STAGE REVIEW : BICULTURAL CONFLICTS COME TO ROOST IN ‘BIRDS’

“He’s getting to be a real man--he bribes everybody.”

The line is a quote from Lisa Loomer’s “Birds,” the first play to come out of South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights’ Project last July and receive a full production on its Second Stage.

“Birds” is a collage in abstract time of the bicultural Los Angeles Vasquez family. Its leading characters--mother Lilly and father Manny--are transplanted Mexicans who adjust (he) and maladjust (she) to the new culture.

They have three children who in turn experience their own sets of maladjustments. Gloria, the eldest, is fiercely committed to her Mexican roots--and to birds (she markets them and runs an aviary).

The genial son Manuel, a restaurant worker, marries a blond Texas airhead named Chrystal whose parents “hate Mexicans.”

The third and youngest child, Jasmine, a budding opera singer, was born in Los Angeles and has the hardest time understanding her family’s cultural conflicts.

Loomer’s play is, in fact, entirely about conflicts--of all types: generational, conjugal, familial, societal, national, cultural. Like migrating birds, the members of the Vasquez family are pulled north by the promise of abundance; pulled south by roots, culture and tradition--and pulled apart by who wants what most when, where.

For bon vivant Manny, Los Angeles offers what he admires and wants: opportunity, a boat and a blond American mistress from the rarefied upper reaches of Rodeo Drive and Bel-Air. (She loves the brown color of his body.) For Lilly, the values of thrift and hard work with which she was reared in Mexico so dominate her life that she can’t adjust even to moderate affluence in Los Angeles. (“My mother could recycle a Tampax,” says an exasperated Gloria.)

Despite the choppiness of the style (we jump back and forth in time over a 20-year period), Loomer’s characters are sufficiently dimensional to show us clearly the complex network of influences tugging at, and creating turmoil in, their lives. Some are more developed than others, with Manny (talking to us from the early grave to which he was remanded by a heart attack), Gloria and Jasmine more detailed than the rest.

This structure (along with one or two questionable choices made by Loomer) creates some loopholes.

A scene with Manny, his mistress and his three young children, includes the unlikely--and unconvincing--offstage presence of his wife as well. Manny “respects” Lilly too much to have brought her into such close contact with the “other woman” in his life.

Also conspicuously neglected are Manuel and Chrystal. Loomer sets up certain givens that she doesn’t develop: Manuel’s inability to find another job, Chrystal’s family’s bigotry and hers and Manuel’s cultural/marital differences.

Otherwise, “Birds” manages to deal with a surprising number of the facets set up by the author and to connect different aspects of the production with an inspired musical thread. (Aside from the traditional tunes, Diane King composed and arranged the music.)

The casting, too, is solid, with the actors well complemented and a real sense of family emerging from the whole.

Performers are Olivia Negron (super-dynamic as the rebellious Gloria), Socorro Santiago (Jasmine), Manuel Santiago (Manny), Rick D. Telles (Manuel), Myriam Tubert (Lilly) and Heather Lee (excellent as both that exuberant bimbo Chrystal and as Manny’s icy mistress as well).

Director Ron Lagomarsino is adept at dealing with the fragmentation of Loomer’s scenes and keeps things flowing without impediment, in spite of a hacienda-flavored set by Kent Dorsey that is gorgeous to look at but problematic to move around in. Costumes (Charles Tomlinson) and lighting (Cameron Harvey) are fine.

What “Birds” confirms is the growing visibility of a small band of American playwrights who are turning to their Hispanic origins for inspiration in a far different way than did the politicized Chicano theaters of the early ‘70s and most notably El Teatro Campesino.

Instead of agitprop, these writers are creating a dramatic literature dealing with self-affirmation through a more traditional examination of the Latino middle class within American society--something Campesino founder Luis Valdez himself is now also doing (“Corridos” and “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinkin’ Badges”).

Loomer is right in line with playwrights Arthur Giron and Eduardo Machado who also delve into their Guatemalan and Cuban heritages, respectively. (Giron’s “Charley Bacon and His Family” is being done at SCR and Machado’s “Fabiola” was seen at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in 1985.) It is therefore not entirely coincidental that Giron, Machado and Loomer were the three participating playwrights in SCR’s Hispanic Project last July.

Is this evolution? Assimilation? Both. These writers’ increasing comfort with more conventional approaches reflects their own need to converse at large with the society they live in, in a language to be understood by all. The day may come when they will find a still more personal, perhaps more primeval, voice with which to take that society one more step into its cultural unconscious. But for the moment, this does nicely.

Tickets are $18-$23. Performances at 655 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa run Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8:30 p.m.; Sundays 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m., until Dec. 7, (714) 957-4033.