If the walls of the Heckscher Theater could talk, they would tell some amazing stories.Built in 1921 and located on Fifth Avenue between 104th and 105th streets, the theater –– which is like a small-scale Broadway house, with a proscenium arch, an orchestra pit, and wall murals depicting fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and “Sleeping Beauty” — had fallen into disrepair. The murals had darkened to the point that the images were barely visible, the director of El Museo del Barrio, Julián Zugazagoitia, said.

On Thursday, the almost forgotten theater, now named Teatro Heckscher after a $1.2 million renovation, will present a three-week run of “Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue,” Quiara Alégria Hudes’s play about three generations of a Puerto Rican family who fought in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. Mr. Zugazagoitia hopes this is the beginning of what could become a regular season of performing arts for an audience from the neighborhood.

Everyone involved in the play hopes this production will allow New Yorkers to rediscover the Heckscher, as well. “The first time I came up here and Julián was showing me around, I was astounded,” one of the directors of Page 73 Productions, the producers of “Elliot,” Asher Richelli, said. He pointed out features of the theater — like the large fly space, the area above the stage where lights and scenery are stored ––that are unusual for an Off-Broadway house. “You hear about all the spaces around town being shut down –– the Promenade, Variety Arts –– and then there’s this undiscovered treasure.”

The Heckscher Building was built in 1921 as a shelter for abused or neglected children who had been taken from their families. (Today, it’s owned by the city and houses the offices of the Parks Department, El Museo del Barrio, and several other nonprofits.) The philanthropist August Heckscher and his wife, Anna, wanted the building to be a happy home for the children, and the theater was one of its much-touted features.

The theater was used for performances both by and for children. In the 1930s, it was used for Broadway tryouts and for children’s plays produced by the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal initiative to provide relief to out-of-work artists. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Joseph Papp’s nascent New York Shakespeare Festival had its offices and performed there.

In 1995, El Museo took over operations and, with a community development block grant, began renovating the space –– restoring the murals and replacing the seats and furnishings, as well as carrying out necessary updates like installing emergency exits.

Since the renovation was completed in 2000, the museum has used the theater sporadically for film screenings and concerts. But no play had come along that was just right for the space until February, when one of the museum’s board members, Elizabeth Cooke Levy, suggested that Mr. Zugazagoitia go to see “Elliot” at the Culture Project downtown.

Mr. Zugazagoitia thought it was perfect for the Heckscher and approached Page 73 about transferring “Elliot” uptown. Although that couldn’t happen right away, because the cast had other commitments, the parties stayed in touch. Now Mr. Zugazagoitia is eager to see how the Latino community responds to the play. The audience at the Culture Project, he said, was great ––”young, urban, very trendy. But we thought, ‘How will it resonate in East Harlem with [the kind of] people who are actually portrayed in the play?'”

While “Elliot” got strong reviews and sold out its run at the Culture Project, it attracted less attention than other Iraq plays that have been produced downtown in the last year, like David Hare’s “Stuff Happens,” Peter Morris’s “Guardians,” or Eve Ensler’s “The Treatment.” Unlike these plays, “Elliot” doesn’t address the politics behind the war, nor is it explicitly anti-war. It doesn’t lend itself to becoming a liberal audience’s pep rally.

Instead, it’s a family story –– one that many families in the Barrio may identify with. In an interview, Ms. Hudes said she was inspired to write the play because her cousin fought in Iraq. He was injured and went to recuperate in California, where Ms. Hudes visited him. He had always been the clown of the family, with a big smile, she said. While he hadn’t lost his sense of humor, she had a sense that he had changed, and that his personality would never be the same as it was before.

“It stayed with me on the plane ride going home,” Ms. Hudes said.”That was the seed –– me thinking about why had he gone, because his father had served in Vietnam and had a pretty awful experience.”

She sat on the idea for a year, because she didn’t know how to write a play about the war without making it political and tendentious. “My personal and political feelings about the war are very strong, but I didn’t feel like the world needed to hear that through my writing,” she said.

“What I ended up realizing is that the story I needed to tell wasn’t about the politics of this war at all. It was about the everyday people who are going to fight. They don’t really have a voice. And once I realized that personal approach, it freed me to write the play.”

She went to Philadelphia to interview her uncle about his war experience. She was nervous to talk, because she knew he never spoke about it. But when they sat down, his story poured out.

“I didn’t ask a single question,” she said. “He spoke for three or four hours straight.” The next week, she said, “I called to thank him, and he said he felt lighter than he had in years.”

El Museo and Page 73 are working with leaders of veterans groups and chairs of community boards in Latino neighborhoods, asking them to encourage local people to come. They’ve invited public school teachers to bring their classes. And there are flyers around the immediate neighborhood of the museum, at the nearby hospitals, and at restaurants like El Paso Taqueria. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Zugazagoitia was still eagerly devising schemes to attract audiences, like encouraging food deliverymen to distribute the flyers with their deliveries –– or what about an advertisement on a napkin?

Ticket prices are relatively low: $35, with discounts for members of the community and $15 student rush tickets. “The idea is to make it as accessible as possible,” Mr. Richelli said.

Because the play worked well in the intimate space at the Culture Project, the producers and the director, Davis McCallum, decided not to use the entire house of the Heckscher, but to put the audience onstage with the actors. “We wanted the actors to be able to talk to the audience without any pretense, and without projecting in a theatrical way,” Mr. McCallum said. He expects the play to have a new power uptown, where Elliot will tell his story “to people who could be his neighbors.”

Mr. McCallum said he was also stunned to discover a theater on Upper Fifth Avenue. “The set designer and Quiara and I walked in,” he said, “and we just looked at each other like, ‘Somebody pinch us, this can’t be true, this can’t be here.'”

He immediately started thinking about the kind of play he’d like to do in the theater in the future.”Maybe a classical play with a lyrical, storytelling feeling –– an adaptation of an Eastern classic, or ‘The Tempest,’ or ‘Arabian Nights.'”

Or maybe a ghost story. With its murals restored to jewel-like beauty, the theater now has the haunted feeling of a lavish playroom built for children who grew up and left long ago. Live theater, which feeds on ghosts, should find a happy home here.

Until October 29 (1230 Fifth Ave. at 104th Street, 212-831-7272).