Clean, and: The Last Angry Brown Hat (review)

Clean. By Edwin Sánchez. The Studio Theatre, Washington, DC. 11 April 1999.

The Last Angry Brown Hat. By Alfredo Ramos. George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium, Washington, DC. 3 October 1999.

Beginning in 1998, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has sponsored programming under the title Encuentros: Latino America at the Smithsonian. As part of its 1999-2000 programming year, and in conjunction with Hispanic Heritage Month, the Smithsonian brought a traveling company performing Alfredo Ramos's 1993 play, The Last Angry Brown Hat, to the DC area for a weekend of shows at various venues. While Ramos's play explores Chicano history and culture, the provocative, ambitious plot line of gay Nuyorican playwright Edwin Sánchez's 1995 play, Clean, poses challenges to actors and audience alike. The play made its (and its author's) auspicious DC debut run at the Studio Theatre's Secondstage in April of 1999. The two plays explore contemporary issues, though their points of focus differ significantly.

Ramos's play, a Big Chill-style reunion of former Chicano activists gathered twenty-five years after the Movimiento for the funeral of one of their comrades, works primarily as a meditation on the rise and fall of that movement, its successes and its failures, as filtered through the respective personal histories of the four protagonists. Willie, Louie, Jojo, and Rude Boy gather in the garage of Willie's East LA home to mourn their dead friend, Frankie, and to consider how their efforts in the late 1960s to form the Brown Berets, a Black Panther-style activist group for Chicano youth, shaped the various trajectories of their respective lives in the intervening time. Ramos's play provides no easy explanations for the movement's various successes and failures; instead, it offers four strikingly different life stories that complement and conflict with each other, but which, combined, offer the audience a rich, complicated picture of specifically male Chicano history in the past quarter century. The four comrades follow very different personal, professional, and political paths into the 1990s, but in their reunion discover fundamental bonds which allow them to overcome their differences. These bonds reflect a shared culture and a shared history, which led them to form the Brown Berets in the first place, and which ultimately leads them back to their old neighborhood so many years later to remember a defining moment for that culture's history.

Although the reunion is occasioned by a death and subsequent funeral, Ramos's treatment of Chicano history is by no means simply elegiac or nostalgic. The Last Angry Brown Hat is clearly intended to demonstrate the ongoing vitality of Chicano culture, a vitality strengthened by the increasing diversity and complexity within that culture as embodied by its four characters. Ramos's play works well in its combination of dramatic and didactic operations, effectively teaching history through a set of compelling and convincing life stories. However, one can only second-guess Ramos's decision to feature only male characters in his play. Certainly the play functions in part as a study of Chicano masculinity in a manner that arguably benefits from the exclusivity of the all-male dynamic among the characters, but it certainly cannot be said to offer anything like a comprehensive picture of Chicano/a history in the last quarter century. The picture it offers is perhaps more symptomatic than representative, but certainly no less valuable and no less enlightening for that reason.

As a traveling production, this version of The Last Angry Brown Hat may not be definitive, but it is at least significantly influential; its stop in Washington is part of a national tour, and it is often performed, as it was here, in conjunction with discussion sessions featuring both the playwright and the actors. All four of the performers are Los Angeles-based Latino actors with considerable credits in stage, film, and television work, and it is clear that their willingness to travel with the production...