‘American Night: The Ballad of Juan José,’ whose earnest themes are leavened with humor, is a hot ticket at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times

August 16, 2010

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Richard Montoya says he’s “obsessed with the night” and the history-making players that go bump in it.

Fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. Mexican immigrants wading across the Rio Grande. Radical labor organizers and hard-line Arizona sheriffs. Lewis and Clark and Jackie Robinson, Sacagawea and Joan Baez, Fidel Castro and Malcolm X.

While a few of these nocturnal convergences are historical facts, others are simply dramatic metaphors and theatrical phantasms. But all of them somehow wander their way into “American Night: The Ballad of Juan José,” the new play by Montoya and Culture Clash that’s one of the toughest tickets to come by at this summer’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

“Under the cover of darkness we find out who we are as Americans,” says Montoya, actor, playwright and co-founder with Herbert Siguenza and Ric Salinas of Culture Clash, the L.A.-based ensemble that for 25 years has been fusing politically probing sketch seriocomedy with slapstick-erudite sociology.

“American Night,” a characteristic Culture Clash mixture of earnest themes leavened with topical humor, antic stagecraft and irreverent portrayals of famous personages, opened June 29 and runs through Oct. 31. It’s inaugurating “American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle,” the OSF’s new decade-long series of up to 37 original plays (matching Shakespeare’s career total) dealing with “moments of change” in U.S. history. Alison Carey, the cycle’s director and the OSF’s associate director, says that Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch and she thought the immigrant-themed “American Night” would be an ideal and extremely timely work to launch the series.

As co-founders of L.A.’s Cornerstone Theatre Company, Carey and Rauch also were familiar with Culture Clash’s previous works, several of which have used mongrel theater forms to explore America’s mixed ethnic and cultural identity.

“If we can inspire conversation about the core values of our country,” Carey says, “I would love that to happen.”

The play’s central conceit involves a Mexican immigrant, Juan José (played by René Millán, who lapses into a fever dream while studying for his U.S. citizenship exam.

Out of Juan José’s mind springs a vision of the nation’s history shaped by ceaseless waves of immigrants as well as by those who aided or resisted their becoming a new thread in the national fabric.

“The idea which has stayed with the piece is looking at these people who at the darkest times in American history have poured light, who have shown good about America during times that are very bad about America,” says Jo Bonney, the play’s Australian-born director, who was sworn in as a U.S. citizen four days after Barack Obama was sworn in as president.

In the course of Juan José’s centuries-spanning, intermission-less 93-minute odyssey, he’s swept up in a ‘tea party’ rally and the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (in which the defeated Mexico yielded about one-third of its territory to the U.S.). He crosses paths with Ralph Lazo, a Mexican Irish American Angeleno teenager who chose to accompany his friends to the World War II Japanese internment camp at Manzanar; and Viola Pettus, an African American Texas nurse who ministered to all and sundry, regardless of ethnicity or social stature, during the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic. Her patients even reportedly included Ku Klux Klansmen’s kin.

Among the other characters performed by the nine-member cast, which includes Montoya and Siguenza, is Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the controversial Arizona lawman who has been in the eye of the current immigration-debate whirlwind. The play even nods to one of the Bard’s offerings at this year’s festival, “The Merchant of Venice,” when a character paraphrases Shylock: “Hath not a Mexican eyes?”

To make the history lessons go down smoothly, there are generous dollops of disarming, equal-opportunity-offender jibes bearing the Culture Clash seal. Sample: an infant Klansman’s offspring comes complete with its own miniature hooded head.

The show has been selling at 98% capacity of the festival’s New Theatre stage, and critics have heaped praised. A Sacramento Bee reviewer described it as a “brilliant, satiric whirlwind,” and a critic for the Mail Tribune in southern Oregon called it “a boisterous, rollicking, surreal, postmodern, postracial (warning: Some descriptions may contain irony) journey into American history.”

Montoya says that audience members, whatever their political persuasion, have come to sympathize with the play’s hero, as performed by the charismatic Millán. “He’s got, like, 2% body fat, which really helps,” Montoya says.

