Speed joking Culture Clash in the South End BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
	Culture Clash in AmeriCCa Created, written, and performed by Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza. Lighting by Ken Elliott. Costumes by Herbert Siguenza. Sound by Gabe Wood and Richard Montoya. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Virginia Wimberly Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through May 8.

There’s a race riot at the Virginia Wimberly Theatre. Don’t panic — no punches are being thrown, just punch lines. The Los Angeles–based performance trio Culture Clash aim to unravel the tangled sociological web of race and identity and sexuality America has woven, especially as it pertains to Chicano culture. But the Clash’s métier is sketch comedy, not sociology, so despite the sensitive, sometimes taboo, aspects of the issue and their method of developing their material, which is to travel the country interviewing real people and reiterate those stories for the stage, Culture Clash in AmeriCCa amounts to little more than a surging stream of ethnic jokes discharged at a manic velocity.

Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza have been performing together since 1984. Anything less than intimate working terms under these conditions would be the theatrical equivalent of a three-car pile-up, since the performers morph and merge from character to character at the mere addition of a hat or wig or the change of a shirt. You almost wonder whether the subtext of their precision timing is the way their team effort stands in polar opposition to the country’s discord. Cultural friction is spelled out in each tableau, where people talk candidly about race. We see that those who feel discriminated against can’t always shake their own impulse to discriminate. An aged, lively Jewish Floridian talks indignantly about a time when hotels brandished "No Jews Allowed" signs, then kvetches about the local Cubans. ("They’re a very uptight people. The smallest thing sets them off.") A catty Latino pre-op male-to-female transsexual explains the technicalities of the surgery, then disparages Cuban women’s subservience to men.

Taking their cue from Anna Deavere Smith and Moisés Kaufman, Culture Clash travel the country cross-examining an assortment of people about race. A particularly clever bit involves Montoya’s visit to a Florida couple’s home. He tries to maintain a semblance of professionalism as the trailer-trash husband (Siguenza, bearing an odd resemblance to Garth of Wayne’s World) reclines caressing his gut and gets visibly excited talking about the rear of his Cuban wife (Salinas, who oddly resembles Wayne).

Another shtick is to present local characters in each new city they perform. For their Boston debut, we get portraits of progressive Jamaica Plain lesbians and a Beacon Hill gardening woman. They come across as trite composites; besides, Boston accents just aren’t prime comic fodder. Other skits are more poignant, like the by now sadly familiar narrative from a priest-abuse victim.

But Deavere Smith and Kaufman interviewed people who had ties to a specific incident (the Rodney King beating in her Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, the Matthew Shepard murder in his The Laramie Project), and they pieced together jigsaw-puzzle-like collages that scrutinize an array of entrenched beliefs on a volatile topic. For all their engaging manners and refreshing irreverence, Culture Clash are probing such a gargantuan issue that each skit gives just a surface glimpse. The show’s mach speed only underscores the superficiality. You’re confronted with the next scenario without a moment to consider the previous one.

AmeriCCa also adheres to the sit-com doctrine that race jokes are okay — even hilarious — as long as they’re directed at your own kind. It’s like Margaret Cho lambasting Asian lesbians. Instead of debunking stereotypes, Culture Clash just reinforce them by parody. One of the more humorous episodes involves a tutorial on how to distinguish ethnicities among Latinos. What’s the tell-tale quality? The way they dance salsa, of course. Culture Clash’s message about the mambo amounts to the same plain lesson about racism: don’t try this at home.