A Study of the Dividing Lines in a California ‘Bordertown’

When Los Angeles-based Culture Clash went to Miami in 1995, the trip yielded “Radio Mambo,” a high point in the trio’s fruitful 15-year career. Elegantly shaped, full of low, medium and high comedy, the show worked like a living mural depicting a wonderfully conflicted Pushmi-Pullyu of a city.

Next stop, San Diego--a far less stereotypically “exotic” locale but just as promising, in part, because of its very opaqueness.

“A wonderful, beautiful city,” says Sheriff Bill Kolender, one voice heard in the new show “Culture Clash in Bordertown.” How to reconcile San Diego’s Chamber of Commerce glad-hand with, say, the Heaven’s Gate cult mass suicide? What’s underneath the area’s multiracial tensions denied and history ignored?

The Clash based its answers to those questions on 100 or so interviews conducted on both sides of the Mexico/U.S. border. “Bordertown” opened last year at San Diego Repertory Theatre, written and performed by Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza. As proven by the revised “Bordertown,” which had its L.A. premiere over the weekend at the Actors’ Gang Theatre, the Clash’s performance skills remain as sharp as ever.

This time, though, the social observations are disappointingly thin. There’s no reason “Bordertown” should copy the intention and tone of the Clash’s Miami show. But this one feels forced, as if it’s settling for less.

Co-presented by, among others, the Mark Taper Forum’s Latino Theatre Initiative, “Bordertown” hangs on the concept of aliens, both the undocumented and the extraterrestrial variety. It’s all in how they’re viewed, according to the show. Murderous disdain comes early on, in a scene (returned to later on) set in the eastern part of San Diego County, where a rabid volunteer border patroller confronts our intrepid researcher-heroes. From there “Bordertown” heads north, to the artists and residents of the Chicano Park neighborhood located underneath the Coronado Bridge. In other scenes, immigrants from all points of the globe talk about their search for a sense of community, in a region similar to L.A. in its troubling capacity for communal isolation.

Staged by San Diego Rep artistic director Sam Woodhouse, “Bordertown” covers plenty of ground. It’s slick--to a fault. When we hear from a woman working in a Tijuana maquiladora (factory), it’s hard to connect with what she’s saying; she’s getting too much competition from talented designers overdoing their jobs, judging from the aggressively flashy lighting (by Jeff Rowlings) and sound (Randy Cohen and Pea Hicks).

The best moment is simple, blunt agitprop. Wrapped in an American flag, Salinas sneaks across a miniature barbed-wire fence to have his way with Siguenza, wearing the flag of Mexico. When the emblematic characters speak, it’s nothing special--but until that point, it’s amazing what wordlessness can convey in comic terms. Elsewhere, in “slam” poetry style, Montoya relays evocatively his own birth in Balboa Park’s old Naval Hospital.

Here and there, “Bordertown” makes provocative theatrical sense of such contrasts. Too often, though, it just seems harried. “We had a hard time finding the pulse of the city,” acknowledged Montoya in a San Diego Union-Tribune interview last May. No single theater piece can do that; it’s what you find when you’re looking that counts. For every shrewd portrait in “Bordertown” such as the Vietnam veteran living in Tijuana, fearful of America’s gun-craziness, we must settle for a facile laugh or two.

* “Culture Clash in Bordertown,” Actors’ Gang Theatre, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. In June: Thursdays-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. $23 (half price July 4). (213) 628-2772. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Richard Montoya: Ensemble

Ric Salinas: Ensemble

Herbert Siguenza: Ensemble

Written by Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza. Directed by Sam Woodhouse. Set and costumes by Christopher Acebo. Lighting by Jeff Rowlings. Sound by Randy Cohen and Pea Hicks. Production stage manager Amanda MacIndoe Gratton.