Although there’s no plan to bring “American Night” to Los Angeles, Montoya says it’s “a no-brainer” that the show will be seen here, “and by that time, in a year or two hopefully, we will have a home there at the Westlake Theatre in MacArthur Park

Montoya has an added incentive for making sure that “American Night” gets seen by as many people as possible: Just two weeks before the show opened, he and his wife became the proud parents of a new baby boy, Mountain Malaquias Velasco Montoya.

“I try to keep that in mind every day I do this piece, we do use a lot of humor and a lot of comedy, but the stakes are very high for the people trying to cross that desert. Not to be melodramatic, but it’s really about life and death,” he says.

“At some point I have to sit my son down and tell him about this.”

reed.johnson@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Play offers offbeat, surreal take on our country’s past
‘American Night’ kicks off OSF’s history cycle of plays with rollicking, insightful satire and occasional pathos

By Bill Varble
for the Mail Tribune

A colored cowboy, a Mexican revolutionary and a Ku Klux Klansman all walk into a saloon …

The premise is put forth by Ben Pettus (Rodney Gardiner), a black cowboy in “American Night: The Ballad of Juan José,” which had its world premiere Saturday afternoon at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s New Theatre.

There’s no punch line, but the setup, with its hint of meta-theater, breaks the tension between three real (in the play) men who fit those descriptions.

It is 1918, and the three are facing off outside El Paso, Texas, where Ben’s wife, Viola Pettus (Kimberly Scott), is selflessly treating victims of the influenza epidemic that killed as many as 100 million people.

It is fitting that she do this, as it jibes with the larger vision of the play, which seems to have been inspired by a belief that often in American history, in the middle of great darkness, somebody steps up to do great good.

The credits say Richard Montoya and Culture Clash wrote the thing, but I don’t believe it.

It plays as if written by the Firesign Theatre and directed by the Marx Brothers, starring Monty Python.

“American Night” is a boisterous, rollicking, surreal, post-modern, postracial (warning: some descriptions may contain irony) journey into American history — and by extension the heart of one man’s American Dream.

Viewing is known to cause unrestrained laughter — and maybe a tear.

Juan José’s (René Millán) journey will take him over mountains and deserts, into wars and plagues, from rock festivals to shlock radio shows to internment camps. He will encounter Teddy Roosevelt, Sacajawea, a Shakespeare-quoting soldier, a bear, Malcolm X, NAFTA, Mormons, Harry Bridges, Bob Dylan, a tea bag lady, Fidel Castro and Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

There will be social commentary, some of it caustic, all of it comic, most of it very funny indeed.

The seed of “American Night” seems to have been “The Citizen’s Almanac,” a sort of Civics 101 booklet published by the government for immigrants trying to become American citizens. Juan José left Mexico, where he was headed for trouble with drug lords and crooked cops, hoping to bring his wife, Lydia (Stephanie Beatriz), and the couple’s baby later.

In the U.S., using flash cards to cram for his citizenship exam, he falls asleep and dreams the play. The narrative has the fractured, disjointed structure of dreams, with one episode segueing into the next outside the normal constraints of rationality or plot.

Juan José finds himself in the Mexican-American War in the 1840s and wants to stop the killing, but the treaty he’s asked to sign will cede a good chunk of North America to the United States at the expense of Mexico, not incidentally making him into an outlaw. What to do?

“Hath not a Mexican eyes?” cries a Mexican soldier, quoting Shylock.

Rim roll.

Sacajawea is a 15-year-old with an attitude. T.R. never sees an animal he doesn’t shoot at. A Klansman with nowhere else to turn brings his baby to black Viola — and the infant has a tiny, little, pointy Klan hood.

Flash forward a bit and it’s a world in which America is ever more Mexican, and Mexico is ever more American, and Nike sneakers can rain from the skies. All this is painted by Montoya and director Jo Bonney in very broad strokes indeed. Scenic designer Neil Patel’s thrust stage fills the entire playing space, with Shawn Sagady’s projections filling in and/or commenting on much of the action: landscapes, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Manzanar internment camp for Japanese-Americans, the 1969 Woodstock festival, vintage postcards, the inevitable moving train, the Caribbean.

