Exiles’ Tale Could Sail Into ‘Radio Mambo’

Remember the couple in Cuba who found a greeting in a bottle from schoolchildren in Corona del Mar--who wound up sponsoring the Cubans’ immigration to Orange County?

A refresher: Luis and Miriam Abreu discovered the jug bobbing in the Caribbean. Fifth-graders from Corona del Mar’s Harbor Day School had sent it to sea as part of their studies of early explorers. The Abreus started a pen-pal relationship with the students. Five years later, when they won a lottery for visas to emigrate from Cuba, they told the students, who collected $1,800 to help the Abreus come to the States. Hugs, applause and national media greeted them all at John Wayne Airport in March.

Now the limelight might glimmer again. Culture Clash, a popular Chicano theater troupe, may write the Abreus’ story into its current traveling show, “Radio Mambo: Culture Clash Invades Miami.” The 2-year-old show, which focuses on refugees who fled Fidel Castro’s regime, will be at South Coast Repertory on Thursday through Sunday, launching SCR’s second annual “Festival Latino,” a three-weekend event.

Culture Clash’s Ric Salinas said the troupe often updates its shows to include and address the latest news stories, and “people send us clippings,” which is how he learned of the Abreus, who now live and work in Santa Ana.

Salinas said he hopes to learn more about them, and in any case “we want to invite them to see the play. They’d get it; they definitely would.”

Salinas said he and his cohorts, Richard Montoya and Herbert Siguenza, depart from their self-described “Chicano-centric” humor with “Radio Mambo.” For one thing, he said, the show is more serious than previous Culture Clash projects. And, while cultures clashing remains central, a greater variety of cultures coexist in this one.

The troupe members collected raw material for the play during weeks of interviews in Miami with Cubans, white Southerners, African Americans, Jewish emigres from the north, Haitians and Bahamians.

Re-creating excerpts from the interviews (a la Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992”), Salinas, Montoya and Siguenza each portray a variety of characters. “It’s very liberating for us,” said Salinas, “and audiences were tripped out because they saw Latinos portraying Jewish people, blacks, Anglos . . . .

“We have some serious issues in this piece,” he continued. “People are going to be able to listen to African American men in jail.” They’re also going to hear from young Cubans eager to come to America, and from their more conservative parents, who were forced to leave their homeland with only the clothes on their backs after Castro’s left-wing forces took over in 1959.

“Our humor has always been kind of to the left,” said Salinas, “but in this piece we pulled back a little and wanted to show the balance. When we met these [older] people face to face, there was no way we could deny their pain, even though we don’t agree politically.”

Right and left clash in a section of the show called “Cafe Nostalgia,” in which “two young Cuban Americans in a cafe talk about Castro,” Salinas said. “One supports Fidel, and one doesn’t, and they have a screaming match at the end.”

“Cafe Nostalgia” is the section that is updated to reflect news developments, such as the 1994 U.S. military intervention in Haiti--or a lottery-winning Cuban couple’s immigration to Orange County.

“We always read the papers because we do satire,” Salinas said, “and we always include up-to-the-minute things. It works out. It keeps us on our toes, and we’ve been doing this play for a while, so it keeps it fresh for us.”

* “Radio Mambo: Culture Clash Invades Miami” runs Thursday through Sunday at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Thursday and Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m. $15-$25. (714) 957-4033.