STAGE : The Juggler : Magic realist Jose Rivera, who writes for both stage and TV, likes to keep another ball in the air--the Latino cultural cause

Playwright Jose Rivera sits at a cluttered wooden desk in a vintage building near Hollywood and Cahuenga. A snapshot of himself in a casual moment with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, just brandished for a visitor’s inspection, lies on top of a stack of papers, literally inches away from a script treatment for an ABC pilot.

The juxtaposition of magical realism’s grand patriarch with the more prosaic tracts of TV production may sound like one of those moments when cultural worlds collide, but it’s perfectly natural in this man’s Los Angeles. Rivera, whose darkly comedic “Marisol” opens Sept. 16 at the La Jolla Playhouse, is a rare bird among Hollywood writers.

Unlike most who drop the stage once TV or film gigs come their way, Rivera has juggled ongoing and increasingly high-profile careers in both mediums for nearly a decade now. He’s done so without exploiting the stage simply to develop works for TV, or tailoring his theater to please industry tastes.

Like the father who cuts his hand to water the corn in Rivera’s play “The Promise,” the writer has learned to use one part of himself to sustain something else that also nourishes him. “One of the ironies of doing television is that it lets me not worry about money for a while, so I take far greater risks in my theater work,” he says. “Also, I’m propelled by fear of writing my plays like a TV writer.”

Although his early plays were kitchen-sink realism, Rivera went on to experiments in magical realism that reaped their share of bad reviews. Yet with “Marisol,” the story of one Latina’s futuristic odyssey in a post-apocalyptic New York, he seems to have found his stride.

“Theater is about language, ideas and moving culture forward,” Rivera says. “It’s about a deeper form of expression, a greater soul-searching than TV. TV is fine, but I can create my lasting work in theater.”

Just as he’s begun to be more successful in theater, Rivera has also taken giant steps forward in TV. Although he had his first staff writing job in the early ‘80s for Norman Lear’s Embassy Television, it was with last year’s “Eerie, Indiana,” a quasi-surreal NBC series set in a prototypal Midwestern town, that Rivera ascended to loftier ranks with his credits as creator and writer-producer.

“Television is a hungry beast. That’s the downside, that I have no time for anything else when I’m deeply involved,” Rivera says. “The good side is that everything will be canceled eventually” . . . a fate met by “Eerie.”

“I have problems doing anything more than two years in a row,” Rivera continues. “I get bored. I alternate like a migrant worker. I’ll spend two years working in TV and then two years writing a play.”

Rivera is also using his “Eerie” leverage to begin to move some larger mountains. He recently sold ABC a pilot idea in which all of the principal characters are Puerto Rican.

“My only agenda in television is that I would love to create a Latino presence on TV, where there is none,” he says. “That’s the one thing that keeps me going back.

“I was at a meeting at a company I won’t name, talking to an executive,” Rivera continues, launched on a topic close to heart. “I said I would love to do a Latino series with all Latino characters. He looked puzzled and asked, ‘Would you set that in the United States?’ To me, that anecdote says a lot.”

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Rivera was born in 1955 in Puerto Rico, where his family lived until 1959. Fleeing his homeland’s depressed economy, Rivera’s father, who was uncomfortable with cities, settled his family on undeveloped Long Island.

“It was idyllic and lush,” Rivera, the oldest of six siblings, recalls. “But most of the people came out from New York to get away from Puerto Ricans and we were not well received. The only kids who would let us in their houses were the Jewish ones.”

Rivera’s father worked as a $95-a-week short-order cook for a decade until he quit to start his own diner, only to see that go under when a shopping mall went up across the street. “He went into a tailspin,” Rivera says. “He was a janitor, worked in a greenhouse, drove a cab and drank a lot.”

This led to the senior Rivera’s eventual debilitation. “He’s diabetic but he wouldn’t stop drinking or smoking, so little by little, inch by inch, he lost both legs below the knee to amputation. He’s become infantilized. He can’t do anything for himself.”

A full scholarship enabled Rivera to escape to Ohio’s Denison University, where he wrote and produced four plays. After graduation, he returned to live at home on Long Island.

In 1979, Rivera moved to the Bronx, making his first New York theater splash with the favorably reviewed “The House of Ramon Iglesia” at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in 1983. It’s an overtly angry look at a Puerto Rican family on Long Island, based on Rivera’s post-college home life. PBS’ “American Playhouse” aired the play in 1986.

At the center of “Ramon Iglesia” is a raging, alcoholic father, an archetype that appears repeatedly in Rivera’s work. “He was a hard father to live with,” Rivera says, referring to his father, undoubtedly the source of the play’s protagonist. “I was so scared of him as a kid.”