For a world of NAFTA there are giant projections of industrial gears and cogs filling the back of the stage like that famous scene in Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”

Much of the story involves stereotypes, with Culture Clash coming down on the side of the argument that says when we laugh at them they are undercut and lose power.

And laugh we do. Mostly. You can’t tell this story without ugly. There is a sign, of a sort once common, that says “No dogs, negroes, Mexicans.” But in the end the satire is the big-hearted, inclusive, Horation sort.

There is Woody Guthrie claiming this land is his land, and ours, and Harry Bridges organizing workers against the bosses, and a stoner Boy Dylan copping song lyrics to inject into loopy dialogue.

The surreal anarchy of the climax reminded me of “Duck Soup,” but Juan José is no Rufus T. Firefly. Millán plays him, brilliantly, as a straight man with a good heart in the midst of comic chaos, as befits what is essentially a zany but profound civics lesson.

“American Night” lasts but 90 minutes, and tickets should be impossible. Give it stars all the way off the page. And note that it debuted exactly 75 years after the first-ever OSF plays. It is the first of Bill Rauch’s “American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle,” 37 commissioned plays that will tell America’s story. It is a rousing, heartfelt beginning.

Bill Varble writes about arts and entertainment for the Mail Tribune. He can be reached at varble.bill@gmail.com.

Culture Clash is proposed to help spur a theater’s revival

A plan is in the works to make the comedy trio the resident company at a restored Westlake Theatre.

The 1926 Westlake Theatre now houses a swap meet. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times / August 15, 2008)

By Reed Johnson

November 28, 2009

A historic MacArthur Park theater could become the permanent new home of the performance trio Culture Clash under an ambitious city plan to bring more cultural amenities to the heavily Latino urban neighborhood.

Under a proposal spearheaded by the Community Redevelopment Agency of the city of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), the Westlake Theatre, which was built in 1926 and currently is used for a swap meet, would be converted into a multi-use entertainment space for live theater, film screenings, musical performances and community and social events. The project also would include the creation of 49 units of affordable housing and a 300-space parking garage.

According to CRA officials, the Music Box@Fonda, which runs the Music Box theater in Hollywood, would operate and program the revamped Westlake Theatre, and Culture Clash, the popular and respected Latino performance ensemble that is marking its 25th anniversary this year, would become the facility’s resident theater company. In addition to performing at the theater for a minimum of 30 days per year, Culture Clash would provide youth-oriented programming and instruction in writing and acting, said Leslie Lambert, the CRA’s administrator for its Hollywood and Central region.

“They’re very popular; they attract a big audience,” said Lambert in explaining the selection of Culture Clash, known for its mix of antic comedy and biting social commentary. “Ethnically, they fit perfectly with that community. They’re very much in touch with that community. [And] they’ll bring in audiences from elsewhere.”

Richard Montoya of Culture Clash, who with colleagues Herbert Siguenza and Ric Salinas has operated as a gypsy ensemble since the group moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, praised the Westlake Theatre as “a grand old faded lady” and said the trio was excited about finally acquiring a “bricks and mortar” home of its own.

“Thank God there’s angels in bureaucracy — there are — that have said, ‘You guys deserve a home,’ ” Montoya said in a recent interview. “We’re, like, two Salvadorans, one Chicano, there’s a need in the area.”

However, he emphasized, MacArthur Park is “not an area devoid of culture. No, it’s a very, actually, sophisticated place.”

Indeed, the new facility is intended to enhance the revitalization of one of the city’s most culturally rich neighborhoods, following a long period in which soaring crime rates and economic decline marred the area’s image. The 633-acre Westlake Recovery Redevelopment Project Area was conceived in 1999 with the aims of stimulating economic development, rehabilitating existing housing and businesses, creating new housing, and improving public infrastructure and services. Other neighborhood projects include buffing up building facades.

