Theater Review : DeLeon’s ‘Faces’ Skims Ethnic Surface

Conservative talk-show hosts have made themselves rich decrying the trend toward political correctness in the popular culture. And, after witnessing “Faces of America,” the new one-woman show with Fran DeLeon at Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Theatre 2, one wonders if they don’t have a point.

Whose “America” is this, anyway? Certainly few viewers would recognize it as anything other than a caricature. Writer-director Colin Cox has painted a gallery of minority victims whose suffering can always be traced back to the crimes of dead white males. “We’re not stereotypes, we’re ordinary people,” says a Chicano teen-ager. Not so. Positive, self-flattering stereotypes are stereotypes nonetheless.

In a series of 10 monologues, DeLeon portrays an ethnic cross section so virtuous and squeaky-clean it could serve as an advertisement for Jesse Jackson’s rhetorical Rainbow Coalition. There is the Japanese American grandfather who recalls his imprisonment in U.S. concentration camps during World War II, the Native American career woman who bitterly rails against federal efforts to isolate her people on reservations, and the African American teacher who struggles with returning to the ghetto in which she grew up.

Cox presents these vignettes with the requisite theatricality; set designer Lawrence Curtis, for instance, has built a metal frame against which banners with mural paintings are unfurled as the show progresses.

But otherwise the treatment is every bit as superficial as the title indicates. Seldom does one of these faces display irony or real wit, although Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt and other historical figures get pilloried as race-baiting mass murderers. Nor do the characters make serious attempts to turn their cultural heritage into a source of personal strength and deep insight.

The sole unflattering portrait is that of a white male, a thick-as-mud Iowa farmer who matter-of-factly drones: “I just shot my wife.” The crowd titters at first, but falls silent as the fellow spins a sad tale of psychosis brought on by financial ruin. Should we laugh or cry? Or blame Teddy Roosevelt?

Although a skilled, vigorous young actor, DeLeon is too callow to convincingly play such a wide range of personalities. Yet a deeper problem is the show’s determination to pander to its young target audience (the term Generation X is repeatedly invoked). Apparently it has never occurred to the creators that this is the sort of uncritical “multiculturalism” that might drive many frustrated Americans into the arms of Rush Limbaugh, Patrick Buchanan and other right-wing apologists.

* “Faces of America,” Will & Company at Los Angeles Theatre Center Theatre 2, 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends April 8. $10-$12. (213) 485-1681. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes .