Loves L.A., Hates L.A., Loves It, Hates It . . .

Jose Rivera likes to examine Los Angeles from the high vantage points near the Griffith Observatory, not far from his Los Feliz home. “From here you can see a pattern,” he said, during a conversation at the snack bar near the observatory. “The city seems more manageable.”

On this particular morning, however, no pattern was readily apparent. Smog obscured most of the vista beyond Griffith Park itself.

How apt. The grassy observatory knoll is one of the settings for Rivera’s new play, which illustrates the difficulty of getting a handle on sprawling and diverse L.A. Opening May 27 at the Mark Taper Forum, “The Street of the Sun” is “about competing views of Los Angeles,” the playwright said.

It is also “a kind of Ulysses journey through Los Angeles and 24 hours of one man’s life.” And it’s the most L.A.-focused play yet from the writer, whose credits include recent La Jolla Playhouse and New York productions of the Obie-winning “Marisol” and “Cloud Tectonics” and an earlier broadcast by PBS of his “The House of Ramon Iglesia.”

“The Street of the Sun” was inspired by Anna Deavere Smith’s staged documentary “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” which also premiered at the Taper. Stylistically, it’s closer to Smith’s work than Rivera’s previous plays, many of which have been awash in surrealism and fantasy.

“I liked the kinetic energy between Anna and the audience,” Rivera said. “It was like Greek theater--a poet telling a story to people who were participants in it.”

Unlike Smith, Rivera conducted no formal interviews to gather material. But he kept his ears open, and “almost all of [“Street of the Sun”] was overheard,” Rivera said. “I transcribed this play more than created it.” There are exceptions to this rule, such as the scenes in which Apollo shows up. Generally, though, “it’s a matter of having the city speak.”

Rivera’s last two plays, “Cloud Tectonics” (La Jolla, 1995) and his new children’s play “Maricela de la Luz Lights the World,” are both set in L.A., but Rivera says they’re “not about the city like this one is.” Neither of the two has been produced in L.A., so this will be the first staging of any of his L.A. plays in the city where they’re set.

Rivera said he would be surprised if “The Street of the Sun” has a life outside Los Angeles. “There’s a great antipathy toward L.A. out there.” The Goodman Theatre in Chicago commissioned the play, but decided against producing it on the grounds that it might not interest Chicago audiences, Rivera said. Likewise, people at Seattle Children’s Theatre, which commissioned and workshopped “Maricela,” told Rivera of their hatred for L.A.

Rivera, 42, can sympathize with such feelings, for he sometimes shares them: “I go from one feeling to another on a daily basis--first I want to create art about this place, then I want to get on a plane.”

His entree into L.A. was extraordinary. Hired out of New York by Norman Lear’s Embassy Television in 1983, the Puerto Rico-born and New York-reared playwright and his wife, Heather Dundas, flew into L.A. “on an incredibly polluted day and took an endless bus ride on the jammed 405 to Van Nuys”--where, at the Flyaway terminal, he was met by none other than Tom Hanks.

At the time, Rivera says, Hanks was “the only person I knew in L.A.” They had been apprentice actors together in 1977 at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Ohio, where “Tom got his Equity card and I decided I wasn’t an actor.” Rivera and Dundas lived for three weeks in Hanks’ guest house in Studio City until they found an apartment of their own. In “The Street of the Sun,” the would-be screenwriter Jorge and his wife Therese also live in Studio City, with an actor friend as an unseen benefactor. Although the play is set in the present, Jorge’s “mind-set is definitely what my mind-set was in 1983,” Rivera said.

Rivera hated L.A. during the time of his Embassy contract. His most famous credit was “a.k.a. Pablo,” a sitcom about a Chicano family, even though Rivera said he “didn’t know the Cinco de Mayo from a burrito” when he arrived.