Last week, the CRA’s board of commissioners voted to begin negotiations with the project’s developers, Millennium Partners, which will have up to 15 months to produce a formal plan to convert the 18,000-square-foot structure and the 1.2-acre site, which is bounded by Wilshire Boulevard, 6th and Alvarado streets and Westlake Avenue.

Plans call for the facility’s ground floor to be used for retail; and there has been discussion of adding a central courtyard and a rooftop restaurant. The city will help the swap meet vendors operating in the building to find new quarters.

Lambert estimated that the total cost of the project would be between $20 million and $25 million. She said it is likely that a not-for-profit entity would be formed to assume ownership of the building or else lease it from CRA, which purchased the structure in 2008.

The project would be funded by “largely if not entirely public money,” she said, and historic tax credits could be applied, given the building’s landmark stature.

Millennium — which, Lambert said, was chosen as the project’s overall developer after a lengthy process of competitive application and soliciting community input — has developed mixed-use properties, including apartment complexes, hotels and office space.

Neither Music Box nor Millennium representatives could be reached for comment.

Lambert said the theater’s old proscenium stage will have to be rebuilt, and retractable seats will be installed. Reduced ticket prices for Culture Clash performances will be offered to area residents, she added.

Montoya said that having a permanent space would enable Culture Clash to extend its creative endeavors and share its resources and knowledge with emerging artists.

“At least turn the keys over to some young people and say, ‘We’re done, we’re just over here if you need us, but here’s the keys to the asylum.’ ”

reed.johnson@latimes.com

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

THEATER

Culture Clash: Staying irreverent yet relevant after 25 years

The troupe known for its ‘political cabaret’ keeps coolly current with its knack for shining a light on life’s dark edges.

Ric Salinas of Culture Clash, the trio that reigns as undisputed clown princes of L.A. bilingual theater, has a laugh at Dodger Stadium with his daughters Daisy, 7, and, at right, Lola, 8. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

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By Reed Johnson

October 25, 2009

A few weeks ago, on a fog-enshrouded night in Malibu, Richard Montoya stepped onstage in full mariachi regalia to welcome his audience to what he slyly called the “Getty Pancho Villa.”

The occasion was a performance of “Peace,” Aristophanes’ perpetually timely 2,400-year-old antiwar comedy, updated to take stock of the latest global quagmires and packed with references to Michael Jackson, Brentwood versus Boyle Heights sensibilities and other punchy anachronisms.

The actors included avant-garde stalwart John Fleck and prolific TV and stage veteran Amy Hill. But the production’s throbbing Greco-Chicano heart was the vaudevillian antics of Montoya, Herbert Siguenza and Ric Salinas, better known by their collective moniker of Culture Clash, who adapted the play with John Glore, associate artistic director of South Coast Repertory.

Although the Getty’s faux-classical environs offered a ready-made symbol of old-school L.A. exclusivity, on this night the audience was a congenial SoCal blend of old and young, Eastside and Westside, Spanish-dominant and Anglo-centric. Among those who attended the show’s three-week run was a new fan so impressed that he fired off an e-mail.

“You guys are heroes and geniuses, clowns and dramatists,” it read. “My wife and I saw you in ‘Peace’ . . . you entertained us, and you tossed a couple of bombs, too, noisy things that did just the right amount of collateral cultural damage. I am an admirer of your work from now on.” It was signed ” Tom Hanks.”

If midlife is an age of sublimated madness, the three clown princes of bilingual L.A. theater — all hovering around mortality’s midpoint — appear to be hitting their manic prime. Since their tumultuous beginnings in a San Francisco art gallery in 1984, Siguenza, Salinas and Montoya have honed their intellectually rambunctious brand of comedy to a machete-like edge. For the group and its longtime followers, “Peace,” with its outlandish visual and verbal conceits (flying dung beetles, Central American gardeners materializing in the middle of ancient Athens) represents something of a return to the group’s anarchic sketch-comedy roots.

“People who . . . have seen us since the ’80s have come to ‘Peace’ and said, ‘Wow, this really reminds me of your early work, as far as the irreverence, the freedom of it,” Siguenza said. “We’re running around like 25-year-olds, you know, yet we’re 50 now.”

