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.

 

Playwright Allan Havis on Water & Power:
From Film Noir to Stage Noir

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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