Once More, With Healing

Frida Kahlo is watching. So are Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez.

Pop Art- and graffiti-style portraits of these icons look down on the members of Culture Clash--Richard Montoya, Ricardo Salinas and Herbert Siguenza--as they talk about 15 years of making politically charged comedy/theater.

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Culture Clash lived up to its name by performing comedy and sketch-style plays in which Latinos collided with other cultures and with one another.

Stereotypes, along with textbook history, took a drubbing. In the trio’s breakthrough success, “The Mission,” for instance, Father Junipero Serra literally beat European culture into the native Indios. In “A Bowl of Beings,” which was taped for broadcast on PBS, Christopher Columbus was killed by an “illegitimate” Chicano child angered by “500 years of genocide.”

The trio performed such material with a touch of commedia dell’arte and a hint of Brecht--enough of a nudge and a wink to defuse its explosiveness even as it blasted biases sky high.

Since the mid-’90s, Culture Clash has been shifting into a documentary style that it calls “docu-theater.” The comedy isn’t quite so broad, and subject matter is expanding.

For “Radio Mambo,” the first such venture in 1994, the trio traveled to Miami to talk to Cubans, Haitians, Bahamians, African Americans, Jews and others about life in that melting-pot city. For “Culture Clash in Bordertown,” which premiered a year ago, the trio interviewed a similarly diverse sampling of residents in San Diego and Tijuana.

At the group’s core, Montoya says, is a “Chicano worldview that is not exclusive, but inclusive.”

Salinas adds that by approaching urgent issues in humorous ways, Culture Clash hopes to facilitate “healing.” “When we hear laughter out there in an audience--and it’s a multiracial laughter--that’s what we’ve been working for for 15 years.”

Montoya, 38, Salinas, also 38, and Siguenza, 40, are gathered at Montoya’s loft in downtown Los Angeles. Laid-back yet prone to giddiness, they juggle one-liners and political rants without ever letting a ball drop.

They were playing out of town when they marked their 15th anniversary on Cinco de Mayo, but they have returned home to perform “Radio Mambo” today at downtown L.A.’s California Plaza, and “Bordertown” for a monthlong run beginning Friday at the Actors’ Gang in Hollywood.

With its popularity increasing, Culture Clash has been on the road eight months out of each of the past three years. All that time together has bonded the performers “like brothers,” Salinas says, “and also like a married couple--we have our days when we have to just deal with each other, even though we don’t want to.”

As they pick up a newspaper or watch the TV news each day, they find renewed purpose.

In recent weeks, they have been particularly unsettled by reports that the Littleton, Colo., teen gunmen intentionally targeted some victims because of race.

“Race is the No. 1 issue in this country,” Siguenza says. “It’s a violent culture,” Montoya adds, “and for any artist to ignore that right now is, I think, 100% irresponsible.”

Perhaps, then, the time is particularly right for the return of “Bordertown.” For while it looks at life along the U.S.-Mexico border, it contemplates dividing lines of other kinds--and how to traverse them.

In San Diego, Culture Clash encountered the racial divisions endemic to an area that is keenly focused upon clandestine border crossing and its socioeconomic impact. But the trio happened upon other kinds of borders as well: the strictly hierarchal world of the Navy units based there; the surf turf divided up by rival boarders; and the cosmic line separating the heavens and Earth, which local UFO cults (Heaven’s Gate wasn’t the only one) are eager to cross.

This obsession with dividing lines is by no means unique to San Diego, the trio says. “We’re so focused on the border and anti-immigration,” Montoya says, “that militias and Littleton, Colorados, are popping up everywhere.”

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Culture Clash was born in 1984 in San Francisco’s Mission District when Rene Yan~ez, a founder of the nonprofit art space Galeria de la Raza, pulled together a comedy show for Cinco de Mayo. Montoya, Salinas and Siguenza--along with comedians Marga Gomez and Monica Palacios and humorist Jose Antonio Burciaga--came together under the moniker Comedy Fiesta.

