Project Puts It All Together for Children : ‘According to Coyote,’ based on the Plains Indians’ mythical and comic tales, is touring schools and plans several public appearances

“I want to bring more kids into the theater,” Josephine Ramirez said bluntly. “I want to give them a theater vocabulary. I want them to feel comfortable there.”

As staff producer for the Mark Taper Forum’s youth theater Improvisational Theatre Project, Ramirez is in an enviable position to effect some of those goals. In addition to working with the Latino Lab (formerly of the Los Angeles Theatre Center) and planning an event for the Music Center’s 25th anniversary, she coordinates the Young Audiences Project, which will offer open rehearsals for the Taper’s upcoming production of “Richard II.”

But Ramirez’s most demanding baby is the Improvisational Theatre Project, which is touring Southland public schools in John Kauffman’s “According to Coyote.” Featuring a cast of four, “Coyote” is based on the North American Plains Indians’ mythical and comic tales about the prairie adventures of the titular Coyote.

On tour since February, the company is also presenting a series of public performances, which will include stops at Cal State University and Taper Too.

“Coyote” director Peter C. Brosius is an outspoken advocate for children’s theater (he refers to it as an “invisible” art form) and believes that it spans a cross-culture of age and sophistication.

“In some schools, the kids talk to the show the entire time, cheering the actors,” Brosius said. “We’ve gone from a tiny school space to 1,400 seats at Wadsworth. We can perform for a kindergarten in Palmdale, then for 14-year-olds in South-Central L. A. The material has to serve a broad constituency of experience and concerns.”

Ramirez, who’s been at the Taper since 1989, was a community arts coordinator in Seattle before that, “going into rural areas, creating programs for the disenfranchised--people of color, the physically challenged.” As for the move, “I had to get out of the rain,” she said wryly.

And the Taper was quite a lure: “You don’t usually see theater for children like this. We have our own lights, sets, sound. We pay our actors better. We put on quality shows.”

A native of Houston, Ramirez attended a high school for the visual and performing arts, weaving a path from acting to lighting, sound, voice, children’s theater and directing. With bachelor’s and master’s degrees in children’s theater (from, respectively, the University of Texas and the University of Washington), she worked in a variety of capacities: “I had an agent, I produced for arts organizations, I substitute-taught to pay my bills, I did free-lance consulting work. At the time, women--especially women of color--couldn’t do just one thing.”

Amid her Improvisational Theatre duties, Ramirez found time last year to adapt the Mexican novel “Baluncanan” for a staging at the Itchey Foot and worked with the Latino Lab in its Christmas production of “ La Virgen del Tepeyac “; during a 1990 sabbatical, she was involved in Daniel Martinez’s performance work “Ignore the Dents” for the Los Angeles Festival.

A former panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, Ramirez was appointed to the L. A. Cultural Arts Commission in 1990. “It feels,” she said, “like I’ve come full circle.”

When it comes to the precarious state of funding for the arts, Ramirez is less sanguine: “I know the current economic environment hits the schools first--and that’s who buys us. Our shows always sell out; it’s no different this year. But I have a little fear for the future. Programs for young people are not a priority; they don’t bring in money. That non-forward mentality is the bottom line.”

As for the Improvisational Theatre Project, “it’s not a program on the outside,” she said firmly. “It’s safe within the institution. It will stay.”