By Cecilia J. Keehan

The professional theater company Word for Word which stages short stories, came to the Morning Forum of Los Altos April 15 to strut its stuff. And what a performance it was.

The actors, two women and two men, all equity actors, performed the short stories of Sandra Cisneros, author of “The House on Mango Street.” The performers assumed a variety of roles, changing character seamlessly — almost midsentence — while performing the very urban and very modern stories.

The production worked with a simple but effective set of four window frames that served to hold towels on a clothesline in one scene and became a blackboard on which the teacher wrote in another. The actors said the sets fit easily into two boxes and are easy to move.

Word for Word was founded 10 years ago by 10 women. The company stages six to eight productions a year at the Magic Theater in Fort Mason Center. It also schedules a schools and libraries tour, reaching students of various ages. Its last production was from a collection of short stories by Stanford’s Tobias Wolf. Last year, it performed short stories from “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson.

Performing the stories from “The House on Mango Street,” the young student laments that the house they are moving into is not the nicer house her parents described to her. The disappointed youngster observes that the bricks are crumbling, the door is swollen, there is no lawn and they have only one bathroom for the entire family. Mango Street, she remarks, is a sad, red house that she doesn’t belong to. On her 11th birthday, she notes that she doesn’t feel 11 and that it will probably take weeks or even months for her to feel it. Later, she says she wants to be 102 and far away.

Word for Word’s purpose is to excite people about the written word, to inspire them to read more and to create audiences for the theater. The group also works to share the world’s diverse cultures and stories.