A Family Divided by Culture and Farce

City slickers versus country cousins is an ancient subject for comedy, but it’s not exactly evergreen, judging from Lina Montalvo’s English translation of “Rosalba y Los Llaveros” (Rosalba and the Llaveros Family) at Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Theatre 3.

Returning to Emilio Carballido’s Mexican family farce after earlier productions in 1973 and 1983, the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts appears satisfied to just go for easy laughs, without trying to find anything more substantive. And while there are a few such laughs waiting to be found, the play grows tiresome as it spins through its many convolutions without getting progressively funnier.

Middle-aged Aurora (Johanna Siegman) and her collegiate daughter (Gema M. Sandoval), the title character, are Angelenos visiting their roots in the town of Otatitlan, in the Mexican state of Veracruz. They descend on Aurora’s brother (Ernesto Miyares) and his wife (Lina Gallegos) and quickly discover a few odd wrinkles in this family’s culture.

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Their handsome late-20s son (John Paul) is treated as if he’s from a lower social class. The maid (Alejandra Flores), meanwhile, is the household tyrant, and her teenage daughter (Tania Campos) is almost like a member of the family. The visitors soon learn how all of these people are inextricably linked. The family doesn’t want to discuss these connections, but the nosy norteamericanos start bringing everything out into the open.

Meanwhile, the family’s daughter Rita (Ana Rey) is being formally courted by a stodgy suitor (Antonio Nesme) with a battle-ax mother (Bertha Holguin) in tow. And a distant cousin who’s a shrieking religious fanatic (Liane Schirmer) makes house calls.

In the original play and the 1973 BFA production, the visitors were Mexican urbanites. In the 1983 and 2000 productions, they’re from Los Angeles. Presumably this is supposed to bring the comedy a little closer to home for an L.A. audience, but it feels contrived.

Aurora and Rosalba are more candid than their relatives, which rings true enough, especially since the daughter is studying psychology. But they become embroiled so quickly in the affairs of their hosts that there doesn’t seem to be much of a cultural gulf at all. Specifically, the speed with which romance begins to develop between Rosalba and her first cousin, without any concern given to their vastly dissimilar backgrounds, seems extremely unlikely.

No one explains why Aurora and Rosalba moved to L.A. If their motives were economic, they don’t seem to be much better off than their cousins. Estela Scarlata’s Veracruz set is colorful but also generically middle-class.

In an apparent attempt to add some local atmosphere, colorfully costumed dancers from Danza Floricanto USA periodically take over the front of the stage for extended folkloric dance sequences. These provide a little welcome variety, but they’re connected so tenuously to the play that they, too, call attention to the synthetic quality of the entire production. What do the dancers’ beaming faces and carefully harmonized steps have to do with the predicaments of farce?

The second act becomes a miasma of narrative strands that, under Margarita Galban’s direction, never coalesce with the assurance that one wants from farce. And while all of this effort is being spent on plot, the slightly deeper resonances that might have arisen from the cross-cultural conflict and the family’s own history get lost in the shuffle. The actors usually opt for overstatement, and only in the case of Holguin’s cantankerous old biddy is this always the appropriate choice.

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* “Rosalba and the Llaveros Family,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, Theatre 3, 514 S. Spring St., This week: Spanish. Next week: English. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 3 p.m. Ends March 5. $20. (323) 225-4044. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.