One-man play, La Esquinita, breaks down what hard times mean.

Actor and playwright Ruben C. Gonzalez is one of those performers who can channel a whole community onto a theater stage by himself to the point you can meet and shake hands with each person who lives there.

Gonzalez’s latest cast of characters come from La Esquinita, USA, a one-man play in which he depicts the residents of a formerly robust black-and-Latino town in decline after the big factory employer leaves for China.

A dozen characters visit a corner bus stop in the shadow of the abandoned factory, trying to explain the rubble of their lives in the aftermath of economic disaster. Lencho is a custodian who has watched the devastation creep into people’s lives. Daniel is an older teen, high on meth and spinning out of control. Wilo is a tecato, or junkie, who runs with a vatonamed Skinny Black while trying to dodge an abusive cop named Whitey.

Gonzalez learned acting and theater at CSU Los Angeles and the London Academy for the Performing Arts, working in films like Jet Li’s The Master and Jennifer Lopez’s Selena, and with Luis Valdez at El Teatro Campesino. Valdez’s son, Kinan, directs La Esquinita, which just played off Broadway in New York.

But much inspiration came in 2007 from Gonzalez’s day job teaching troubled high school kids. He describes them as “17 students nobody wanted in the district.”

His summer wasn’t much rest or relaxation. “I spent that summer in Oakland with friends in a place called ‘the murder dubs,’” he writes by email. “Oakland was a barometer of what the Bush years would be leaving behind.”

That’s where these characters began “speaking” to him and he began transcribing their words into what would become La Esquinita, which translates to “the little corner,” as in the corners that powerless people get pushed into, bus stops, drug cross streets.

Many of his characters talk in street-slangy Spanglish, they cuss, they wax philosophical. But beyond the verbal pyrotechnics, a bigger picture emerges.

“This is class war,” Gonzalez says.

Luis “Xago” Juarez and his Salinas agit-prop theater troupe Baktun 12 are producing and promoting the show because they believe in its message.

“Even though this region had already experienced the bulk of factory job closures in the ’70s, ’80s (Firestone, Nestle) and into the ’90s (Speckels Sugar),” writes Xago, “the relevance of the story he tells strikes on multiple levels.”

LA ESQUINITA, USA runs 8pm Thu-Sat (July 7-9) at Alisal Center for the Fine Arts, 745 N. Sanborn Road, Salinas. $8 suggested donation. 758-5715.