‘Egg’ Is Peppered With Social Satire

What’s a conflicted Latina wife and mother to do?

Damaged Fallopian tubes have prompted her desperate daughter to ask Elsa Morales to become the surrogate mother for one of her fertilized eggs, a prospect certain to arouse the ire of Elsa’s traditional and headstrong husband, Juancho.

The unusual choice facing Elsa and her middle-class Angeleno family fuels Luis Santeiro’s new comedy “The Rooster and the Egg” (“El Huevo del Gallo”) performed on alternate weeks in English and Spanish at the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts. Long on earthy farce and broad slapstick and peppered with affectionate social satire, the show comes across like a Latino “All in the Family Way.”

As Elsa and Juancho, Johanna Siegmann and James Victor were perfectly matched antagonists in the reviewed English cast (Marie Curi and Ernesto Miyares take the roles in Spanish; the other performers remain the same). Siegmann does a sharp balancing act between her familial loyalties and her own neglected needs, while Victor’s bluster and narrow-mindedness set him up for the inevitable comeuppances.

Rosita Fernandez and Jon Leon Torn bring just enough sense of shifting cultural values to the daughter and her Anglo husband to make their points without heavy-handedness; Angelina Estrada milks the cute but overwritten nymphomaniac grandmother for all the part is worth.

In Act 2, Juancho’s irritation with his less-than-macho son (Marcos Monzon)--who’d rather cook and clean than toil in the garden or tool around on his motorcycle--leads the play into tricky territory. The time-honored rite of a father initiating his son into manhood through visiting a prostitute is clearly inappropriate in a time of rampant sexually transmitted diseases, so Santeiro hedges his bets with a somewhat implausible compromise. Yet writer and performer manage to elicit the positive impulse in Juancho’s concern for his son’s masculine identity, just as Elsa, despite her deceptions and weaknesses, discovers a path to her own feminine fulfillment.

* “The Rooster and the Egg,” Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, 421 N. Avenue 19, Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, Sundays, 3 p.m. This week in Spanish; alternates weekly in English and Spanish. Ends March 31. $15. (213) 225-4044. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.