Long before the Vikings landed on North American shores, major literary works such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the Kama Sutra were laying down a path toward the publication of Sir James George Frazer's major opus, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, in 1890. The continuing work of the culturally-sensitive editors and photographers at National Geographic (which published its first issue in 1888) as well as such pioneers as Margaret Mead (who published Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928) exposed the world to remote tribes and cultures.
On January 24, 1955, a photographic exhibition entitled The Family of Man (curated by Edward Steichen and named after a poem by Carl Sandburg) made its debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. According to Wikipedia:
"As part of the Museum of Modern Art's International Program, the exhibition toured the world, making stops in 37 countries on six continents. More than nine million people viewed the exhibit, which is still in excess of the largest audience for any photographic exhibition since. The photographs in the exhibition focused on the commonalities that bind people and cultures around the world, the exhibition serving as an expression of humanism in the decade following World War II. Though the United States Information Agency was instrumental in touring the photographs throughout the world in five different versions for seven years, it was not shown in Franco's Spain, in Vietnam, nor in China. In 2003 The Family of Man photographic collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in recognition of its historical value."
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| Cover art for 1955's The Family of Man |
Some things, of course, are better left to fiction.
Cartoonist Gary Larson became famous by looking at people through a wildly imaginative lens. Whether spoofing the behavior of fictional cavemen, farmers, nerds, Irish setters, or frumpy housewives, his artistic gifts created an alternative universe that has kept readers laughing for more than four decades.
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On May 5, 1984 (Cinco de Mayo), a half dozen Hispanic-American writers in San Francisco's Mission District formed a new theatre company aimed at creating using “social archaeology” to create a form of documentary theatre with a heavy satirical bent. The original members of Culture Clash (José Antonio Burciaga, Marga Gómez, Monica Palacios, Richard Montoya, Ricardo Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza) began by interviewing people in minority communities as they created characters and sketches. Using material from some of their site-specific plays (Radio Mambo, Anthems, Mission Magic Mystery Tour, and Bordertown), Culture Clash in AmeriCCa premiered in 2001, was produced by Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2002, and transformed into a film documentary in 2015.Nearly two decades after they began working with director Lisa Peterson, the Clasheros have returned to Berkeley Rep with an updated version of their show. Following a 2019 booking at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Culture Clash (Still) in America is now being performed at Berkeley Rep where, on opening night, audiences were laughing their heads off as Montoya, Salinas, and Siguenza performed updated versions of some of their old sketches along with some deliciously transgressive new material that is all too painfully relevant.
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| Herbert Siguenza portrays a high-strutting preacher in a scene from Culture Clash (Still) in America (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Culture Clash (Still) in America begins with a Mexican refugee seemingly being interviewed by ICE agents (who turn out to be actors). While being grilled, the refugee is asked to describe what went through his mind as he was separated from his nine-year-old daughter (who he has not seen since). Just when members of the audience can feel a lump rising in their throats, scenes can switch to an elderly couple of Trump supporters in Miami (who keep talking over each other while making little to no sense) or an angry Nuyorican poet in a wheelchair who is not particularly impressed with the young poets coming up behind him.
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| Herbert Siguenza portrays an old school Nuyorican poet in a scene from Culture Clash (Still) in America (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
The characters onstage range from a Muslim immigrant (whose male and female relatives were given the first name of Muhammed) to an agitated preacher who struts back and forth like a rooster while delivering his sermon. Two immigrants (one Filipino, one Nigerian) about to become U.S. citizens are soon replaced by a pair of pot-smoking geriatric feminists with pussy hats who try to remain as “woke” as possible, even when the latest vocabulary confuses them.