But with the big 5-0 looming, Culture Clash has acquired a gravitas to match its frisky spirits. In “Peace,” which Aristophanes wrote as a bawdy rebuttal to the dreadful toll of the Peloponnesian War, the double entendres and sight gags yield to some chilling reflections on warfare’s immoral waste.

This year, to mark its 25th anniversary, the group is tracing its artistic evolution in suitably frenetic but serious-minded style.

Over time, Culture Clash has transitioned from doing mainly sketch comedy (or “political cabaret,” in Montoya’s formulation) to nervy, full-blown scripted works. Typically based on extensive research and scores of interviews, they’re laced with historical cross-examining and brimming with audacious sociological slapstick.

The list includes “Chavez Ravine,” about the Latino community that was bulldozed aside by urban visionaries; “Water & Power,” a tragi-humorous take on the classic L.A. narrative of H2O and municipal corruption; and their latest work, “ Palestine, New Mexico,” which deals with America’s shifting political landscapes and the parallel searches for identity and a homeland. Like “Chavez” and “Water,” “Palestine,” directed by Lisa Peterson, is concerned with the unearthing of long-held family and community secrets and will have its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum (in December).

But that’s only one act in a fall calendar that includes a tribute Friday at UCLA’s Royce Hall featuring appearances by Rage Against the Machine’s Zack De La Rocha, troubadour Michelle Shocked and others.

Also this fall, the trio will begin scoping out “American Night,” an Oregon Shakespeare Festival commission that will inaugurate its 10-year cycle of American history plays. Culture Clash’s work, which will open next year, focuses on an immigrant man who drifts into a fever dream while preparing for his citizenship exam and turns into a time-traveling Zelig.

“The American night is a very dark place — it can be,” said Montoya, “and it’s usually in the American night when immigrants are moving through the night. Whether it was Harriet Tubman or an Indian guide or a Quaker or someone, there was sometimes someone holding up a lantern guiding the way, and that’s where you find the best of the American character.”

Perhaps most significantly, the footlose troupe soon may have a permanent home. As part of a prospective city-backed restoration project, Culture Clash is in negotiations with L.A.’s Community Redevelopment Agency to become resident artists at a new multi-purpose cultural venue that would occupy the historic Westlake Theatre at the edge of MacArthur Park. “People are very excited about Culture Clash going into the Westlake,” said Leslie Lambert, a CRA regional administrator. “They’re very much in touch with that community.”

This flurry of projects and praise has put Culture Clash in a mood simultaneously edgy and contemplative. To a degree, the group still feels it’s trying to shed its early image as a kind of Chicano-agitprop Three Stooges. Even before the breakthrough of “Water & Power,” Montoya, who has assumed principal authorship of the group’s scripted works, said he was “on a mission to drive a stake through the heart of the idea that we were a comedy troupe.”

“And that’s what’s funny with all the newspapers: They still try to keep you in that, ‘Oh, the comedy troupe, light and frivolous,’ ” he said. “But yet there’s this yearning and a restlessness that we have as artists.”

Practically from the moment the trio came kicking and screaming into the world at a Bay Area performance on it has aroused equal measures of admiration and confusion. Were these serious political commentators or breezy stand-ups? What was the deal with that bilingual rapping, those cheesy wigs, that verbal melange of potty jokes and erudite allusions?

Above all, some observers harrumphed, how could an ensemble consisting of a Mexican-American from Sacramento and two sons of Salvadoran immigrants take such unbridled, politically incorrect pleasure in toppling Latin American idols from their pedestals?

“We would do material on sacred cows, whether it was Frida Kahlo or Che Guevara,” Salinas recalled. “People reacted. They hadn’t seen that before.”Indignant Berkeley lefties took offense. Stanford University practically ran them off the campus. Even friends and relatives warned that the group was being overly irreverent at a time when Latinos were combating prejudicial stereotypes.

