As I mentioned yesterday, my wife and I, and a friend, Colleen, trekked to San Jose Saturday to catch the comedy troupe Culture Clash. I hadn’t caught them in about eight years — when I interviewed them for the cover of the Sacramento Bee’s Ticket section — and so I was heartened to see how their routine has matured over that time. (They actually had a show on Fox for a year that nobody knew about; as Herbert Siguenza, one of the members, said: “We’re Latino, and we were doing satire, so that’s two strikes right there.”)
While their work in the early to mid-’90s was all about the Chicano identity, their new staged pieces have opened up and grown in a different direction, tackling issues of citizenship, belonging, cultural assimilation, the immigrant experience, and the topic that’s hanging over all of us: war and terrorism. Their routine’s anti-war message gave the performance a more somber but deeper and more resonant tone.
Two of the members took the stage after the show to answer questions from the hundred or so folks who remained, many of them students from UC Santa Cruz. Richard Rodriguez explained the troupe’s work by invoking the word “journalism” as part of their mission. Before a show’s run, the three members actually go out and interview 50 or 60 locals to get a feel for what the community is experiencing on a social and cultural level. The resulting show, they said, is about reporting back to the audience on their findings.
An official with San Jose rep mentioned that the theater company had gotten some hate emails about the troupe’s act (and they were actually run out of town in Mesa, Ariz.). Not surprising, given the power and uncompromising vision of the performance.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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