Mission Play Revival : Tuj-Unga Pageant planners hope to create an event that makes the Verdugo Hills area culturally valuable to the whole city.

On paper, the Tuj-Unga Heritage Pageant appears to be just another pleasant community event, bringing together poets, performers and artisans to celebrate the days of “Old California.”

Indeed, the site of the pageant--the McGroarty Arts Center, nestled in Tujunga’s Verdugo Hills just south of Foothill Boulevard--is named for John S. McGroarty, an early 20th-Century promoter of a romantic image of pre-industrial Southern California. Through his 40 years of columns for The Times and several volumes of poetry and plays, McGroarty campaigned for restoration of the California missions as part of a revival of “The Mission Style”--both a spiritual cause for the Catholic McGroarty and a seductive selling point used by Los Angeles real estate developers.

But if McGroarty helped pitch Los Angeles as an innocent, sunny land where, in his words, the missions founded by Father Junipero Serra turned California Indians away “from heathen barbarism to Christianity and the arts of peace,” the pageant, opening today and sponsored by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, represents a big shift away from the old myth.

As center Director Joan de Bruin and assistant Daniel Veneciano point out, the shift began last year when De Bruin organized the first pageant.

“We initially planned to restage ‘The Mission Play,’ McGroarty’s best-known play” written in 1912, De Bruin says, “but realized, looking over the text, that for all of its wonderful qualities--it’s similar in a lot of ways to ‘Ramona’--the play’s patronizing attitude to Indians made it very out of date.” (“Ramona” is Helen Hunt Jackson’s still-running 1923 play.)

Playwright Leonard Smith solved the problem by inserting portions of “The Mission Play” into his own play, “Tuj-Unga,” and examining the myth McGroarty helped invent. The first of a planned repertory of plays to be presented at future pageants, “Tuj-Unga” brought McGroarty’s ghost to the present, post-myth reality.

“As caretakers of the McGroarty history,” Veneciano explains, “we don’t want to deny the outdated attitudes and perspectives, but inquire into them and bring them up to contemporary concerns.”

The re-examination continues this year in an expanded program that includes a Saturday dawn-to-dusk American Indian gathering (everything from food to dance to an Aztec sunrise ceremony), two evenings of storytelling and poetry readings, a pair of ongoing photo exhibits, a Sunland-Tujunga historical house tour and four performances of S. John Daniels’ new play, “. . . For the General Welfare,” being staged on the center’s elevated playing area, which McGroarty used as both a dining room and a theater.

De Bruin acknowledges that the festival’s strong American Indian presence stems from Veneciano’s curatorial contacts in the Los Angeles American Indian community, “even though I didn’t know Daniel had them when he came on board last year.” Veneciano, originally from Cordoba, Argentina, says he is aiming for something larger than just the current festival. “I hope that the pageant and the McGroarty Center will become a permanent site for Native American artists and performers, who don’t have such a home now.”

The diversity of pageant performers runs the length of the Americas, from the Chumash people of the Santa Inez Valley near Santa Barbara (the Riverbottom Dancers) to the Maya of Mexico’s Chiapas region (the Cuica Calli Ballet Folklorico).

Derived from his research and visits to Maya communities in Chiapas, Cuica Calli founder and director Alfredo Calderon’s dance blends Maya masks with a complex integration of indigenous ceremony and Catholic ritual. “It’s based on an ancient bloodletting ritual,” Calderon says, “in which a young man would be pierced with arrows, the blood would drip on the ground as a sacrifice to bring rain and nourish the corn crop. Under Catholic domination, this was adapted to include St. Sebastian, who was also pierced with arrows. Like most indigenas , the Maya took any outside influence and, through art, adapted it to their own needs.”

McGroarty’s own romances would not have allowed for such cultural accuracy. But he had another, more socially attuned side as a politician. Daniels’ ” . . . For the General Welfare” dramatizes his support of Long Beach physician Francis Townsend’s national pension plan of $200 a month for citizens older than 60. The plan spawned a political movement that spurred the creation of the Social Security Act in 1934, the year McGroarty was elected to the first of two terms in Congress.

McGroarty, though, split with Townsend in 1936 over the issue of creating a third party. “The play is treated as a meeting,” says Daniels, “involving Townsend, McGroarty and his wife, and two men who represent the social classes--I call them The Man Who Smokes His Pipe and Nods, the everyman who has the last word, and The Man Who Plays the Player Piano, who’s well-to-do and Republican. Townsend saw two key social problems, first, that fewer people were needed to make more goods, and second, that there was no safety net for older people--many of the same problems we have now. McGroarty agreed with Townsend on the aims, but not the methods.”

“McGroarty loved the Tujunga area and the Verdugo Hills,” De Bruin notes, “and what now makes it special are the many old homes occupied by the families who built them. Part of our long-term plan behind the pageant is to create an event that makes the area culturally valuable to the whole city, so when developers might want to come into the area, not only the locals, but the city will urge preservation instead of new building, more traffic and wholesale changes in a very unique hillside area.”

Where and When

What: Tuj-Unga Heritage Pageant.

Location: McGroarty Arts Center, 7570 McGroarty Terrace, Tujunga.

Hours: Exhibits: Today-Oct. 31 (Reception 6:30 p.m. tonight.) Poetry and Storytelling: Native American Evening, 8 tonight; Chicano/Latino Evening 8 p.m. Sept. 23, Native American Gathering/Festival sunrise to sunset Saturday. “. . . For the General Welfare,” plays 8 p.m. Sept. 25-27 and 2 p.m. Sept. 27, Sunland/Tujunga historical house tour, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Sept. 26.

Price: $2, for “. . . For the General Welfare;” other events free.

Call: Pageant information: (818) 352-5285. House tour reservations: (818) 352-7847.