Facing Another Culture Clash

Actor Herbert Siguenza is leaning over a narrow counter in a backstage dressing room, coming face to face with himself in the mirror. The comedian is 43, balding, lumpy around the middle, and about to take on the role of a lifetime.

This is opening night for “eforeCantinflas!”--a new play about the renowned Mexican funnyman written and performed by Siguenza, who is taking a leave from the Los Angeles-based, satirical comedy trio Culture Clash. In less than an hour, he’ll make his solo debut at his hometown’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, performing for the first time without his comedic cohorts of 18 years. His partners, Richard Montoya and Ric Salinas, at this moment are in Washington, D.C., for the latest Culture Clash production, which Siguenza co-wrote but which is going on without him.

“It’s really scary for me to carry a show on my own,” Siguenza says. “Since I don’t have the other two guys, the whole weight is on me now.”

And Siguenza didn’t make it easy on himself by taking on a veritable legend. Cantinflas is a classic of Mexican cinema, a comedic character as identified with the mestizo nation as Woody Allen is with New York.

Created by the late actor Mario Moreno, the Cantinflas character captured the dreams and frustrations of the working-class everyman, the humble shoeshine boy who stood up to corrupt politicians, the uneducated street urchin who could talk his way out of any predicament with a torrent of words that sounded highfalutin enough to confuse his adversaries.

Cantinflas has been called the Mexican Charlie Chaplin, but his appeal is not relegated to some silent-film memory. He remains as relevant to Mexicans today as he was in his heyday of the 1940s and ‘50s. As lovable as Red Skelton’s Freddie the Freeloader, as witty and outrageous as Groucho Marx’s Captain Spaulding, as gracefully slapstick as Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Cramden, Mario Moreno’s Cantinflas had no peers in the annals of Mexican comedy.

The character’s appeal knew no borders in the Spanish-speaking world, resonating naturally with Siguenza’s Salvadoran mother, for example, who attended the debut in a sequined dress.

Cantinflas attracted Siguenza’s attention for his human qualities: “for being good and being moral and being upright and never letting things get you down and being happy with what you have.”

Siguenza prepared for more than two years for this moment. He watched Cantinflas movies until early hours of the morning. He studied the Mexican comedian’s quirky gestures, nervous as a hummingbird, agile as a bullfighter. He dissected his Spanish speech pattern, so uniquely nonsensical that it earned a place in the dictionary. Cantinflando, we learn in Siguenza’s clever, biographical script, means to talk a lot while saying very little.

In real life, Siguenza looks nothing at all like the character he’s about to re-create--Cantinflas’ wily and noble tramp called “El Peladito.” That’s what makes his imminent transformation all the more amazing. Calmly, the actor applies his own makeup. He accentuates the comical Cantinflas mustache, two pathetic patches at the sides of the mouth. He puts on the baggy, low-slung trousers, barely held up with a rope for a belt. He dons a disheveled wig on his shaved head, then finally puts on the cockeyed, undersized hat that was a trademark of Mexico’s most beloved movie character.

“Cantinflas was never a victim,” Siguenza says of the persona he has come to inhabit so well. “He was smarter than the rich guy. He would outwit society. And he was never exploited. In all of his movies, he would fight, fight, fight.”

American audiences knew Cantinflas best as Passepartout, the bumbling but resourceful valet of David Niven’s aristocratic Phileas Fogg in the Oscar-winning 1956 movie, “Around the World in Eighty Days.” The film, which earned Moreno one of two career Golden Globe awards, marks the opening of Act II in Siguenza’s two-act, almost two-hour tribute.

Cantinflas starred in only one other English-language film, the disappointing “Pepe” in 1960. In Siguenza’s play, an aging Moreno, who had become a fabulously wealthy and well-connected celebrity, reminisces with a female reporter about the pain of his unrealized Hollywood dreams.

His main problem was the language, he says in English to the admiring foreign journalist. His comedy, so grounded in double meanings, flowery excesses and deliberate misunderstandings, was too hard to translate.

To prove the point, Siguenza’s Moreno does a brief Groucho impersonation in Spanish, using a famous line (“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard”) that falls flat in translation. “See, it doesn’t work,” admits the dejected old comedian.

Honored in His Language

Language is also a big issue for Siguenza’s bilingual drama, which includes long segments in Spanish. In fact, Siguenza re-creates skits word for word, and sometimes move for move, from some of Cantinflas’ 51 movies, such as his breakthrough 1940 classic, “Ahi Esta el Detalle,” which roughly translates as “There’s the Rub.”

To understand these extended passages, high school Spanish classes were of no use to the many non-Latinos at opening night last week.

“I keep wanting a little more English,” one man was overheard to say during intermission. “But then it’s like, ‘Get over it.’ I love just watching him.”

The man turned out to be John R. Killacky, executive director of the arts center here that helped develop and produce the Cantinflas project. The play was first conceived by Siguenza shortly after Moreno’s death in Mexico in 1993, but it wasn’t realized until his residency at Yerba Buena two years ago.

In an interview, Killacky said the heavy use of Spanish became a topic of discussion among the arts center’s staff. Some questioned whether more English would help bring the monolingual half of the audience along. Others supported Siguenza’s choice of preserving his character’s original dialogue.

“Why can’t we have the man we’re honoring and the language that he spoke?” Killacky concluded. “If we’re really going to be a multicultural institution, let’s go with it.”

In an early draft of the script, Siguenza played a nerdy professor using a Power Point program to trace Cantinflas’ career from his beginnings with traveling tent shows, or carpas, to his final film in 1982, “El Barrendero” (The Street Sweeper). In the play’s final version, the journalist is a more effective device suggested by director Max Ferra, founding director of New York’s INTAR Hispanic American Arts Center.

It’s Not Americanized

Backstage with his supporting cast after the show (which continues here through Sunday), Siguenza is obviously pleased with the debut. The script works, he declares, so he has no intention of changing it.

“And he remembered his lines!” beamed his new wife, Adriana, a high-spirited Glendale schoolteacher who serves as the actor’s live-in critic. Memorizing the long Cantinflas dialogue was extremely difficult, the couple recalled over lunch the following day at a favorite Market Street restaurant. The sentences are so fast, disjointed and illogical.

“I made a conscious decision not to translate it,” Siguenza says, “because I wanted to re-create his bits--how he sounded, how he dressed. I didn’t want to Americanize it.”

That’s the “militant side of me,” Siguenza says, arguing that people never demand to have Italian operas translated. Should an artist’s work be preserved and respected only when it’s considered high art? “My attitude is, ‘No!’ ” asserts the actor, surprisingly serious and low-key off stage. “This is the way it is. And it has just as much validity.”

Ironically, one of the most memorable moments in the play is a skit that Siguenza translated into English--”for the culturally impaired,” as his Cantinflas character cracks. The scene, about an incompetent carpenter who creates a crooked coffin with a zipper for the deceased, is from the film “El Analfabeto” (The Illiterate One). Although not as inspired as the Spanish, Siguenza’s English wordplays and well-placed colloquialisms give a remarkably good impression of what Cantinflas comedy was all about. For that moment, Siguenza’s bilingual skills overcome the language barrier that stunted the U.S. aspirations of Mexico’s comedic icon.

“I wanted to prove that maybe he could have done it,” he says.