He fled to New York in late 1985, but returned briefly in 1988 for a production of his “The Promise” at Los Angeles Theatre Center. However, in 1990, Rivera and Dundas--now “flat broke”--decided they didn’t want to raise their new daughter in a New York apartment. They returned to L.A., lured by the prospect of screenwriting salaries.

This time they settled in Silver Lake, a neighborhood that Rivera had not even glimpsed in his first L.A. sojourn. Though Malathion-spraying helicopters greeted them, Silver Lake “completely changed my view of L.A.,” he said. “It was so much funkier, more diverse, younger.”

Hollywood came through. Rivera co-created and co-produced the NBC children’s fantasy series “Eerie, Indiana.” It lasted only 19 episodes, but they’re rerun weekly on the Fox network. The series enabled Rivera and Dundas to buy their Los Feliz house. Two weeks after they moved in, the riots hit L.A.

That night, driving east on the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10) after a play reading in Santa Monica, Rivera thought he saw a tornado to his right. Then he realized it was smoke. He and his family watched the flames progress north into Hollywood. But he didn’t leave. “We had made a commitment. I was old enough to remember that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” The next day, he helped clean broken glass off Vermont Avenue “so thoroughly,” he said, “that I wondered if we were whitewashing it.”

The riots and most of the subsequent L.A. disasters--brush fires, quakes, though not the O.J. chronicles--are mentioned or experienced by characters in “The Street of the Sun.”

Although Rivera’s house wasn’t damaged in the Northridge quake, he remembers his daughter feeling that “robbers had come and were shaking the house like a piggy bank,” and his then-2-year-old son walked around for days saying, ‘Scary house, scary house.’ ” Rivera, who had experienced a New Jersey quake in 1980, said he’s consoled that at least L.A. doesn’t get hurricanes, tornadoes or blizzards (though in his play “Maricela de la Luz . . . ,” L.A. is buried in snow).

“Something really awful is going to happen,” he noted, “but at least for now we’re in a tranquil place, between disasters.”

Actually, Rivera believes the closeness of nature is one of L.A.’s best features. “It’s reassuring, because nature is self-renewing.” Of greater concern are L.A.’s man-made social divisions. The Santa Monica Mountains “aren’t nearly as much of a divide as the 10 Freeway,” he said.

Or, for that matter, the east-west divides. Confessing to what he called “reverse snobbishness,” Rivera said, “I don’t like the Westside. My father was a janitor who raised six kids and never made more than $10,000, so even though my income is high now, I still find conspicuous displays of wealth repulsive and laughable.”

L.A. “is so subdivided by race and culture,” he said. “If they all interacted on a consistent basis, that would be exciting. But that’s not the case. It’s a feudal society, with little fiefdoms defined by race and culture and not a lot of communication.”

Rivera is hopeful, though, that things are changing. In a class that he volunteered to teach at a high school near his home, he noted the number of children with mixed cultural backgrounds. Rivera’s wife is of Scottish ancestry, “and I hope my children will enjoy the fruits of both cultures equally.” Their respective families didn’t object to their marriage, Rivera said, but some members of both families do harbor prejudices against Cubans--and one of the characters in his play is a Cuban American who discusses such intra-cultural disputes.

With his belief that “race will be less meaningful” in the future, Rivera acknowledged that he is at odds with playwright August Wilson’s recent statements on behalf of black-specific theaters and in opposition to cross-racial casting. “This is naive,” Rivera said. “But I do believe in maximum artistic freedom. That includes the ability to transcend race.”

Meanwhile, despite L.A.’s problems, or perhaps because of them, Rivera finds plenty of dramatic fodder here. “The cultural conflict, the diversity . . . this city provides one surreal image after another,” he said. “L.A. attracts some of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met.

“This isn’t Florence in 1450, but there’s a lot going on here. When we take a very critical look at our history and our current situation and get at underlying truths, it won’t be flattering, but it will be healing.”

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“THE STREET OF THE SUN,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Dates: Opens May 27. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends June 8. Prices: $29-$37. Phone: (213) 628-2772.