Culture Clash

Thursday, November 20, 2008 : 7:00pm

University Park Campus
Bovard Auditorium

USC student with valid ID, $5. USC faculty and staff, $10. General public, $20.

Latino/Chicano comedy and theater group Culture Clash pays homage to everyone from Cantinflas to the Marx Brothers.

http://www.usc.edu/spectrum

NORTH COUNTY NEWS

ANA MARIE WELSH

Last here for their Hellzapoppin’ “Zorro in Hell” at La Jolla Playhouse, Culture Clash —- or at least two members of that satiric Latino comedy trio —- just returned with “Water & Power” in an exciting, chilling, often hilarious production solidly directed at the San Diego Repertory Theatre by Rep artistic director Sam Woodhouse.

”Water & Power” marked a new level of artistic seriousness and a different kind of achievement for the Clash, which premiered the piece two years ago at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Written by Clasher Richard Montoya and featuring all three members of the quicksilver comedy troupe, this was and is a real play. It has a throughline involving the fictional Garcia twins, and chronicles, with flashbacks and in glittering shades of noir, both their personal odysseys and layer upon layer of corruption among the multicultural power players of Los Angeles.

But “Water & Power” delivers its potent, if sprawling, critique of the City of Angels without losing the qualities that have defined Culture Clash since it began performing on Cinco de Mayo in 1984 San Francisco. Montoya’s sensibility is sharply satiric, pointedly political; both the writing and the performance quality are unbuttoned and ebullient.

Clashman Herbert Siguenza is the sole member of the original cast to appear at the Rep; he reprises his potent performance as the complicated cop Gabriel Garcia (aka Power). Both crooked and idealistic, Siguenza’s Power is on a coke-snorting high in the sleazy Paradise Motel as the show opens. He’s hiding out after committing a crime that has already backfired.

Thanks to a mysterious ex-gangbanger named Norte/Sur, who literally circles the action in his wheelchair, Power is visited by his brother Gilbert, nicknamed Water. Their Mexican immigrant father, you see, worked as a ditchdigger for the fabled Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. He raised his boys to be tough and to rise in the gringo-Jewish world that had shut him out.

A former D.A., Gilbert is now a powerful state senator about to form a political coalition that will close a deal for a 22-acre green space in the Garcias’ old East L.A. neighborhood. Gabriel’s crime gets in the way of all that. So Gilbert heads for the Fixer, a rich, powerful, creepily suave developer even better connected to the powerful gangs —- in prisons and penthouses —- who run the city.

Montoya’s intricate plot borrows liberally from TV crime drama, noir films like “Chinatown,” and mystery fiction. Add magical elements from the all-knowing Norte/Sur, flashbacks to the boys’ childhood, vaudeville-style joking and a little Deer dancer (a Yaqui Indian spirit) to the mix and the play could careen out of control.

Woodhouse and his strong cast hold the elements together in an in-the-round staging that only occasionally flags during its action-packed 100 minutes. Bobby Plasencia excels as Norte/Sur, a chameleon figure who may be a prophet; his epilogue about his own Sweat Lodge conversion proves a tour de force. On opening night, Plasencia even ad-libbed hilariously to a woman heading early for the exit —- or the ladies room.

As state senator Gilbert, Richard Trujillo was short on political charisma, but convincingly concerned about his brother, whose actions he’s quick to judge and slow to understand. The brothers’ fight scenes are realistically choreographed by James Newcomb, and all in all, the three main actors, including Plasencia, play off one another like blood brothers.

Rep favorite Mike Genovese, dapper in head-to-toe white as The Fixer, owned his pivotal scene in an upscale restaurant. Though he didn’t steal the show as Dakin Matthews did in L.A. with his slithering, more roguish and flamboyant interpretation of The Fixer in L.A., Genovese made a firmly frightening, sexually ambiguous thug. And Trujillo made Gilbert’s degradation in the man’s presence palpable.

Young Marc Alexander Gonzalez distinguished the child versions of Water and Power learning to box and outfox one another, and John R. Padilla was empathetic as the boys’ father Asuncion, whose concern for their differences comes to fatally define them.

In the sketch comedy of their city-inspired collages —- “Radio Mambo” (1995) about Miami, or “Bordertown” (1998) about San Diego —- Culture Clash juxtaposed low comedy and tragedy, high camp and pathos, creating scores of characters, male and female, peopling those cities.

