made a rich living off the swamps through hunting, trapping, shrimping.

Now, Hebert, 37, who two years ago moved back to New Orleans, has repeatedly explored her Cajun roots through her writing.

Her latest play, “Ruby’s Bucket of Blood,” which will have its world premiere Wednesday at the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Lyceum Stage, is set on her familiar rural Louisiana turf.

At the heart of “Ruby’s Bucket of Blood” is the story of an interracial romance between a black and a white--both Cajuns--set on a steamy 1961 Saturday night between the hours of 5 p.m. and 5 a.m.

The black, Ruby, is a tough, middle-aged woman with a 13-year-old daughter named Emerald. Ruby runs a blues bar called Ruby’s Bucket of Blood, which has earned its name from the blood spilled during drunken fights there. Ruby is no romantic, but she falls in love--despite herself-- with a white man, Billy Dupre, who fills in for a sick member of the band that plays in her bar. Dupre is married to a woman named Betty. Ruby is also married, and, to make things more complicated, she also has a longtime friend who is in love with her, Johnny Beaugh.

“I identify with all of them,” Hebert said of her five characters. “I identify with Ruby. And when Dupre is seducing Ruby, I understand where he’s coming from. When Betty is pissed off, I understand where she’s coming from. I’ve been 13 (like Emerald) and all confused. And like Johnny, I’ve been in love with someone who was in love with someone else.”

Along with director Sam Woodhouse, who visited New Orleans last month to soak up the atmosphere, Hebert has striven to make the setting absolutely authentic. Even the music played by the three-person on-stage band will sound authentic, a mixture of music from 1961 New Orleans--called “swamp-pop”--as well as original music in the classic style by Mark Bingham.

Through these particulars about Cajun society, its music and prejudices, Hebert said, she is reaching for a universal message about the human dilemma. A message she hopes will come as much from who she is now as where she came from as a child.

“I really wanted to write about people in their 30s and the crazy struggle between passion and reason,” Hebert said, looking small, slight and almost little-girlish as she pushed her straight, dark hair off a face untouched by makeup. “People in their 30s have made certain decisions and yet there’s dissatisfaction. They get torn. I wanted to capture the loneliness of people, the desperation of someone who wanted to change his life and not knowing how to do it and not hurt anyone.

“The world makes it hard on you when you don’t follow its rules,” she said softly. “So you have to be strong and know what you value and protect it.”

Hebert knows quite a bit about breaking rules. She has been thrown out of her family three times--and taken back each time--for offending the mores of her close-knit, Catholic relations.

The day before the interview, she said, she had a phone conversation with her mother in which her mother advised her, again, “ ‘Don’t let your heart get in the way of your good sense.’ . . . I said, ‘Mom, you have the good sense, I’ll have the heart.’ ”

The biggest rule Hebert broke was to give birth, in 1981, to a child while unmarried; at the time she was in a long-term relationship that has since ended.

She credits her daughter with being the catalyst that helped her become a writer.

“I had tried to write a couple of times (before the birth), but I didn’t like what I wrote,” Hebert said. “But after she was born, I started writing again. The birth of a child makes your mortality very clear, and you get a sense of why you shouldn’t waste time.”

Hebert first broke from what was expected of her when she left Louisiana in 1976 for what was supposed to be “a year of fun” in California. She had graduated from Nicholls State University, summa cum laude, with a degree in biology, and she intended to become a doctor. By 1977, she was acting and directing in San Francisco. And once she began directing, “I never went back,” she said simply.

“For the first time in my life, I was working with people who took theater as seriously as I had taken science,” she said. “It opened my eyes as to the impact art has on life.”

Once Hebert chose her career, she never worried that, because she is female, she might have trouble finding directing jobs--and she didn’t. She has directed all over the country, her best-known productions being Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” at the Circle Repertory in New York, the now defunct Los Angeles Theatre Center and in Japan, as well as Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind” for the Steppenwolf company in Chicago.

Part of her self-confidence comes from her family; she has always been encouraged intellectually, she said.

“I come from a family of strong women and sensitive men,” Hebert said. “I never felt I couldn’t do anything because I was a girl.”

Most of her plays reflect not only her home turf, but her focus on women.

Her first, “True Beauties,” first produced in 1986, is about an old Louisiana woman remembering her life at the moment of her death. In “Strongbox,” 1987, two women have coffee and discuss a strange voice one of them hears. “Almost Asleep,” 1988, is set in a woman’s mind as she falls asleep. And in “The Privacy of Strangers,” 1988, two sisters war over a dead husband and a stranger.

Hebert’s connection with the San Diego Rep began indirectly in 1977 when she met Darla Cash, now wife of Rep artistic director Douglas Jacobs. Cash was directing her as St. Joan in Arthur Kopit’s “Chamber Music” in San Francisco.

In the summer of 1989, Cash and Jacobs went to the Los Angeles Theatre to see Hebert’s “Almost Asleep.” While there, Hebert told them the story of what would become her seventh play, “Ruby’s Bucket of Blood,” which she had just begun working on. They were intrigued. Later that year, Hebert gave Jacobs an early draft of “Ruby’s.” Three years and two staged readings after Hebert began creating it, Ruby’s dark, smoky bar is finally about to see light.

The past three years have been long ones for Hebert. During that time, her 10-year relationship with the father of her child broke up, and she has started a new relationship. She also returned to her home state and has become artistic producing director at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, where she will take “Ruby’s Bucket of Blood” next season.

In New Orleans, she has had to deal again with the people for whom the very name Hebert denotes “a certain class,” as she puts it.

She said she has poured all of her resulting emotions about love, longing and loss into the show.

“A lot of this is about how the self survives. My struggle has been to rid myself of self-hatred,” Hebert said.

Yet she has also discovered, in working on this play, an unsuspected source of strength.

“I feel lucky to have been born where I was born,” Hebert said, with an air of someone who is still surprising herself.

Her Cajun background “has the sense of an indomitable spirit inside it which sustains me,” she said. “Sometimes I think that strength comes down through the generations. I don’t want to exorcise it or take it for granted, but I want to know it for what it is.

“I feel lucky.”

* Performances of San Diego Repertory Theatre’s “Ruby’s Bucket of Blood” are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, with Sunday matinees at 2, through March 14. Opens Wednesday. Tickets are $16 to $22. At the Lyceum Stage, 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego. Call 235-8025.