Rivera’s parents never saw “Ramon Iglesia”--or any of Rivera’s plays, for that matter--because they’d already moved back to Puerto Rico. But one of Norman Lear’s people did see the play, and since they were looking for a Latino writer at the time, Rivera was hired on the spot by Embassy Television.

Among Rivera’s assignments was “a.k.a. Pablo,” a 1984 show the writer now dubs a “disaster.” “One of the biggest mistakes was agreeing to take that job,” he says. “It was about a Chicano family in East L.A. and I was a Puerto Rican kid in the Bronx. At one point I said to Norman Lear, ‘This is as foreign to me as it is to you.’

“People in L.A. don’t really know what a Puerto Rican is,” Rivera says, referring to the entertainment industry’s frequent equation of “Latino” with “Chicano” or “Mexican-American.” “We all have different political agendas. Puerto Ricans don’t worry about immigration. Mexicans don’t worry about overthrowing Castro.”

These differences can be divisive. “One of the problems in the industry is there are schisms in the Latino community between Chicano, Cuban and Puerto Rican artists and others,” Rivera says. “It’s a small pie and everybody wants a piece of it. The groups tend to be cliqueish. They tend to have a siege mentality and there’s a lot of in-fighting. That’s one of the things that’s held back Latinos in the mass media.”

Despite the cultural differences, however, there’s a strong case for collaboration. “As people on the lower end of the economic scale, lagging behind in education, we have a stake in working together,” Rivera says. “I like to think of artists as transpolitical, that Chicano artists and I have a common agenda in terms of bettering our population, moving our art forward.”

Unfortunately, things haven’t moved forward much since the days of “a.k.a. Pablo,” Rivera’s own success notwithstanding. “I predicted that if (“Pablo”) went off the air, it’d be 10 years before the next one comes on, and I was right,” he says.

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After three years in the TV mill, Rivera moved back to New York. He wrote for Jay Presson Allen’s “The Clinic” in 1987, and then Ensemble Studio Theatre produced his plays “Slaughter in the Lake” and “The Promise.” The latter was also mounted at the late Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1988 and then at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, although Rivera was dissatisfied with two out of three of the play’s outings.

Artistically, “The Promise,” which tells the story of childhood sweethearts who are forced apart by the young woman’s tyrannical father, was Rivera’s first break with straight naturalism. In it, people are possessed, a fighting chicken lurks and the symbols fly fast and furious.

“I was exploring my cultural heritage by writing in a new form, employing the myths and legends of my grandparents,” Rivera says. “That was a real liberation for me.”

New York didn’t care for it. The New York Times’ Mel Gussow said the play “aspires to the level of ‘magic realism’ . . . but sinks to backyard mumbo jumbo.” Rivera partly agreed, saying the East Coast outing “was not well produced.”

The LATC staging was Rivera’s first Los Angeles production, ironically coming right on the heels of his repatriation to the East. “The attempt to bring North American magical realism to a mainstream audience was laudable, whatever may have gone wrong,” he says.

Rivera also cites the LATC production as emblematic of an ongoing problem. “I ran into the problem I suspect Luis Valdez (was) running into in casting Frida Kahlo,” he says, referring to the recent flap over the director’s choice of Laura San Giacomo for the role of the Mexican painter in the now-postponed film “Frida and Diego.”

“At the center of your work, there’s a magnificently strong and complex role for a Latin woman and you look around and see that the population that you’re working with has never had the opportunity to play those roles before,” he says. “So you cast inexperienced people. And several of the people in the company were inexperienced, handling language that is very charged.”

Despite a good review from The Times’ Dan Sullivan, Rivera says: “Whatever could have been magical in the production fell short. There were a lot of choices leaning toward technology to create effects instead of organic solutions that would have had more truth.”

In San Francisco at least, Rivera feels they struck the right balance. “Julie (Hebert, the director) didn’t have a lot of technical support, but she did away with all the trappings of realism, which was the right touch.”

“Each Day Dies With Sleep” is another of Rivera’s departures from realism. Like “The Promise,” its story of a young woman in a family with 21 siblings and yet another macho patriarch suggests the playwright’s admiration for Garcia Marquez, with whom he once studied. It received 1990 productions in Chicago and Berkeley, as well as at New York’s Circle Repertory Company, where the New York Times’ Frank Rich called it “weightless and pretentious.”

Rivera could afford the criticism, though. After returning from a 1989-1990 Fulbright scholarship at London’s Royal Court, during which time he wrote “Marisol,” Rivera sold “Eerie, Indiana.” It went on to 19 episodes last year and critical praise, although it won’t be on the air this season.