In this differently styled exploration of place, “Water & Power” possesses some of the familiar untamed wildness and a good deal of the old Clash comedy. But Montoya’s writing here has psychological weight, too. He manages to compress the events of one violent night and its aftermath into an episodic play riddled with a specifically Latin fatalism. It’s been optioned as a film, and well-directed, it should be a good one.

”Water & Power”

When: 7 p.m. Sundays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; through Nov. 16

Where: San Diego Repertory Theatre at the Lyceum, 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego

Tickets: $25-$53

Phone: (619) 544-1000

Web: www.sdrep.org

CENTER STAGE

PAT LAUER REVIEW

“Water and Power” was written by San Diego native Richard Montoya, co-founder of the acclaimed Chicano troupe, Culture Clash. The play stars Herbert Siguenza, Montoya’s long-time, multi-talented partner in comical and political crime. It’s all about blood being thicker than water – or power. And, taken from their blue-collar father’s low-end job in the Dept. of Water and Power, those are the nicknames of his East L.A. twin sons, whom the good-hearted guy groomed to make a difference in society. They took decidedly divergent paths; one’s a cop and one’s a senator – and over the course of a tough-talking evening, each will staunchly defend and disavow his most cherished values and desires. 
 
It’s a dark, taut 100-minute thriller, with acid-laced laughs and superb performances, expertly directed by Sam Woodhouse, artistic director of the San Diego Repertory Theatre. A few plot threads and resolutions strain comprehension or credulity at the end, but there’s still plenty to chew on. Some folks at the opening said they needed to see it twice, to glean all the levels of meaning in the quick-witted, fast-paced play. 
 
Montoya’s language is terrific – gritty, real, down-and-dirty and often downright poetic. The staging, which includes a rainstorm that sprays front-row onlookers, is configured in the round, or really in the square, recreating a boxing ring that symbolizes the simultaneous competition and protection the father imbued in his boys. And they do fight to the death for each other. There are as many touching as suspenseful moments. Don’t leave your attention or intellect at home for this one. But don’t stay at home and miss it, either. 
 

Its gonna happen folks, people are on edge, especially on
Sundays and if their chosen NFL team loses.

We opened Water & Power in San Diego on Sunday, private party up at the club. When a guy with a thick or no neck at all sporting a Chargers/El Cajon jersey saw my friends Obama 08 jersey, came over to ask if she was for Obama and the faggots.

Private party mind you, I asked No Neck to leave and soon went down in a flurry of arms and fists when he charged me, glasses shattering and a dozen people jumping in. Nobody got hurt, No Neck was escorted out and we all had a good laugh but one of these mixers is bound to get dangerous. I was not proud of what happened, I could not however take the insult to Senator Obama, our queer brothers and sisters and Fabiola Torrez who was the target also.

It was not very Obama of me and next time I will tamper down the reaction.

On our toes, the work continues, people are pissed, so what.

We will triumph.

rjm (slugger)

S.D. Rep’s ‘Water & Power’ delivers briskly with thunder

*By James Hebert *

THEATER CRITIC
October 28, 2008

You wouldn’t want every play to take its title too seriously (imagine the potential PETA freakouts over a literal-minded “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”). But “Water & Power” embraces its name with elemental enthusiasm at San Diego Rep; near play’s end, cascades of water form a curtain around the stage of the Lyceum Space, spritzing the shoes of those in the front row.

That moist moment is in keeping with the tactile feel of Richard Montoya’s lacerating, darkly funny and vividly realized drama about brotherhood and strife among Latinos in L.A.

The “power” part of the show comes not just in the portentous flashes of lightning that punctuate some scenes, but in Montoya’s muscular writing itself, a worthy match for the ruthless power politics the play depicts.

The play’s lyrical but drawn-out final scenes juke an audience with maybe one false climax too many, and its pronouncements about politics occasionally feel tacked onto what is really more a story about family. But this is still an original and exciting work, a bold announcement of Culture Clash’s passage into new theatrical realms.

“Water & Power” premiered in 2006 at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum, with Montoya playing the role of Gilbert alongside his Clash compadres Herbert Siguenza (as Gabriel) and Ric Salinas (as the street poet Norte/Sur). At the Rep, where the troupe has a long and memorable history, only Siguenza reprises his role; Richard Trujillo steps in as Gilbert, and Bobby Plasencia takes the role of Norte/Sur.