“It was very controversial, because the idea was that the movement was still very much a serious matter and it was too early for the clowns,” Montoya recalled. “I mean, we were hopefully doing some important stuff, but we were also wearing fishnet stockings. People very close to us were just like, ‘No, mi’jo, it’s not time.’ ”

But many members of those first audiences discerned a brash, important new voice in the American theater and began following it, first in the Bay Area, then in Los Angeles, Culture Clash’s adopted home since the early 1990s. That voice subsequently has infiltrated venues stretching from Lincoln Center to Midwestern college auditoriums, aired on PBS and Fox, and been studied in courses at UCLA.

“We were saying stuff that everybody had thought about but never said, you know?” Siguenza said. “About growing up, about being bilingual, bicultural, connected to people, resonated with people very deeply. And it still does. That’s why I think we’re around. Because that hasn’t changed, that sense of not belonging.”

The idea of belonging or not belonging is tricky when discussing a group inspired by artists as disparate as Peter Sellars, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Bertolt Brecht, Lenny Bruce and Dario Fo. Most influential of all, perhaps, was the proletarian panache and seat-of-the-pants resourcefulness of El Teatro Campesino, the farmworkers’ theater company founded by Luis Valdéz in 1965 to support striking grape farmers.

Since arriving in Los Angeles, the trio’s work has been nurtured by such luminaries as the South Coast Rep creative team; director José Luis Valenzuela; Gordon Davidson, the founding artistic director of the Mark Taper; and his successor, Michael Ritchie. Davidson said that even as Culture Clash has matured artistically, “they haven’t lost their identity and a kind of purity.”

“They don’t make you feel that they know more than you do, that you’re going to listen and we’re going to tell you,” Davidson said. “That’s part of the gift of comedy, but it’s also what’s in their souls.”

Others point to the group’s fraternal chemistry as one of its great assets. “They really trust each other. There’s no early-dating stage,” Ritchie said. “They’re well into a marriage that isn’t going to end.”

While the political climate around them keeps changing, Culture Clash continue to style themselves as equal opportunity offenders. In more than a dozen shows that they’ve produced since the Reagan-Bush era, they’ve taken on City Hall power brokers, U.S. immigration policy, Chicano intellectuals, the Rodney King beating and its terrifying aftermath, Father Junipero Serra, the Dodgers and the L.A. Times, among many others. You’d be hard pressed to name a local theater troupe that’s better attuned to the erratic, occasionally sublime frequencies of 21st century Los Angeles. Even victims of its wasp-ish attacks can’t help smiling at the group’s well-aimed stingers.

“It’s never mean-spirited,” Glore said. “There’s always a sense that they’re including the audience in the joke on itself.”

As Culture Clash ponders its next 25 years, its members will keep heeding advice they received nearly two decades ago from writer Sandra Cisneros. A couple of years before, Salinas had been blasted with a shotgun while trying to break up a gang fight outside his home in San Francisco; he nearly died on the operating table. After seeing one of the group’s shows in Hollywood, Cisneros told them, “Y’all need to be a little more reflective about what you’re doing.”

At the time, Montoya recalled, he and his confreres were riding in the back of a limousine. But Cisneros’ words touched a nerve and became a mantra. “I think the work deepened,” Montoya said. “I think it got a little darker.”

There remains a strong impulse in Culture Clash to lift a lantern up in those dark places, to find and repair through art whatever has been lost or damaged by history — with a laugh or two, whenever possible.

“Something that we found in common is, like, we all come from broken, divorced families,” Salinas said. “And I don’t know what that did to our psyche, but that did something. I know it informed the wanting of something.”

Aristophanes had a similar term for it: “the desire and pursuit of the whole.” Which, the Greek playwright once observed, is really just another name for love.

Culture Clash offers ‘Peace’ in our time

Review: L.A.-based trio mix politics, history and toilet humor at Getty Villa.

With Culture Clash, nothing is sacred except satire

Richard Montoya, left, Ric Salinas, center and Herbert Siguenza began Culture Clash 25 years ago. “We’re equal opportunity offenders,” Salinas says. (Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times / January 5)

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.