STAGE REVIEW : ‘BADGES’ PUNCTUATES THE HYPHENATED LIFE

All the way through Luis Valdez’s newest play, “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges,” which opened Wednesday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, there are clues.

We open on what looks like a living-room/kitchen set positioned on a sound stage. There are TV monitors and a mike boom overhead. There’s a big poster of “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” adorning one wall (the play’s title is a quote from the movie). Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” swells to a climax. It’s the score for the life of Buddy and Connie Villa, a happily married pair of studio extras who have graduated to bit parts--playing maids and gardeners.

Could it be that Valdez (he wrote and directed) and his El Teatro Campesino (spawner of some of the best ‘70s agitprop as well as “Zoot Suit”) are now into TV sitcoms?

Not quite. True, this is your standard middle-class tract home and your standard American Dream, with pool and microwave and upwardly mobile kids--one of each gender. The girl’s a doctor in Phoenix, the boy a Harvard law school freshman. This reeks suspiciously of success. But Buddy and Connie are not your standard Mr. and Mrs. America. The color of the skin is wrong. The address is not Beverly Hills. It’s Monterey Park.

Buddy and Connie know their reality. Life “on the hyphen” (as Mexican-Americans) has frustrations you can double when you pair them with life in the studios as “invisible” stereotypes. But they’ve made an accommodation.

“I’d rather play a maid than be one,” says the scrappy Connie, who, when she’s not selling real estate, is not too proud to scratch for every bit part she can get.

What unfolds on the Manny Rice stage of the Tom Bradley Theatre is--you guessed it--a metaphor: Life as TV, interchangeably.

“I grew up in this low-rated situation comedy,” shouts Buddy and Connie’s troubled son, Sonny, who drops out of Harvard to rejoin his parents in this “cheap imitation Anglo life” that rips him apart.

Is that the message? That some of us can make accommodations and some cannot? One suspects it is, at least in part. But the central argument--should we “adjust” to life as stereotypes or should we fight it?--remains unresolved.

Sonny, who has a real identity crisis (and a Japanese-American girlfriend who rides her hyphen with much greater ease), remains an emotional conundrum. We can see why he dropped out of law school. We can even see, if not believe, why he needs to rub his nose in the life (contemptible in his eyes) that his parents lead. What we can’t see is what triggers his leap from that to going back to school and fulfilling his parents’ expectations.

Much of the reason for this is that “Badges” makes extravagant stylistic turns in Act II that the writing is not strong enough to validate. It goes so far with its ideas and then appears to lose the scent. The first half is pure--and dexterous--sitcom: funny, solidly rooted in character and reality. (Some TV producer out there could build a series on the germ of this idea.) But the second expands into hyper-real dimensions it cannot quite sustain.

The result is a muddled metaphoric cleverness that outreaches the play’s grasp. And when Valdez turns serious on us, with some blatant speechifying, the dramaturgy breaks down in earnest.

And yet Valdez has too many good things going in this play to let it go at that. His inventiveness is ticking every minute. He comes up with more than a few zingers. His first-act curtain, to the signature of “I Love Lucy,” is true commentary as well as a climactic flourish. And running the play’s credits on the TV screens at the end is a capital touch. But he hasn’t decided yet where it is he wants to take us, or how, and it shows. The play has too many modes and too many endings, none of which is convincing.

As a director, Valdez does better. The pace is lively. James Victor and Anne Betancourt are a plucky Buddy and Connie, all good humor and zest for the life they’ve chosen. There’s real pride of achievement here, proving, once again, that it’s not what you do but how you do it that matters in the end--and that goes for parenting too.

Robert Beltran’s considerable power as a performer almost rescues the complex Sonny from the confusion built into his role. He at least keeps us seriously wondering--and caring--if the young man is psychotic or schizoid or just depressed. But there’s no overcoming the basic inconsistencies in the character. As his dancer girlfriend, the attractive Patti Yasutake is believable, even if her level of energy is not always a match for that of the other three.

Russell Pyle designed the lights and slightly tacky set, and Nicole Morin the fine costumes. It’s the script that’s lost its way on a road worth taking. It’s a matter, perhaps simpler than it now seems, of identifying the true course and dropping the diversionary side trips.

‘I DON’T HAVE TO SHOW YOU NO STINKING BADGES’ A new play written and directed by Luis Valdez at the Tom Bradley Theatre of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St. in Los Angeles. Presented by the Center and El Teatro Campesino. Producers Phil Esparza, Diane White. Corporate coproducers LFC Insurance Co., TELACU. Assistant director Tony Curiel. Sets and lights Russell Pyle. Costumes Nicole Morin. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Videography Bill Swadley. Dramaturg Adam Leipzig. Choreography Anni See. Stage manager Jill Johnson. Cast Anne Betancourt, James Victor, Robert Beltran, Patti Yasutake. Plays Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m., until March 1 (213) 627-5599.