STAGE REVIEW : El Teatro Arrives With an Odd Pairing

Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino is touring the West, starting with a visit through Sunday at the Japan America Theatre, but where it’s going artistically is less clear. Where once Valdez wryly skewed the mingling of TV reality and Chicano assimilation in his “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges,” El Teatro’s production of Evelina Fernandez’s “How Else Am I Supposed to Know I’m Still Alive” (sharing the bill with Josefina Lopez’s “Simply Maria”) is little more than TV on stage.

Ironically, Lopez’s alternately sweet and raucously comic piece of autobiography--which El Teatro brought to the same theater on its last tour in 1990--also connects with TV, but in a caustic, theatrical way. Where one play appropriates this powerful electronic tool of cultural assimilation for its own purposes, the other simply mimics it. In every way, except one, they’re polar opposites; amazingly, Socorro Valdez directed both.

The one link may be the one Valdez hooked into: Both Fernandez and Lopez are fiercely attached to female protagonists staying vital in a palpably patriarchal world. But whereas Maria is a precocious young Chicana aspiring to literary greatness whose vivid imagination “writes” the comedy we see, Nellie (Wilma Bonet) and Angie (Rosa Marie Escalante) are middle-aged housewives short on mobility or choices.

The sad joke in “How Else” is how slim their choices are: for Nellie, keeping on in widowhood; for Angie, having an affair and getting pregnant. Mind you, Angie is 48, which gives an idea how deep this is in silly sitcom land.

There are also strong overtones of the broad, crowd-pandering French boulevard comedy with its loud sexual innuendoes and furious effort to keep ‘em laughing. Though Bonet and Escalante are high-ranking comic veterans who could run clinics on timing and delivery, Valdez urges them to milk every laugh line until things run seriously dry. Even if you accept Angie’s preposterous dilemma, Fernandez leaves it be with few complications. As sitcom pilot material, “How Else” may show promise, but it’s a very different promise than the one El Teatro has symbolized since the ‘60s.

In this way, “Simply Maria” is much more an El Teatro play, but with a tenderness and playful verve that’s Lopez’s own. It loses no energy on a second viewing (if anything, Valdez’s cast, especially Ernesto Ravetto as Maria’s dad, is more dynamic than the original), and it walks the balance beam between polemics and a young girl’s simple tale with real grace. This, plus the play’s wise theme of embracing the best of the old and new countries, makes “Simply Maria” an amazing feat for Lopez to have written in 1986 at age 17.

“How Else Am I Supposed to Know I’m Still Alive” and “Simply Maria,” Japan America Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro St., Los Angeles, Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Sunday. $12-$16; (213) 680-3700. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.