Los Angeles is home to an industry that makes dramas and exports them around the world. But there's something wrong about the way our diverse city looks and sounds in big Hollywood films.
With a few, notable exceptions, Latinos are usually in the background, doing yardwork or working as nannies, putting on the thick Spanish accents demanded by their scripts.
Black characters are often wacky police officers, gangsters or single moms. Asians are technicians or immigrants who look confused. And the white characters are usually well-off and self-involved, fated to learn about the essential goodness of all the other ethnic groups.
It's all so predictable and unsatisfying.
The real L.A. is a crazy cast of Shakespearean characters and tragicomic contradictions. Where can you find actors who bring that reality to life? In our small but vibrant community theater scene, of course.
Among many troupes, there's the Company of Angels, the Robey Theatre Company, the Actors' Gang in Culver City, and the legendary Cornerstone Theater Company.
L.A. is also blessed to have three actors with roots in comedy who are a Southern California institution. They aren't afraid of offending anybody. And they feel free to let rip on stage with all the weirdness that makes L.A. a cool and confounding place to live.
Culture Clash will celebrate its 25th anniversary Oct. 30 at UCLA's Royce Hall with a host of luminaries. If one word captures their oeuvre, it's "fearlessness." Over the years, Herbert Siguenza, Ric Salinas and Richard Montoya have portrayed just about every local "type" imaginable on stage.
Male and female, gay and straight. Accents with a touch of Yiddish, of Iowa, or Guatemala. Muslim and Jewish. In blond wigs, skullcaps or sombreros. Day laborers and mayors, or even the beloved Dodger announcer Vin Scully. These guys will work themselves into any skin. And they seem to find "the funny" and the true every time.
"We're equal opportunity offenders," Salinas told me.
To show the real L.A., you have to be.
"My friends back East and in San Francisco look at L.A. and see a laid-back, phony, plastic place," Montoya added. "But this is really the biggest powder keg in the world. . . . It's a multicultural theme park ride."
Siguenza showed me a picture of the ash that covered his car that morning, and chimed in: "L.A.'s always on the brink of disaster." One day the budget is collapsing, the next the mountains are ablaze. But where else can you find great kimchi and brain tacos just off the same freeway exit?
