Stirring Up an Indefinable ‘Creole’ Dish

Perhaps the best way to get a handle on Creole culture is to catch a peek at the steaming pot of gumbo being served up before and after Roger Guenveur Smith and Mark Broyard perform their “Inside the Creole Mafia,” at Highways, closing Sunday. A great, mad admixture, halfway between soup and stew, between the South and the Caribbean, gumbo is American Baroque in a bowl.

In their own modest way, Smith and Broyard are after the same kind of sensation: Little bits of this and that, slowly brewed and absolutely unclassifiable. It gives off the aroma of a work-in-progress, but this is Highways, which is interested in the artists finding their way somewhere rather than the ones settled in at an institution. Creole culture isn’t going to be put into a box, and neither is Creole theater.

The pair seem to be part of a New Orleans funeral procession as they enter to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” with Smith repeatedly blowing on a whistle and both of them trying, not very successfully, to get the crowd clapping and singing. This isn’t surprising, since no one is convinced this early on that there’s anything to clap about.

They get over this awkward beginning, though, with rituals with candles and a roll call of Creole names, as if to summon spirits. They hand out flash cards with Creole expressions--for clown, proper, loose bowels, for instance--to good-natured audience members. All the while, Smith and Broyard banter with each other so casually that it feels improvised.

This probably has to do with these two actors being childhood friends and feeling free to lend the writing an air of playful conversation. Things are loose, but they’re going somewhere. As moments and vignettes course by--Broyard pours milk in a blender while Smith pours in lots of coffee to strengthen the black-and-white mix, a poor dictionary definition of creole gets ripped out of the book and burned--”Inside the Creole Mafia” becomes less a revelation of a culture than a collection of usually droll ways of describing it, without pinning things down too firmly (“Not nubian, but more Neapolitan,” remarks Smith on the Creole look).

Dressed up in nifty cream suits, facing off or pacing around each other in a timeless setting filled with such icons as combs and cans of black-eyed peas, the tall Smith and the shorter Broyard make a team that can’t be called exactly comic, anymore than Vladimir and Estragon can in “Waiting for Godot.” (A lampoon of Hollywood auditions is the closest they come to overt comedy.) But underneath it all is a subtle satirical jab at the theater of multicultural identity, even as these two seem forever locked in a struggle to find out what their identities are.

“Inside the Creole Mafia,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, tonight and Sunday, 8:30 p.m. $10; (310) 453-1755. Running time: 50 minutes.