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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 S an. 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 Sanchez's 1995 play, Clean, poses challenges to actors and authence 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 authence a rich, complicated picture of specifically male Chicano...