Montoya drew on elements of his own boyhood in crafting the story of Gilbert and Gabriel, East L.A. brothers whose working-class dad (John R. Padilla, quietly powerful in flashback scenes) urges the boys to strive for the kind of success he never attained.

Dad works at the city’s Department of Water and Power (one of the boys seems to believe “DWP” stands for Department of White People); he anoints Gilbert “Water” and Gabriel “Power,” nicknames that take on allegorical meaning as the saga unfolds.

Decades later, the groomed and smooth-talking Water has become a rising state senator; Power is a tough veteran cop who has made lieutenant and, in the process, an utter mess of his life.

Most of the action happens on a single night in a crummy Sunset Strip motel room, amid an epic 17-day stretch of rain. Gabriel is holed up there after stepping way past the power of his badge. Now a man is dead, Gilbert has been drawn into the mess, and forces on both sides of the law are gunning for his troubled brother.

Sam Woodhouse, the Rep’s co-founder and artistic director, directs with an intuitive feel for the material (he has worked with Culture Clash for years, and there’s been no greater champion here of plays with Latino themes).

Some of the stage business might be laid on a little thick (the boisterous thunder and lightning, crashing in at pivotal moments, starts to feel pushy), but the pacing of the 105-minute, intermission-free show is brisk and does justice to the suspense of Montoya’s narrative.

One of the most satisfying aspects of Montoya’s dialogue is the way it fleshes out character so vividly.

“I’ve been a Chicano since 1993,” Gilbert remarks half-jokingly, a reflection of his very self-aware opportunism and the fluidity of his public persona.

Gabriel is full of fatalistic wisecracks and gallows humor, which Montoya weaves deftly (and daringly) into what is otherwise a pretty stark, dark drama.

Woodhouse cast the show carefully, and it pays off. Trujillo, who has done the previous, ever-morphing Culture Clash favorite “Bordertown” elsewhere, has just the right self-righteous, slightly oily take on Gilbert, while Siguenza, a comic highlight of past Clash shows, reins in the clowning and comes up with a meditative and affecting portrait of Gabriel, who seems to embrace doom as a form of self-fulfillment.

Mike Genovese has a sharply etched turn as the Fixer, a behind-the-scenes power player whose fussy manners (and habit of awkwardly name-dropping rappers like Tupac and Biggie Smalls) mask a sadistic streak that comes to the fore in a startling scene of humiliation when Gilbert comes seeking his
help.

But Montoya’s most affecting touch comes with Norte/Sur, the ex-gangster who now gets around in a wheelchair and has become Gabriel’s unofficial right-hand man, despite some extremely difficult history between them.

Though the self-effacing Norte/Sur is ridiculed by Gilbert, he becomes the play’s voice of wisdom, and a fount of gentle humor. Plasencia plays him with a deeply authentic, soulful feel, right down to the way he dotes over the sketchbook in which he chronicles events mundane and earth-shaking.

If the plot of “Water & Power” finally wades into the unlikely (you have to wonder how some of what transpires could ever be kept quiet, for example), the play has its own power to shake up theatergoers. Thunder or no.

*Writer: *Richard Montoya. *Director: *Sam Woodhouse. *Sets: *Kristen Flores, Adam Lindsay. *Lighting: *Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz. *Costumes: *Kate Stallons. *Music: *Paul James Prendergast. *Sound: *Tom Jones. *Cast: *Richard Trujillo, Herbert Siguenza, Bobby Plasencia, Mike Genovese, John R. Padilla, Marc Alexander Gonzalez, Arturo Medina.

Reaching for the Brass Ring:
Insights from Richard Montoya

The son of a Korean War Veteran, Richard Montoya was born in 1959 at San Diego’s Balboa Naval Hospital. Raised in Sacramento, he came of age in San Francisco’s Mission District and now lives in Echo Park, one mile from the Motel Paradise on Sunset Boulevard where much of the action of Water and Power takes place. The REP asked Montoya to reflect on his first full-length drama, the first play authored solely by Montoya. 

Is this a breakthrough work for Culture Clash?
This is not brand new ground for us, but it is ground that says Culture Clash are not just comic actors - that we can sink our teeth into dramatic characters in a dramatic story, and work with discipline and restraint. We gave ourselves permission to venture into the darker recesses, like August Wilson says, “to walk into the shadows.” 

Wilson watched our production of Chavez Ravine in L.A. two nights in a row. He said he saw a lot of parallels between it and his last play Radio Golf. Both are portraits of big-city power politics and conflict. August’s work, and ours, is not about the “master” - the white boogey man or white devil. Ours is about our own Latino demons, ambitions and desires, our very American ideals… about us wanting the same things, the same brass rings as everybody else. 

