(MUSIC)

BARBARA KLEIN: Josefina Lopez is a Mexican-American playwright with her own community theater in Los Angeles. She is trying to help other Latinos bring their stories to the stage.

On this day, she is talking with actor Rene Rivera about his one-man play. The play is called "The King of the Desert." It deals with his struggles growing up in a barrio, a poor neighborhood, in Texas near the border with Mexico. Mr. Rivera has acted in films and on TV shows like "Law and Order." We first told you about his play back in two thousand ten when he performed it at a different theater in Los Angeles.

His play is exactly the kind of story that appeals to Josefina Lopez. Her theater is called Casa 0101. Casa is Spanish for home. The 0101 comes from the zeroes and ones used by computers in the language of the digital information age.

In "The King of the Desert" Mr. Rivera looks at the difficulty of navigating life between two cultures.

RENE RIVERA: "It is the life of a Hispanic family living in the United States and yet not being part of the United States, and so being sort of locked and stuck in between the two cultures, and trying to be reverent to both of them."

Ms. Lopez says there are thousands of stories like this from the Latino community and other groups just waiting to be told. She herself wrote the play "Real Women Have Curves," and co-wrote the screenplay for the successful film version ten years ago.