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| Ricardo Salinas and Herbert Siguenza portray two immigrants at a citizenship ceremony in a scene from Culture Clash (Still) in America (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
As Richard Montoya notes:
“That word ‘still’ is about us as Culture Clash: three chroniclers who are still out there doing the job. It’s not that we wanted to make characters out of ourselves, but we were there and we drag all that equipment with us through the night.. The show was always about voices in the margin, with a lot of immigrant stories tied in, but that’s even more centralized now. Trump’s America has very much impacted our work. There’s a responsibility to be an American citizen so, 25 years later, we’re back marching in the streets. We’re marching with our sisters. We’re marching with our immigrants. We’re not taking this lightly or quietly.”
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| Richard Montoya, Herbert Siguenza, and Ricardo Salinas star in Culture Clash (Still) in America (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
“It starts with the writing. We have a certain language with Lisa [Peterson], who has a way of helping us shape the work. The trick is to get the script up on its feet and start shaping it live with her. When we were in Chicago not long ago, we did a version of this [show]. The audience was packed with African American and Latino kids mixed in with the graduate theatre class from DePaul University. Both those groups were side-by-side, vibing and feeling with lots of tears and lots of laughter. But the most important thing is not that they see three actors and writers, but that what they see in this show is something that they could easily do. They could go record their grandmothers, grandfathers, and moms – their people, their preacher, and cops on the street – with their iPhones: and make a show the same way that we made a show. That’s very empowering.”
Working with brightly-colored sets designed by Chris Acebo, often hilarious costumes by Carolyn Mazuca, lighting and video design by Tom Ontiveros and sound design by PJP, Culture Clash (Still) in America provides a rowdy (and often bittersweet) 90 minutes of timely Chicano satire ranging from an outspoken transwoman (who goes into graphic detail as she describes the intricacies of her upcoming gender reassignment surgery) to a man carrying a boombox who demonstrates how to clearly identify a person's ethnicity by the way they dance to salsa music.
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| Ricardo Salinas demonstrates various ways to dance to salsa music in a scene from Culture Clash (Still) in America (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Performances of Culture Clash (Still) in America continue through April 5 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (click here for tickets).
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Just as robots and automation have brought drastic changes to the manufacturing process, computers have had a dramatic impact on office culture. We've come a long way from the days when shorthand was a required office skill, large corporations had rows and rows of secretarial desks, and typist jobs were listed under the heading "Employment: Women."Physicians who grew up in the computer age have had an easier time adjusting to templating software than their professional elders. With telecommuting now a commonplace component of the business landscape and a new generation of entrepreneurs taking matters into their own hands, there is a growing population of "consultants" and "influencers" conducting business on their smartphones and building their brands while seated in a café. Full-time office grunts with little personal investment in their jobs know they can easily be replaced by temp workers or artificial intelligence.
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| A scene from the original Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying |
In the past 60 years, the look and feel of an office has evolved from Robert Randolph's cartoonish sets for the original Broadway production of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying to drab cubicle farms. Starting in 1986 (when a series of unfortunate incidents led to the term "going postal" entering the vernacular), office culture has been filled with brooding tensions, petty jealousies, and people whose wounded egos resemble ticking time bombs. The images people witnessed on September 11, 2001 (as desperate office workers jumped from the windows of the World Trade Center in a futile effort to escape being burned to death) permanently darkened the aura of what was once considered to be a glamorous workplace.
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| Jeremy Kahn (Dean) and Martha Brigham (Ani) in a scene from Gloria (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
The American Conservatory Theater is currently presenting Gloria, a 2015 drama by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that examines the impact of a shocking event on a handful of office workers (most of whom are aspiring writers). Other than a lowly intern, these are people who seem to show up at work with little interest in actually getting anything done. Between arriving late, taking long lunch hours to go shopping, heading to the nearest Starbucks for coffee, and (for at least one male employee) desperately trying to hit as many networking events as possible, the crippling exasperation of being stuck in a dead-end job pervades the general office atmosphere. Routine gossip is spiked by too much caffeine, literary aspirations remain unfulfilled, and introverts who keep to themselves feel trapped in a dysfunctional microcosm where lots of busy-ness masks a wealth of wounded egos that are easily threatened.
