Edit Villarreal

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.

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.

"Modern Muses," a day of free staged readings of new plays by Los Angeles writers, will be presented by Present Company in association with Cornerstone Theatre Company at the Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event will feature plays by Denise Uyehara, Edit Villarreal and Ismael Kanater, among others. Reservations are not required. Information: (310) 281-5670.

South Coast Repertory has awarded commissions for new plays to Edit Villarreal, Octavio Solis and Edwin Sanchez, all who participated in the theater's 1989 Hispanic Playwrights Project, a play development program. The Costa Mesa theater will also publish plays by Villarreal, Sanchez and Oliver Mayer, who also took part in the project. In addition, tickets for SCR's 10th annual production of "A Christmas Carol," running Dec. 6 through 24, go on sale at 10 a.m.

South Coast Repertory has announced the names of three playwrights who will participate in its sixth annual Hispanic Playwrights Project--a development program composed of workshop rehearsals that will culminate with an onstage reading. This year's program--which gets under way July 31--will be attended by writers Guillermo Reyes, Octavio Solis and Edit Villarreal. All have previously participated in the program (Reyes in the inaugural year, 1986; Solis and Villarreal in 1989).

PBS would be nearly all safety nets and no risks were it not for the Independent Television Service, a San Francisco-based programming resource that freshens public broadcasting with an occasional brisk breeze of feistiness. With risks inevitably come stumbles, however, as in the case of "Foto-Novelas," a series of four slender ITVS films meant to erase the boundaries between reality and fantasy along the lines of some of the comic book-like pulp novels of Latino and Chicano tradition.

Jose Cruz Gonzalez, a Mexican American, has been crossing borders all his life. "I always feel like I'm on one side of the fence or the other," he says, "or I'm on the fence about to cross over." The soft-spoken writer-director--looking earnest yet casual in wire-frame glasses, jeans and a collarless shirt--was sitting on an office sofa at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, talking about his upcoming departure from the nationally recognized Latino play-development program he founded here.

South Coast Repertory will launch its 1989-90 season with Alan Ayckbourn's "A Chorus of Disapproval," theater officials announced Monday. The Mainstage production of the British backstage comedy about a maladroit provincial troupe will run Sept. 8 to Oct. 15 under David Emmes' direction. The rest of the Costa Mesa theater's 26th subscription season will unfold on the Mainstage as follows: Hugh Whitemore's "Breaking the Code" (Oct. 26 to Nov.

Multilingual Vetza Trussell is an actress, a symphony cellist, a performance artist, jazz vocalist, a wife and a mother of two daughters. But Trussell, the daughter of Guatemalan novelist and composer Elizabeth Escobar, always felt she didn't have any direction in her life "because I was always going in several directions at once." Then one day she went to see a psychic. "She said the most wonderful thing: 'You are the kind of person who can go in several directions and be comfortable with it.

Anyone who believes that the nation's ethnic dramatists are being forged in the streets of the inner cities these days might well have his mind changed by the fourth annual Hispanic Playwrights Project, a series of workshops now under way at South Coast Repertory. The three Mexican-American writers whose plays-in-progress will receive public readings at the Costa Mesa theater this weekend are all products of academe, including the most elite graduate writing programs in the country.

South Coast Repertory will continue its love affair with George Bernard Shaw in its 1990-91 season: "Man and Superman" will open on the company Mainstage Sept. 7 and will play through Oct. 11. Other upcoming Mainstage productions announced this week are the West Coast premiere of David Hare's "The Secret Rapture," (Oct. 26-Nov. 26); George S.