Getting Fired Up Over Miami’s Topical Heat

The three Chicano satirists and pranksters who make up Culture Clash have eliminated most of the satire and pranks from their upcoming show. And they aren’t dwelling on Chicano themes.

They will, however, offer a lot of culture clash. In fact, more cultures clash in “Radio Mambo: Culture Clash Invades Miami,” opening next Sunday at the Tamarind Theatre in Hollywood and then again next summer at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, than in any of the group’s other work.

The subject is Miami. It’s where Cubans, white Southerners, African Americans, Jewish emigres from the North, Haitians and Bahamians meet. And it’s where the Culture Clashers--Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza--spent weeks interviewing people from all of these groups and others in preparation for “Radio Mambo.”

Interviewing? As a theatrical technique, it’s associated with Anna Deavere Smith of “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” and “Fires in the Mirror” fame, not with the three rowdies whose brand of Chicano comedy attracted young hipsters to Los Angeles Theatre Center in the late ‘80s, to a Fox TV sketch comedy series in 1993 and to the Mark Taper Forum for “Carpa Clash” later that year.

“When I first saw Anna Deavere Smith, I said, ‘We’d never do this,’ ” Siguenza recalled. “It’s too laid-back.”

But the group doesn’t mind overturning their fans’--or their own--expectations. “We were slaves to our own style and expectations of our audience,” Siguenza said. “They expect something hilarious and Chicano-centric. This is the opposite.”

In a style similar to Smith’s, Culture Clash conducted about 75 interviews of Miamians, arranged by the Miami Light Project, the arts presenter that commissioned the work. Then the three Californians re-created excerpts from these interviews for the stage, playing all the parts themselves.

The show initially was presented in Miami in November 1994--but only for three performances, generally well received. “By the third night, we had it down. And we knew we had to do it again,” Salinas said. What better town than L.A., the trio’s home and a well-known caldron of clashing cultures itself? “The parallels to L.A. are amazing.”

Of course, differences exist too. Siguenza found “a lot of hope” in Miami, “a feeling that when Fidel [Castro] falls, there will be tremendous economic opportunity.” In L.A., by contrast, “I feel it’s dying. I don’t see horizons.”

Montoya, however, didn’t find as much hope in Miami as his colleague did. Like L.A., he said, “Miami is very much a city divided by geography. People are not listening to each other.” However, Montoya said there is a big difference in the welcome given to immigrants in the two areas (“there they have a parade”).

He also found a difference of timing between the two cities. Smith put together her “Twilight” after “the [L.A.] explosion. But [in Miami] we felt we were in the midst of it--or just before it.” While the group was there, Haiti was invaded. Since then, Americans won new rights to travel to Cuba. And “if something happens to Fidel, we’ll have to change the piece tomorrow,” Montoya said.

The piece already has changed considerably. The L.A. version, which will move to INTAR in New York before going on to South Coast next summer, is definitely not the same show Miami saw. For L.A., Culture Clash brought in a new director, performance artist Roger Guenveur Smith (“Inside the Creole Mafia,” “A Huey P. Newton Story”), to take over the reins from the group’s longtime mentor Jose Luis Valenzuela. Smith is “more of a colleague, in the same boat we are,” Siguenza said. “It was time for a change.” Valenzuela also said he foresaw difficulties in recreating the show in a smaller venue.

Another big change is in the script. At least from the vantage point of an interview two weeks before the show was scheduled to open, “a classic Culture Clash paper-thin plot” (in Montoya’s words) that was pasted onto the interview material for Miami was being cut.

In that now-scrapped plot, Siguenza--playing himself--was held hostage in the fictional Miami radio station that forms the framework for the show, simply because he made a couple of remarks about how much he learned on a trip to Cuba and how Chicano activists were inspired by the Cuban revolution--sentiments that didn’t go over well with the Cuban emigres who ran the station.

“It was a device that worked there,” Montoya said. But here, in a much smaller theater, director Smith “is allowing the monologues to breathe. We’re challenging ourselves not to be whores for the yuks. We’re finding the transition points in how [the interview subjects] are connected,” and “this connective tissue is much stronger than the forced plot we came up with.”

“Without having Culture Clash in the story line, we can focus on the [other] people,” Salinas said. Which is, in fact, what the group did when they were in Miami, home to very few Chicanos.

“I could show you the biggest Che posters in the world” from his own past, Montoya said. But “pointing to stuff like that can be a trap for groups that are left of center. When we told the story of a patriotic right-wing character, it became sad enough. It didn’t need our spin.”

Among Cuban Americans in Miami, Siguenza said, Che Guevara, “was a guy who killed their cousin. It’s hard to be sympathetic with [the Castro regime] right now. We’ve all turned our mind-set around. Not that we’re siding with the right wing. But there has got to be a middle ground.”

Even such a moderate attitude probably would have been impolitic for a Cuban American playwright, Siguenza said. Such a writer “would have been exiled. But they let us slide. They probably said, ‘Oh, they’re leaving town.’ ”

“I think that’s why they had us do it only three times,” Salinas joked.

Culture Clash is producing itself at the Tamarind--for the first time since the group’s salad days in San Francisco. While the trio professes to enjoy the autonomy and the sense of “investing [about $20,000] in ourselves,” in Montoya’s words, they did approach the Mark Taper Forum about producing the show, to no avail. (Corey Madden, Taper associate artistic director, said through a spokeswoman that she saw a “Radio Mambo” video and, “I liked it a lot, but we had already set our season.”)

Montoya said the group hopes to do a “Radio San Diego” at San Diego Repertory Theatre. “San Diego really fascinates us,” Montoya said. “Talk about contrasts.”

Meanwhile, the group is planning another show that sounds like a return to the old style, earmarked for Valenzuela’s Latino Theatre Company at Plaza de la Raza. It would mark their East L.A. premiere. This one is planned as “a mocking autobiography, especially of our days in Hollywood.” It would examine their attempt “to survive somewhere between the rough and tumble of Hollywood and the theater, trying to make one subsidize the other,” Montoya said.

The title: “Culture Clash Is Dead!”

Their mixed feelings about all of this are reflected in a question posed by Siguenza: “Would we be at the Tamarind if we had a sitcom?”

“We’d probably own our own theater,” Montoya replied. “But for now, we’re still a rental.”

* “RADIO MAMBO: CULTURE CLASH INVADES MIAMI,” Tamarind Theatre, 5919 Franklin Ave., Hollywood. Dates: Opens next Sunday. Thursdays to Sundays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 7. Prices: $18-$20. Phone: (213) 466-1767. The show moves to South Coast Repertory in July. Phone: (714) 957-4033.