Culture Clash Flirts With Fame : Crediting Its TV Show for Greater Exposure, the Satiric Trio Returns to Consciousness-Raising Onstage

A curious thing happened when Culture Clash visited a Costa Mesa supermarket recently. The Latino comedy trio was mobbed.

Maybe not the same as if Hugh Grant strolled through a hookers’ ball, but several shoppers did take notice.

“It was weird; they really kind of mobbed us,” recalled Ric Salinas, one of the group’s founding members along with Herbert Siguenza and Richard Montoya. “It was right down the street from South Coast Rep, where we were preparing our show. They wanted to know how we were doing, what was up. It must be [because of] the TV.”

Credit the new fame to the influence of television. Although Culture Clash’s weekly program (simply called “Culture Clash”) syndicated through Fox Television has been canceled, the exposure let a huge audience know who these guys are and what they can do.

“We have been and are mainly a traveling theater group, and TV wasn’t part of the agenda,” Salinas said. “But to have 1 million people see what you do in one night, that’s very enticing. It would take us years and years to reach that many people [on stage].”

Now Culture Clash is back on the stage beat, performing its “consciousness-raising, socially topical” skits for audiences a small fraction of that size.

The trio presents “Carpa Clash” at South Coast Repertory tonight and Saturday in the show’s Orange County premiere. The performances launch SCR’s Festival Latino, a series of shows designed to raise funds for its Latino-oriented programs, including the Hispanic Playwrights Project.

“Carpa Clash” was introduced in Southern California at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1993. Salinas said that some of the original sketches will be reprised, but many are new or have been revamped to fit changing times. Orange County’s bankruptcy, as well as immigration, Proposition 187, affirmative action and government censorship on the Internet and elsewhere are a few of the issues to be pricked and prodded, he noted.

The Latino way in Orange County will also be examined.

“Everybody always makes fun of the Hispanics living in O.C.; for some reason they think they’re doing better, getting more money, than us in East L.A.,” Salinas said. “But, you know, they’re struggling in Santa Ana, too.”

A little of the history behind carpa (Spanish for tent ) will give an idea of the evening’s edginess. Salinas explained that carpa groups used to travel through Central and South America providing shows full of pratfalls and politics for villagers with little opportunity to know what was happening in their country.

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These ever-moving circuses, made up mostly of clowns, would present one satire after another, usually with an eye toward events shaping their part of the world.

“I come from El Salvador and remember them; they were outrageous, funny and political,” Salinas said. “They were like the newspapers for people that didn’t have newspapers.”

The provocative flavor of the carpa is something Culture Clash plans to maintain. In that sense, Salinas said, the stage is a more accommodating, liberating place than TV.

“You have to tone it down for TV, which is the drawback,” he said. “The blue humor and the intellectual level all come down. . . . I still think the door is open with Fox for us to do another show down the line, but who knows?”

In the meantime, Culture Clash is working on the script for a feature film titled “Gomez, Gomez & Gomez” about a trio of private eyes that heads from East L.A. to Mexico City on a trail of comic sleuthing. Although no deal has been made, Salinas said a couple of major studios are interested.

Until that’s resolved, Culture Clash will stick with its original goal of tweaking the Establishment. Siguenza, who was with Salinas and Montoya at the Clash’s beginning in San Francisco in 1984, said it would be impossible for the group to forget that.

“We started during the Reagan era, but it doesn’t matter who’s in the administration; there’s always been a need for this kind of humor,” he said. “Although there’s been progress, we feel that the empowerment of Latinos has been stifled. It’s just very hard for us to look away from that.”

* Culture Clash will perform “Carpa Clash” tonight and Saturday at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $18 and $22. (714) 957-4033.