Young Playwright Finds Life’s Lessons the Best : * Stage: Josefina Lopez, 23, seems to be repeating earlier success with another based-on-fact play, ‘Real Women Have Curves.’

In the spring, the thoughts of carefree high school students lightly turn to what they are going to wear to the big prom.

In the world of the play “Real Women Have Curves,” the five women in Garcia’s Sewing Factory in Los Angeles are also thinking about what those students are going to wear to the prom. But the thoughts aren’t so so light or carefree.

Because they are laboring to finish the dresses for the big prom--specifically an order for 100 prom dresses--that they must hurry to fill while one of the women, who owns the factory, watches nervously for the immigration agents.

The owner is an undocumented worker, hoping to raise money through this order, to hire a lawyer who will help her obtain a green card so she can stay in the country legally.

“Real Women Have Curves,” a Teatro de la Esperanza production by Josefina Lopez, will play today only at 8 p.m. at the Mandeville Auditorium at UC San Diego.

Lopez, 23, is writing from experience. After high school, for a few months in late 1987, she worked in her sister’s East Los Angeles sewing factory, along with their mother.

“We all worked for a manufacturer, and we always had a hard time finishing,” Lopez said on the phone from her parents’ home in Los Angeles.

“My sister was the second youngest of all the women there, and she was very stressed out. She worked so hard, she inspired me. She didn’t have all the problems that come across in the play, but she was the last one to get her green card. She had waited for the last minute (to apply under the amnesty provisions of the 1986 immigration law) because she owed money here and there.

“My mother made a joke once, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if the migra came and, instead of taking away the employees, they took the owner?’ And we all laughed.

“But then I thought, ‘What if that was the case. . . .?’ ”

Lopez’s last big success in town was also drawn from her life. It was the semi-autobiographical “Simply Maria,” a one-act that captured the fear, agony and frustration she felt as a Mexican-born undocumented teen-ager growing up in Los Angeles.

Although Lopez lived in Los Angeles since the age of 6, she didn’t get her green card until 1989.

She won the San Diego-based Playwrights Project annual contest for new writers with “Simply Maria.” Its first professional production was given by the Playwrights Project at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company in 1988, and it has since been co-produced by KPBS-TV and the Playwrights Project in an award-winning production that has been televised in many other cities. It has toured the country with the San Juan Bautista-based Teatro Campesino and returned to San Diego this year at the Educational Cultural Complex.

At one point, the critical acclaim and attention paid to “Simply Maria” seemed to hold the solution to all of Lopez’s hopes and dreams. She was sure that this would either earn her enough or help her get scholarships to go to college.

So far that hasn’t panned out. The years between “Simply Maria” and “Real Women Have Curves” have proven difficult.

She has taken courses at UC San Diego, at New York University in New York, at Columbia College in Chicago and at East Los Angeles Community College, applying for financial aid, getting some money and then dropping out when the scholarships ran out.

“I think I’m a junior now,” she said uncertainly. Her hope is still to get that bachelor’s degree and pursue a career in film.

Even as a writer, she has found herself groping for a voice in this intervening time.

She has written several one-act plays since “Simply Maria,” but none have struck chords the way that first play and now “Real Women Have Curves” seems to be doing.

After a San Francisco production by the San Francisco-based Teatro de la Esperanza in 1990, “Real Women Have Curves” had even been optioned by Warner Bros. But the option fell through. She still hopes to sell a treatment of it to PBS.

Lopez thinks that these two plays touch people because both are so directly drawn from her life.

“After I wrote the story of my family, I thought I was going to not write things about them anymore,” she said.

“But I found the things that concern me are the things that concern others. I think I’m going to continue writing about my life because that’s what I know best. It’s easier and much more truthful, and why shouldn’t I tell my stories?”

“Real Women” is dedicated to the women in the sewing factory and author Susie Orbach, of “Fat Is a Feminist Issue.” Lopez, who has struggled with weight most of her life, credits the book with helping her see fat “as a way of shouting back, of rebelling.”

“I’ve lost a lot of weight now because I’ve been able to deal with my anger instead of swallowing it in.”

Lopez modeled the character of Ana on herself.

“Ana, she’s the little whippersnapper. She thinks she knows it all, and she’s probably the most educated and she’s somewhat condescending, but at the end she learns something from the others.”

Like Ana, Lopez said she takes pride in what she has learned from her family. And she continues to pour what she’s learned right back into her plays.

* “Real Women Have Curves” will be presented at 8 p.m. today at Mandeville Auditorium on the University of California at San Diego campus in La Jolla. Tickets are $15 general admission, $13 for seniors, $11 for students, 534-6467.