Marking 20 Years of Bilingual Plays : Stage: Although the company usually does plays in English and Spanish, its anniversary season opener is an English-only production at LATC’s largest theater.

A few things you should know about the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts (Fundacion Bilingue de las Artes):

* It’s not a foundation.

* It’s a theater company that does Hispanic plays, with Spanish and English versions running in repertory.

* As it celebrates its 20th year, its founding mothers--producing director Carmen Zapata, artistic director Margarita Galban, production stage manager Estela Scarlata--still run it.

* For the past 13 years, they’ve operated out of a small former jailhouse on an obscure side street in Lincoln Heights.

Now, forget much of that and observe how the Bilingual Foundation is marking the big 2-0: with an English-only production of a play by an African-American at the largest theater in downtown’s Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Two of the group’s three full productions will be done at LATC this season. It’s part of an attempt to reach beyond the group’s longtime niche and assume a higher profile--an effort that the BFA founders hope will culminate with a permanent move from their 84-seat Little Theatre to a 299- or 399-seat theater in the Olvera Street neighborhood.

Will that outreach affect the programming? BFA is known primarily for its stagings of Spanish classics and later plays by Latin American writers. Yet BFA’s first production to be mounted at LATC, “My Visits With MGM (My Grandmother Marta)” last spring, was by an L.A.-based Latina playwright, Edit Villarreal.

And the production that will open the BFA season Thursday, “B/C Historia,” is by C. Bernard Jackson, director of the Inner City Cultural Center, which is collaborating on it. The play covers the entwined histories of African and Hispanic cultures from the 8th Century to the present, according to Zapata, who is appearing in it, as she did in an earlier version staged in 1975.

Zapata sees the production as “a special 20th-anniversary gift to L.A. for healing purposes.” But she said it does not portend a movement away from bilingualism. It’s being presented just in English because “I don’t know where I can find three blacks who are good actors who can speak Spanish.”

Ninety percent of the actors in BFA’s bilingual productions perform in both languages. Occasionally an actor will forget which language is being used at which performance and begin speaking the wrong one. “The biggest problem” in training bilingual actors, said Zapata, is to get them to fully memorize both versions. “You cannot translate as you go along, or else it becomes a kind of pidgin.”

Bilingual productions cost more than English-only ones. Two actors understudy each role, and the BFA commissions most of its translations. Actors rehearse three weeks in each language, and “the only thing that’s the same is the blocking. The emotion, the perspective, even the body language, are different,” said Zapata.

Some observers who don’t share the BFA’s usual aesthetic conservatism nevertheless applaud its devotion to bilingualism. “That’s the most important role they play,” said Jose Luis Valenzuela, director of the Latino Theatre Lab, formerly part of the old LATC company and now affiliated with the Mark Taper Forum.

“We don’t have the same feelings about theater,” said Valenzuela. But he’s “very supportive of their work,” not only because they’re bilingual but also because he believes they’re “the only Latino theater in town” doing regular professional shows in a space of their own.

Oops. Make that Hispanic , not Latino. Zapata associates the word Latino with any Latin-derived culture, such as the French or Italian, and the BFA mission statement shuns it in favor of Hispanic.

“My roots come from the Iberian peninsula, whether we like it or not, or whether we think Columbus was a villain or a hero,” said Zapata, who was born in New York of Mexican and Argentine parents. Her colleagues Galban (with whom she shares a house in Van Nuys) and Scarlata are Cuban- and Argentine-born, respectively.

This is more than a matter of semantics. BFA programming has been noticeably light on contemporary Mexican-American or locally set plays, in favor of less potentially controversial works from Spain, Mexico and South America. Though Zapata said she is “very interested” in “nurturing” U.S.-oriented plays, she makes no apologies about the fact that they’re seldom fully produced.

“I don’t know about Chicano theater,” said Zapata. “I’m not trained in it.” Chicano theater tends to be collaborative, “while we work from a traditional script . . . Lots of Chicano theaters can do (collaborative work) much better than I can.”

She rejected the idea that there is a dearth of such theaters in L.A. “There are lots of little theaters out there,” said Zapata.

While some might question the BFA’s relationship to the larger Latino community around it, few would challenge the theater’s devotion to its own subscribers. Indeed, except for some management prerogative in the selection of classics, said Zapata, audience reaction to readings determines what goes on the mainstage.

“Our theater exists for its audience,” said Zapata. “If we just did plays I love, no one would come to see them--classics nobody has heard of. Bizarre, avant-garde things. In the beginning, we did some weak comedies that the audience would respond to easily, to get them used to coming. Now we’ve brought them up to a better appreciation of better theater.”

The Little Theatre is now filled to an average of 95%, said Zapata, and “we have a lot of angry people who can’t get seats.” And this is in a dicey neighborhood. Last fall, crowds of young people, socializing after midnight, began shooting up the windows and writing graffiti on the walls. After Zapata complained to City Councilman Mike Hernandez, the police put up no parking signs and dispersed the crowds. But the BFA leaders remain anxious to move.

They have their eye on an Olvera Street site, said Zapata, but it would take $3 million to convert it into a theater, and they would like to raise another $4.5 million as an endowment. Such a campaign is “a new idea for the Hispanic community,” said Zapata, who claims “they’re not subscribing-oriented or philanthropy-oriented.”

Nonetheless, the BFA has had some success in fund-raising. Only about one-third of its $900,000 annual budget is derived from earned income. Much of the rest has come from the Ford, Sever and ARCO foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts and other public agencies.

Still, Zapata contends that “if we were not a minority theater, we would have been given (enough public) funding to (fully) institutionalize.”

With public arts funding currently in crisis, that now seems unlikely. But the women of the BFA are not about to give up. “In the early years, people didn’t take us seriously because we were women,” said Zapata. “They felt it was a toy we would give up.”

Now they know better.