As the one-night gig stretched to years, the group gradually thinned down to the present trio, and the name changed to Culture Clash.

By 1988, the trio was looking to expand beyond stand-up and sketch comedy. What emerged was the play-length “The Mission,” which met with wide acclaim when brought to the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1990. The performers were so energized by their Los Angeles sojourn that they moved here.

In the early years, Culture Clash’s humor could be downright clown-like. “We wore that red nose like a badge,” Montoya says.

This sensibility--jumbled together with everything from the Marx Brothers to the traveling tent shows known as carpas, from Jerry Lewis to El Teatro Campesino--bubbled through 30 half-hour episodes of a TV show that aired in seven Fox Television markets, as well as a wacky re-imagining of Aristophanes’ “The Birds” that the trio created with playwright-dramaturge John Glore and performed in early 1998 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.

The move into a documentary style began when Culture Clash visited Miami in 1992 to perform “A Bowl of Beings.” An idea thrown out during casual conversation grew into an invitation from the Miami Light Project, an arts presenting group, to create a show based on interviews with locals.

Culture Clash first performed “Radio Mambo,” built from videotaped interviews with about 70 people, in 1994 and has since taken it on tour, with stops throughout Southern California.

One of those stops was at San Diego Repertory Theatre, where Culture Clash soon had a commission to create a show about San Diego. “Bordertown,” based on interviews with 60 to 70 people, debuted there in spring 1998 with the theater’s artistic director, Sam Woodhouse, directing. (For Los Angeles, the show is being slimmed from two acts to one, with some material added and some of the localisms dropped.)

Although sketch comedy makes its way into the documentary pieces (in “Bordertown,” Sea World’s Shamu worries about losing his job to Mexican whales), the shows are built mostly from the interviews. That doesn’t always mean that the trio repeats verbatim what the subjects said, however.

“We finish their sentences,” completing thoughts that the subjects, out of fear or simple oversight, left unsaid, Salinas says. “There’s text and there is subtext,” Montoya adds. “There’s what people really wanted to say but didn’t--it was hanging in the air, it was written on the wall. It’s our duty to go there.”

Although the trio indulges in a bit of mind-reading, it nevertheless attempts to re-create subjects as accurately and as wholly as possible, right down to speech patterns and personality traits.

“It’s like fine portraiture work,” Montoya says. But “the red noses are still right there if we want them; they’re still in arm’s reach.”

The documentary style--”Culture Clash doing America,” as the trio refers to it--has proven so popular that theaters are lining up with commissions. Culture Clash is working on shows about New York’s Puerto Rican community in the ‘70s (scheduled to debut in September), San Francisco’s Mission District (February 2000) and Washington, D.C. (in the planning).

The trio doesn’t see itself returning to out-and-out comedy any time soon. “I don’t have the urge,” Salinas says.

Would that change if--as happened with Woody Allen--fans were to begin complaining that they preferred the early, funny stuff? “I hear that once in a while,” Salinas says. “But you can’t listen to that,” Siguenza adds. “It’ll drive you nuts.”

No matter what, Culture Clash will continue trying to find a way across the borders of the human heart--scaling walls built of prejudice and separatism.

“We have this almost, like, burden: We can’t just be artists, we also have to be activists,” Siguenza says.

“Are you getting tired of saving the world?” Montoya ad-libs, in mock documentary style.

Playing along, Siguenza giggles, “It is tiring; I’m tired.”

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“Radio Mambo: Culture Clash Invades Miami,” California Plaza’s Watercourt, 350 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. 8:30 tonight. Free. (213) 687-2159. “Culture Clash in Bordertown,” Actors’ Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Opens Friday. In June: Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 8 and 10:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. In July: Thursdays, 8 p.m.; Fridays, 8 and 10:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends July 11. Friday-next Sunday, $15; thereafter, $23. (213) 628-2772.