In our California plays we are putting the ghosts of California onstage. Since Clifford Odetts, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee, Latinos have been asking and yearning for OUR Death of a Salesman, our August Wilson. Water and Power came from L.A., from the films of L.A., the bridges, the East Side and the West Side, listening to the city talk to me. And from me saying: we can handle drama. 

Water & Power as “Stage Noir.”
The smoke-filled back rooms and the opium dens of Chinatown were not invented by Hollywood filmmakers. They have existed throughout California history. Films like “Chinatown” and “There will be Blood” did not invent noir. San Diego has the same sun-bleached west coast noir as L.A. When I stare at City Hall in L.A., it reminds me so much of the old El Cortez Hotel in San Diego. If noir was not invented in the El Cortez, I don’t know where it was invented! Noir has never really been set in the East Side of L.A. or in San Diego’s Barrio Logan. But there have always been guys beating the pavement and driving hard in cars that lean forward in the late afternoon when the shadows and odds are slim that you will survive the dance that night or the fight under the bridge.

A Cautionary Tale
Chicano power brokers have not yet learned what Anglo and Jewish power brokers have learned about power: “To have it but not to use it. And if you do have it, spread it around.” Water and Power is a story that says, “If you are going for the power and reaching for the brass ring… never forget where you came from. And if you get there, take some people with you.”

Visceral Drama from Culture Clash

“The Marx Brothers meet the Rolling Stones” is how American Theatre Magazine described the 20 years of theatre from Culture Clash, the country’s most irreverent and incisive Latino theatre ensemble.

They are the acclaimed creators and performers of the works Culture Clash in Bordertown(SD REP 1998), Culture Clash in AmeriCCa (SD REP and nationwide 2000–08), Chavez Ravine (Los Angeles 2003), Zorro in Hell (throughout California 2005–07) and now Water & Power at the REP October 21 to November 16.

Written by Clash member Richard Montoya and starring Clash member Herbert Siguenza as Power, the San Diego premier production is directed by REP Artistic Director Sam Woodhouse, a longtime Clash collaborator. REP audiences will experience this powerful comic drama in the round in the intimate Lyceum Space where no seat is more than six rows from the action.

Monotya’s story is hot and visceral “stage noir,” set in the private rooms of power and conflict in our insatiably power hungry Southern California culture.

With nods to the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley, the heart of this L.A. mystery is the push and pull of brotherly love running headlong into desire and revenge.

The brothers Water and Power are both heroes and villains, each a real archetype of Latinos with 
power in contemporary California — flesh-and-blood examples of how newfound power left unchecked can erupt with the force of a California earthquake.

A hardworking Chicano father nicknamed his twin sons Water and Power and taught them the family motto: there is no power without water, and no water without power. In 2008, Water has become a rising star state senator with his eye on Washington; Power is an honored Police Lieutenant who breaks all the rules.

On the eve of an election that could propel Water’s political career into the fast lane, Power steps outside the law. Suddenly the lives and dreams of the brothers are in flames.

Water & Power is theatre written and performed for the people of 21^st century Southern California — a play about the movers and shakers that are rattling the future of our state. Montoya’s careening, buoyant imagination bursts forth in an explosive story that is hilarious, political, social, satirical, ethnic, fearless, often moving and always theatrical.

Nearly all popular American audiences love film noir. The attitude and narrative found in classic film noir have an intoxicating power to lift and magically transport the movie participant. Film noir was coined by French film critics who were commenting on the darkly rendered American crime and detective films released in Europe in the early 1940s. The violent, misogynistic, unlawful perspectives of these World War II era crime tales served as a metaphoric snapshot of society’s domestic devils. Despite the pronounced pleasures in watching these films, there were rarely optimistic endings in the classic world of film noir. 

Frequently, a film noir narrative was tailored to a detached, amoral, sexually ample male who could slam a bouncer without breaking a sweat (e.g., James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart). The noir male could also withstand a bullet in the shoulder. Far more damaging, the noir protagonist would meet within ten minutes a stunning, promiscuous, femme fatale (e.g., Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall) and he would make the wrong decision to fall in love with her. An open question remains today whether or not the women watching noir would endorse or condemn the moral pathology of these diabolical divas. The evolution of feminism in the last two generations of American culture puts new pressures on the virtues of our cherished femme fatales and the destructive elements of crime’s lust at the risk of Cupid’s death. 

