At the beginning of "Mexterminator vs. the Global Predator," Guillermo Gomez-Pena's new/old, ever-evolving show about race, sex, war, borders and globalization, the 50-year-old performance artist circles the stage, dons a bright-red headdress and performs a slow, ritual indio dance, thereby carving out a sacred space in which to slaughter some sacred cows.
No, there are no dead chickens in the current show, presented during the weekend by Sushi at St. Cecilia's Playhouse, as there were in "The Dangerous Border Game," the piece Gomez-Pena performed here eight years ago at the Centro Cultural de la Raza. But age, marital bliss and a regular, respectable gig as a National Public Radio commentator haven't dimmed the artist's desire to pester, provoke, needle and prod.
A border-crossing performance artist in an age of post-radical art, Gomez-Pena is no throwback, but an essential observer of contemporary American culture, capable of connecting the dots between personal identity, pop culture and official malfeasance. When he asks what it means, these days, to be transgressive, he is lamenting his own, somewhat ridiculous posture as an aging radical. But he is also talking about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Like many performance artists who came of age in the '70s and '80s, Gomez-Pena uses the overworked, yet ever-taboo subject of sex to explore other, less-scrutinized forms of boundary-crossing, from racial identification and fantasizing, to the increasingly un-p.c. but still legal practice of smoking.
Through direct questioning and side-winding associations, he implicates the audience, and by extension, society at large, in the moral quandaries suggested by his onstage persona and performance.
Dressed in a sparkly black jacket and skirt – "Aztec glam," in his own pungent phrase – and poised somewhere between male and female, Mexican and American, sublime and ridiculous, Gomez-Pena symbolizes the no-man's-land of cultural identity in which so many Americans now find themselves, post 9/11.
At one point, he brought the house lights up and began to casually question the audience about their dealings with illegal aliens. Had anyone ever hired an illegal alien? To do what, and for what pay? The questions also edged into more personal terrain.
"Are there any illegal aliens in the audience?" he asked. A few hands went up. "People who were once illegal?" A few more hands. "Anyone who has had sex with an illegal alien in the last month?" A single hand went up, to general, somewhat embarrassed, applause.
Comic timing is a key strategy of Gomez-Pena's work. So is knowing exactly when to pull back. Having secured the audience's permission to read an erotic poem aloud, he switched from English to an indecipherable idiom (perhaps nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs) as the text heated up.
However much mirth his antics produce, though, Gomez-Pena is almost never out just for laughs. After quizzing viewers in his apparently offhand manner ("Thank you for your candor," he said with languid irony after each answer), he implored the audience to "ask me anything," then responded in the same impenetrable Indian patois.
This time, however, the artist's unintelligible speech spoke volumes about otherness and alienation – potent subjects in the current era of restricted travel for foreigners seeking entry to the United States, Patriot Act politicking and homeland security spying.
The Mexterminator is not a new character for Gomez-Pena, and "Mexterminator vs. the Global Predator" is not a polished show. It has the avid pulse and heady formlessness of a work-in-progress. Its success depends on a determinedly anti-theatrical style.
There is an art to all this artlessness, a point underlined by the much-less-artful opening act, by Adrian Arancibia, a founding member of the San Diego-based Taco Shop Poets and the arts collaborative Voz Alta. His meandering (and scarcely audible) account of U.S. interference in Latin American politics, filtered though his personal history, didn't resonate with the same urgency as Gomez-Pena's taut invective.
"The only difference between a madman and a performance artist is that a performance artist has an audience," the bilingual, binational, multicultural Gomez-Pena deadpanned at one point. But the real difference is the legendary provocateur's ability to expose the madness that forever infects the culture in which we live.
Writer/performers: Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Adrian Arancibia.Guitar/bass: Nicholas Carvajal.Turntables: Tanner Blackman.
Jennifer de Poyen: (619) 293-1277; jennifer.depoyen@uniontrib.com
