To Grandmother’s House She Returns : Stage: ‘My Visits With MGM (My Grandmother Marta)’ relights the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Edit Villarreal calls it “like rising out of the ashes.”

She was talking about Estela Scarlata’s set for Villarreal’s play, “My Visits With MGM (My Grandmother Marta)”: the burned-out shell of a house, filled with family memories. Long before the recent riots and the torching of the inner city, it was a key image in the playwright’s mind. Eerier still, this accidental reminder of the city’s social tragedy is in the site of a cultural tragedy--the Los Angeles Theatre Center, whose resident company went out of business last year. The once-bustling four-theater center now felt full of ghosts.

Yet Villarreal calls her work “a comedy of assimilation,” in which the lessons of a past generation are not lost on the present. Out of the charred Texas abode of Marta Grande, grandmother of young, unconventional Marta Feliz, come “memories that fuel the play, memories that bring the dead back to life.”

The Bilingual Foundation of the Arts production marks the company’s first stride into a large theater (nearly triple the size of its longtime Avenue 19 venue near downtown). “MGM” is a big step for Villarreal as well. Nurtured under Jose Cruz Gonzalez’s direction, first in workshops at South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project and Tucson’s Borderlands Theatre, and now in its second full production (the first was staged at the San Jose Repertory), this semi-autobiographical look at three Mexican-American generations is at last in the shape Villarreal wants it.

Like fellow Latina playwrights such as Milcha Sanchez-Scott (whose “Roosters” appeared in the same LATC space in 1988), Villarreal intends “MGM” to blend the magic realism style of contemporary Latin American literature with qualities and characters that belie stereotypes--above all, the misleading image of the quiet, subservient Mexican grandmother dressed in black.

“They’re not all like that!” says Villarreal, sitting at a table in the empty LATC lobby. “I want to break down that image with this story, since Marta is very much based on my own grandmother, who was her own woman. The rest of the people come out of fiction, exaggeration, a broad comic context--but not Marta. First of all, my grandmother was a Methodist, and virulently anti-Catholic. She came from Monterrey, which has long been a Methodist stronghold. It was a city founded by Jews who fled to Mexico from persecution in Spain during the era of Isabella.

“Marta is part of a great Mexican diaspora created by the events of the 1910 revolution, which really marked the country’s step into the 20th Century.”

Villarreal pauses, mentally patching together the parts of her fiction and her lineage. “Since 1978, when I started writing seriously, I realized that if I wasn’t learning something from the writing--if I was getting bored, then audiences would be bored as well. Then, I realized that the core of the writing process was discovering an idea, a mystery perhaps, that you didn’t realize was even there when you started the writing. It became an act of discovering a new part of myself.

“Well, I realized that Grandmother’s diaspora generation was willfully optimistic. The misleading image of immigrants is one of people running away from something rather than toward something. No one really wants to leave their homeland, but they finally decide that they want something better for themselves and their family. They act, and decide to gain their goal.”

Her play, then, became a project in reviving that history of courage, since, Villarreal notes, “it’s easy for us to forget the bold choices made by earlier immigrants. I wanted to keep alive the energy of that gesture by having Feliz ‘immigrate’ from Texas to L.A.”

The Yale-trained writer jokingly adds that she knows friends in New England who could never handle a move to California--”too foreign, too alienating.” But they would never need to tackle the added beast of assimilation, which Marta Chica, Feliz’s mother, and her great-aunt, Florinda, confront in very different ways in “MGM.”

“Chica is part of that transitional group,” Villarreal says. “She really has troubles here, fitting in. Florinda searches for escape hatches from assimilation: first, through evangelical faith, then dabbling in voodoo, finally in a Catholic parish, where she tries to be a Mother Teresa. She’s my avenue for really broad comedy. To be honest, I’m not terrific with the one-liners, and that’s probably just as well. All my instincts bring me to a benign, ironic view of the world.”

So assimilated herself that she confesses that her Spanish is “very rusty,” Villarreal relied on Lina Montalvo to translate “MGM” into Spanish as part of BFA’s ongoing effort to stage bilingually. “It’s very strange to hear it in Spanish,” Villarreal says, “but it adds a new world, which I like.”

Ultimately, Marta Feliz resembles her independent grandmother more than her mother: “I wanted to create a Hispanic protagonist who does things not widely accepted by her people. She marries three times, to Jews and Anglos, and has a child by each of them. She’s not religious. She breaks the rules, showing, hopefully, that one can triumph through assimilation, yet retain one’s strength.”

This may be the most autobiographical element of all, since Villarreal the writer consciously resists being pegged into the now-familiar role of “rising Chicana voice,” while proving herself in a variety of forms. Her first play, for instance, produced at Yale, was a play about American Indian men titled “Crazy From the Heart.” She has written two unpublished, ethnic-free children’s books--”If Dogs Played Baseball” and “How Tony Made His Family Bigger.” And with writer-husband Bennett Cohen, she is currently adapting Daniel Pinkwater’s fanciful novel “The Snark-Out Boys and the Avocado of Death,” for the Nickelodeon cable channel.

What she says of the graduate playwriting class she teaches at UCLA--”There’s no common trend in a style, no way you can slot them”--can easily apply to her as well. “What my students are confronting, and it’s something I’ve encountered, is the fear of creating a character of the other sex. I’ve decided, though, that the soul has no sex. In fact, for the new play bubbling around in my head now, I don’t think there will be any women.”

Villarreal says this almost as a dare in the face of artistic stereotypes. Somewhere, Grandmother Marta may be smiling.