“Two weeks before the pilot sold, we were so broke that my wife and I were looking at help-wanted signs at Ralphs,” recalls Rivera, who has two young children. “I don’t know what would have happened if ‘Eerie’ hadn’t sold, but that was my entree into a position of power. I was a producer, which is far different from being just a writer. I had an enormous amount of creative control.”

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The series centered around two boys who see bizarre things going on in their achingly normal Midwestern town, but who have trouble convincing other people of what’s happening.

“It had its tongue firmly planted in its cheek and a sense of style,” says Chad Hoffman of Hearst Entertainment, which co-produced the show and with whom Rivera has a development deal. “ ‘Twin Peaks’ helped pave the way (for this kind of material), but that’s not the reason it got on the air. It was theatrical, and it asked questions about what is real.”

“Eerie, Indiana,” which had nothing to do with matters Latino, also shows that Rivera can evade the ethnic writer pigeonhole. “There was resistance to my being the producer because of lack of experience,” he says. “I don’t think it had to do with my being Latino, though.”

“Marisol” too deals comically with surreal events. The play, which is set for a Hartford Stage Company production this fall directed by George C. Wolfe, was well-received at its premiere at this year’s Humana Festival in Louisville.

The titular heroine is told that God is over the hill and senile, and that if she fails to join the angels in revolution, it’s going to be every woman for herself. Marisol then travels through a comic nightmare, sidetracked by an array of weird guys.

“My feeling about the timeliness of the piece was strong,” says Tina Landau, who directs the La Jolla outing. “There’s also something ancient in its deep structure, the classic journey story of how a hero goes through trials.”

That hero happens to be female. “I marvel that this was written by a man because the whole piece is written from a woman’s point of view,” Landau continues. “It’s not just how the character is written, but how women are so pivotal in the world he creates.”

Significantly, Marisol is also a Latina. “One strand is Marisol’s struggle to understand her relationship with her own culture,” Landau says. “In that way, it’s culturally specific. But its allegorical meaning is equally important. I’ve never felt excluded because I’m not Hispanic.”

“It’s the most self-consciously political play I’ve written,” Rivera says, pointing to influences as various as his year at the Royal Court, a long-lost uncle who died homeless, the reign of Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rivera is also buoyed by the title role casting of Cordelia Gonzalez, the actress for whom Rivera originally wrote the play. (She was unavailable for the Humana Festival production.)

The only bridge left uncrossed, it seems, is the one to Rivera’s parents, who now live in Alabama. “They won’t see ‘Marisol’ because it would break my mother’s heart because she’s so religious,” Rivera says. “I show her this play about angels having a revolution against God and she’ll think the devil has finally gotten my soul.”

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Rivera has been part of a small L.A. company called the Wilton Project for about six months and may let the group co-produce a collection of six short children’s plays for adults that he’s recently completed. And while readying “Marisol” for its coming productions, he’s also writing an ABC pilot called “Tremont Avenue.” Set in the Bronx, the autobiographical situation revolves around a single mother, her son and a younger adult male, all of whom are Puerto Rican.

ABC’s interest in the project is particularly unusual given that the few Latino TV shows that get even this far tend to be Chicano. The last sitcom focusing on a Puerto Rican character was CBS’ “Popi” in 1976. “ABC wanted to do something with me because of the success of ‘Eerie,’ ” Rivera says. “If they have any inclination to do Latino work, it’s usually Chicano.”

Rivera would like to see the show change more than what’s on screen. “I would like to have an all-Latino writing staff,” says Rivera, who’ll be executive producer should the series go into production. “That’s going to be difficult to do, but I’ll make the effort.”

Despite this difficulty, though, Rivera has made some headway. “For years the problem was lack of Latino projects,” he says of his experiences during the ‘80s. “I wasn’t called for ‘Murphy Brown’ and things like that because they couldn’t believe a Puerto Rican writer could write a white show. Then, when I did get called, it was for gangs. There was one period where I went to three pitch meetings and I was pitched Salvadoran gangs, girl gangs and death gangs.”

That may not happen to Rivera anymore, but there are still plenty of Latino writers spinning their wheels, such as many of Rivera’s colleagues on the Writers Guild’s Latino Writers Committee. It may fall to the few like Rivera who make it to help others break through.

“I’ve proven that I can do a mainstream show, so the trust level has increased greatly,” Rivera says. “Honestly, I’d rather be writing only Latino projects because I want to give Latino actors jobs. You’re talking about putting your fingerprints on the mass consciousness. Our voice should be heard.”