CAMPESINO: Touring Again After 12 Years : For El Teatro Campesino, a Belated Curtain Call : Stage: In its first visit to Orange County in 15 years, the company will perform a set of one-acts at Santa Ana’s revitalized Yost Theatre.

Actor Andres Gutierrez remembers the smell of orange blossoms from a visit to Santa Ana with El Teatro Campesino in the 1970s. In a telephone interview earlier this week, he asked if it was still possible to smell the blossoms there.

That question indicates just how long it’s been since El Teatro performed around these parts. Now, the company’s return to the road after a decade of not touring, along with the creation of a new venue for ethnic theater in Santa Ana, have conspired to bring El Teatro Campesino back to the county for the first time in 15 years.

The troupe opens a four-day engagement today, marking not only the group’s belated return but also a new phase in the life of the Yost Theatre, a former vaudeville house built in 1913 that will host live performances again after decades of primarily showing movies.

El Teatro Campesino, based in the Northern California farming community of San Juan Bautista, will perform a program of two one-acts at 8 p.m. today through Tuesday. Most programs will feature “How Else Am I Supposed to Know I’m Still Alive” by Evelina Fernandez, a broad comedy focusing on the friendship between two Chicanas, and “Simply Maria” by Josefina Lopez, an autobiographical and sometimes caustic work that touches on themes of cultural assimilation (Lopez was just 17 when she wrote it).

The exception to that program is Sunday’s matinee, which will pair “How Else” with “Soldado Razo” by El Teatro founder Luis Valdez. A seminal early work in the Valdez canon, “Soldado Razo” was written in 1971 for the Chicano Moratorium as a protest of the high death rate for Latinos in the Vietnam War.

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El Teatro Campesino was founded on the strike lines in the fields during the Delano grape strike of 1965. Led by Valdez, the troupe toured the San Joaquin Valley, playing for farm workers from the back of a flatbed truck. (The Santa Ana shows will be dedicated to the memory of farm labor organizer Cesar Chavez, who died in his sleep Thursday night.)

The company later expanded its reputation with national tours; in 1973, it settled into its permanent home, in a former packing plant in San Juan Bautista.

Touring slowed down in the ensuing years, and stopped altogether in 1980. The company’s main focus shifted to “developing a body of work” in a “laboratory and workshop mode,” said Gutierrez, now the company’s press director. “We ceased to be an acting troupe, an acting ensemble, and began to cast from show to show.”

In 1990, El Teatro launched its first tour in a decade, a short venture that led to last year’s full national tour. This year, a troupe of 11 (seven actors, three technical people and a company manager) have been on the road since early February, beginning in the Northeast, and will tour through May.

The return to touring was a way to get the company back in touch with its roots, Gutierrez said.

“It’s a part of our history, and there are a lot of people who have not seen us live.”

Education director Rosa Maria Escalante used to tour with El Teatro Campesino when she joined the company 20 years ago, and she now finds herself on the road again as a director and performer.

“Last year we came back and realized how much people wanted to see us,” Escalante said. “We realized again that most people in this country don’t see an awful lot of live theater.”

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Things have changed since the early touring days.

“We used to stay in people’s homes; there was no flying,” Escalante recalled. “Many people have the impression that we still tour with that catch-as-catch-can attitude, which is not really true.”

Plays in the touring troupe’s current repertory still hew, to varying degrees, to the physical, commedia dell’arte- inspired style of company’s early works, but the technical demands are somewhat higher. Most of the tour stops now are in professional playhouses and university stages, rather than the union halls and schoolrooms of old.

Florinda Mintz, general director of the Yost Theatre, had not planned to reopen the theater to live performances until the fall, but she changed her mind when she called El Teatro and found it was available.

“This is exactly the kind of thing we want to do,” Mintz said.

The theater was a Spanish-language cinema for many years before the city of Santa Ana bought it in 1985. It was subsequently bought by the owners of Fiesta Marketplace, the Latino shopping district where the Yost is situated. The theater was renovated and operated again as a film theater until February, when it was closed in preparation of its reopening as a venue for live theater, music and dance.

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Irving Chase, general partner of Fiesta Marketplace Partners, said he plans to operate the theater as a rental facility and plans to keep fees low enough to attract local and touring performing groups of varying ethnicity.

“We’d like to see it booked every day, but we don’t have any kind of break-even formula,” Chase said. “It’s basically a less-expensive venue than some of the other places in the county.”

In a somewhat confusing relationship, Mintz was named general director of the 700-seat theater but then formed her own production company, Festivals West, so she could produce shows there in addition to renting the facility to outside groups and promoters. The appearance by El Teatro Campesino is underwritten by Festivals West.

“If I break even, I will be very happy, because I want to prove that the theater can work,” Mintz said. “This is not going to be a onetime deal. I want to show that it is possible to do this.”

Mintz foresees the theater serving Santa Ana’s large Latino population and also hopes to attract black, Vietnamese and other ethnic works and companies.

“I want to be able to produce cultural festivals throughout the year. From my point of view, (the theater) is just a jewel. . . . It’s just the right place to be to serve the community that is here.”