Latina Actress Takes Her ‘Work’ to Heart : Theater: Ruby Nelda Perez empathizes with her troubled character in “A Woman’s Work,” playing at Centro Cultural this weekend.

Audiences often assume the character Ruby Nelda Perez plays in “A Woman’s Work” is autobiographical.

It’s not.

Perez has never been on welfare. Nor did she marry an abusive husband. Nor does she now aspire to be a schoolteacher--although she worked as a teacher for a while before she became a full-time actress.

But the stories she tells in this solo show do reflect the life of many welfare recipients in San Antonio, Tex., where she lives.

“It’s hard for a lot of women if their husbands leave and there’s physical abuse,” Perez said in a phone interview early this week from her home. “Welfare can be the only way to get by until they get on their feet. It can be a cycle for some, but for many it’s a way out of a terrible situation.”

Perez, 38, will present the San Diego premiere of “A Woman’s Work” this week, performing tonight and Saturday nights at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park.

The character she plays in the show is a woman who breaks the welfare cycle, but not without a great deal of resistance from her abusive husband and from her family, who tell her she would be better off getting married again than going back to school. Perez wove the bilingual 80-minute piece together from a group of poems by four Chicana writers: Denise Chavez, Mary Sue Galindo, Beverly Sanchez-Padilla and Enedina Casarez-Vasquez.

She has performed it more than 150 times since it had its debut in 1985 at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio. That includes stints at the late Joseph Papp’s Latin American Theatre Festival in New York and as part of the Smithsonian Institute’s Hispanic Heritage Month in Washington.

Perez was born in Chicago, but raised in Alice, Tex., by Latino parents from families that had lived in Texas for generations.

She took her first drama class before she had ever seen a play. Her “breakthrough” came during her sophomore year, when most of the school’s drama students took an unauthorized trip to Mexico during a speech tournament and got suspended from extracurricular activities.

Perez and a handful of fellow Chicanas were the only ones not to go, so the drama teacher had to come up with a small-cast play for them: “Riders to the Sea.”

To everyone’s surprise, the girls made it all the way to the state drama finals.

“Once you get recognition, you’re hooked,” Perez said on the phone from San Antonio.

Still, no one, and especially not her parents, thought theater was an appropriate choice for a young Chicana. Where would she even find parts? Theaters, and certainly Hollywood, were not actively looking for ethnic diversity in the 1970s.

So she left college to become a kindergarten teacher. But the dream of an acting career wouldn’t die and she found herself acting in the evenings and on weekends, “burning the candle on both ends.”

Then she got an invitation to join the First Professional Bilingual Theater, a new company in Houston.

She worked there two years before trying her luck in Hollywood in 1979. She hated Los Angeles and left after five months for Teatro de la Esperanza in Santa Barbara, where she stayed for two years.

Teatro de la Esperanza marked “a turning point,’ she said. “I learned everything I became now. I learned to be conscious of social issues, women’s issues, Chicana issues, boycotts and how to work in a collective where no one is the main boss.”

But the touring at Teatro de la Esperanza proved exhausting, and she returned to her former company in Houston in 1981, which by then had renamed itself the Bilingual Theater of Houston. There she became reacquainted with director Jorge Pina, whom she married in 1982. And, when Pina became director of the drama program at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, she went with him.

She launched “A Woman’s Work” at the Guadalupe by chance.

In 1985, after having taken some time off to care for her two-year-old baby, she was asked to read some literature at the Guadalupe in honor of the International Women’s Day Celebration. She put out feelers for work by local writers and, after sifting through piles of typewritten and handwritten manuscripts, came up with the poems that would become her one-woman show.

The audience response was enthusiastic and Perez, after working to establish a firm narrative in the piece, began to tour with it.

Perez says “A Woman’s Work” has solidified her commitment to her heritage, which she clearly loves. But that is not the story of the central character she plays: In one of the most dramatic segments, she asks her mother to forgive her “for not wanting to be like you. I don’t know how to make tortillas, but don’t cry for me, it’s going to be OK.”

The character needs to leave behind some traditions in order to “make it” in American society. Perez is on the opposite track: this show has reinvigorated her ties to her community. She said she hopes this play will also reach those whom she calls the “educated Chicanos. I want them to come back to the barrio, to come back to the place from where they came, not to forget their roots and to bring back their education to their neighbors.”

Perez makes a point of doing a show for migrant workers at each performance stop.

On Saturday morning she will give a free performance in one of the North County encampments where migrant workers live. Afterward, at 1 p.m., she will give a theater workshop at the Centro Cultural de la Raza.

She said she hopes that Chicanos of all economic levels who see her show will come away with “a feeling of pride and a feeling of their roots.

“I want them to feel pride of being Chicano, to recognize themselves or their families and to laugh and cry about the culture which can be a great relief.

“What I like best is when afterwards, they say, ‘You made me think of my mother or my family.’ And then they don’t give me a handshake, they stand in line to give me a hug.”

* Performances of “A Woman’s Work” are 8 p.m. today and Saturday. Tickets are $8; children are free. At the Centro Cultural de la Raza, Balboa Park, 235-6135.