Classic American noir ended with Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” (1958) set in Tijuana and starring Charlton Heston as a Mexican police official. In the last twenty-five years, American noir has travelled from Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982) and John Dahl’s “The Last Seduction” (1994) to Robert Rodriguez/Frank Miller’s “Sin City” (2005), making each decade more miserable about romantic love, ruthless ambition, and the existential bliss of outlaw life. 

Transforming noir from screen to stage is an interesting but daunting proposition because of the immediacy of our anti-hero’s sweating brow and beating heart experienced from the fourth row. One of the most successful attempts at noir in live theatre was Sam Shepard’s Suicide in B Flat directed by George Ferencz and employing original music by jazz artist Max Roach (La Mama ETC Theatre, New York City 1984). The unavoidable meta-realism of noir in a black box theatre was celebrated by the La Mama ETC artists - colorless light jells, hypnotic jazz chords from a live band, smoke and shadow acting, and acid verbal deliveries. Skilled comedy supported the fake violence and yet the production irony undermined the totality of the sentimentality, blessing our layered cynicism, our misanthropic dreams, and our undying love of the 1940s crime movie. 

Anticipating Richard Montoya’s very Californian play Water & Power with genuine enthusiasm and aesthetic hunger, one imagines the gun play, the proximity of our Mexican border, the hard-boiled Bogart dialogue, the horrid double cross that breaks the realm of friendship, and the cruel death of a society’s innocence. Absent in Montoya’s tale is the presence of the femme fatale and all airs of bitchy love. Indeed, there are no women in the landscape. Nonetheless, Water & Power will inevitably conjure up the lasting memory of Sam Shepard’s play, Dashiell Hammett’s novels, and the forbidden seduction of filmic crime’s dimly lit, wonderfully executed murders. 

Allan Havis - playwright, professor of theatre & film, and Thurgood Marshall Provost at UC San Diego - has a new cinema studies book, “Cult Films: Taboo & Transgression,” University Press of America, 2008.

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Written by RICHARD MONTOYA

Directed by SAM WOODHOUSE

Starring HERBERT SIGUENZA

October 21 - November 16, 2008
Previews - Tuesday at 7pm, Wednesday at 7pm, Thursday at 8pm, Friday at 8pm and Saturday at 8pm
Press Opening: Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 7pm 
   

      

Culture Clash, America’s premier Latino theatre troupe, has been called “The Marx Brothers meet the Rolling Stones.” We call them our favorite ensemble of actor-writers in America. They are sly and incisive theatrical anthropologists, commentators on who we are today, in an America that has never looked the way it does before. Trust us… nobody writes about Californians like they do!  

Ensemble leader Richard Montoya has written a truly humorous, tough-minded and penetrating look at Southern California’s power politics, and the Latinos and Gringos who hold our future in their hands. Ranging from the hilarious to the chilling, this is a gripping piece of Southern California noir fiction in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley and the film “Chinatown.” At the center of the intrigue lives the power of brotherly love as two brothers, flush with the temptations of new and immense influence, attempt to save themselves from the abyss of realpolitik.

The Story

A hardworking Chicano father nicknamed his twin sons Water and Power, underscoring the family motto: “There is no power without water, and no water without power.” Water has become a rising star State Senator with his eye on Washington; Power is an honored Police Lieutenant who breaks all the rules.

It has been raining for 17 days and nights. The brothers are trapped inside Motel Paradise on Sunset Boulevard. On the eve of an election that could propel Water’s political career into the fast lane, Power has ignited a life-or-death scandal that threatens to derail the lives and dreams of each of them. The brothers, and the city, are in trouble.

This is theatre of the moment: Montoya’s careening, buoyant imagination bursts forth in an explosive story that is political, social, satirical, ethnic, fearless, often moving and always dramatic. Water & Power won the Los Angeles Theatre Critic’s Circle and Ovation Awards for Best New Play when it premiered in 2006. REP audiences will be the first to see this award-winning work prior to its feature film debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009.

CULTURE CLASH IN AMERIccA and CHAVEZ RAVINE

November 20th, 2008

USC Campus

More information to come…

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Culture Clash in AmeriCCA

TWO SHOWS ONLY!

January 23 and 24th, 2009

National Hispanic Cultural Center

Albuquerque, New Mexico

http://www.nationalhispaniccenter.org/index.php