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| Matt Monaco (Lorin) in a fact checker at a magazine in a scene from Gloria (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
As director Eric Ting explains:
"So many of our ancient stories are born out of the human need to make sense of trauma and disaster. This play becomes a mechanism for making sense of the world they’re now lost in. The challenge of Branden’s work (which often functions like a puzzle) is to go past that interpretation you’re drawn to, and to understand that moment is not what the play is about. If anything, the play is trying to escape the orbit of that event. There’s a kind of Rashomon effect at play in Gloria, where the event of the first act is then turned and turned again by different perspectives. Trauma acts as a sort of ghost. The first act is haunting the second. There’s a clear moment the world pivots and leaves the characters unmoored. They’re trying to make sense of it by telling a story.”
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| Jared Corbin (Miles), Jeremy Kahn (Dean), and Lauren English (Gloria) in a scene from Gloria (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
“There’s a layer about the traumatic event, about the cynical way in which we own and appropriate trauma narratives, about our deep inhumanity, and about this incredible narcissism that comes with existing in this kind of society. There’s all of that, but at the very bottom is this thing that feels like hope. The Starbucks café acts as a liminal space between the two offices in Act One and Act Two, between the two coasts of New York and Los Angeles. Gloria looks at the haunting that affects people and stories and places. Branden’s play makes it a little easier for us to see the ghosts. In many ways the puzzle is one of comprehension and coping—of trying to piece together a portrait of a person and make sense of why an awful thing happens. I like to think Branden and I share an affinity for going into the deep, dark recesses of people and society and finding not despair, but hope.”
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| Jeremy Kahn (Dean) and Melanie Arii Mah (Kendra) in a scene from Gloria (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Act I takes place in the Culture Department of a magazine devoted to celebrities on the morning when news hits that a singer named Sarah Tweed has suddenly died. Surprisingly, the core of Gloria's story is less a question of the trauma that changes the lives of its survivors, but rather how the one person who actually witnessed the event must struggle to tell his story while being confronted by other survivors (none of whom were "in the room where it happened") who feel the necessity to seize an opportunity or cash in on their 15 minutes of fame.
Jacobs-Jenkins has slyly chosen to avoid casting anyone as a clear villain in Gloria by having most of the actors portray multiple characters. The resulting ensemble is not only impressive for the work they do in Act I, but also for how their versatility comes in handy in Act II.
Lauren English shines as the title character (a bookworm who works in the magazine's Copy Department) and Nan, the woman who was previously Gloria's boss but finds herself pregnant with twins eight months later and is easily coaxed into monetizing her experience. Martha Brigham once again demonstrates a solid gift for physical comedy as Ani, an editor named Sasha, and a production assistant named Callie. Matt Monaco has the questionable luxury of portraying a fact-checker suffering from PTSD who relocates to Los Angeles, where he remains easily triggered by the sounds coming from an office printer.
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| Jared Corbin (Miles) and Jeremy Kahn (Dean) in a scene from Gloria (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
In smaller roles, Jared Corbin does triple duty as Miles (an office intern in Act I), Shawn (a barista at Starbucks), and Rashaad (a Millennial who is Vice President and chief "packager" at a television production company in Los Angeles). Melanie Arii Mah nearly steals the show as Act I's overly-caffeinated, fast-talking Kendra (an Asian-American princess with no interest in doing any work) and Jenna (a development executive for a TV show who reacts to the presence of a celebrity like a dog who hears a can of food being opened).
Lawrence E. Moten III has designed three highly effective sets (the way the scenery transitions from a Starbucks to an office in Los Angeles is an impressive coup de theatre), with Christine Crook designing costumes, Wen-Ling Liao in charge of lighting, and Madeleine Oldham credited as sound designer.
Those familiar with the playwright's style of writing will find plenty to laugh at in tiny moments of human fallibility, yet leave the theatre with plenty of food for thought. Performances of Gloria continue through April 12 at ACT's Strand Theatre (click here for tickets).
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