Los Angeles’ freeways may split the city’s ethnic neighborhoods, but that doesn’t stop Allan Axibal, Rafael Agustin and Miles Gregley from speeding past racial divides.
The three UCLA alumni take a humorous yet serious look at race relations in their three-man comedy show “N*GGER WETB*CK CH*NK.”
Finally returning to Los Angeles after a nationwide performing arts center and university tour, the three former Bruins will keep their message about accepting, understanding, and valuing ethnic and cultural differences alive at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood as “N*W*C” opens on Thursday.
“We did a national tour that made us famous and critically acclaimed,” Agustin said. “Now we’re about to do our performance at home that we never had. … We want to prove to people that theater in L.A. is not dead and that people will come out if you give them something worth going to.”
Graduates of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television, in 2004, Axibal, Agustin, and Gregley created the show as students, collaborating with former professors Liesel Reinhart and Steven Seagle from Mt. San Antonio College and integrating each other’s life stories to spark a dialogue about our nation’s understanding of different ethnicities and cultures.
Even before the show’s creation, the three strove to start a dialogue about the ethnic issues that affected them daily.
“I feel like because I was raised in L.A., I was raised in a diverse area and that diversity has definitely had a strong impact on my outlook in terms of race and ethnicity, in terms of seeing people as people,” Axibal said.
The show’s imagery includes a karate-chopping, Nehru-collared Axibal; a mamboing, wifebeater-wearing Agustin; and a strutting Gregley, clad in a knee-length velvet coat and paisley-printed pants.
While all three actors were exposed to ethnic diversity growing up in Los Angeles, they didn’t realize until they came together that understanding their ethnic identities was more than just being exposed to different kinds of people.
“You’ve grown up taking all of these different classes. You’ve taken history, and you feel like you have a good grasp on it because you’ve heard it a thousand times,” Gregley said.
“So when I went to community college, I thought, “˜Well, I’ll take something different, I’ve never taken African-American History.’ … And I swear within the first twenty minutes, I heard more from that than I’d heard in twelve years. … It made me a little upset to think that there’s so much history that’s out there that we haven’t scratched the surface of.”
The trio first started learning and discovering their own cultural identities in ethnic studies classes at UCLA, Agustin said.
“We hope that one day there’s no need for ethnic studies classes because there will be just social studies classes, but we don’t live in that time right now,” he said.
With this growing sense of cultural awareness in mind, the three friends brought their views on the importance of ethnic studies together and performed their first version of the show on campus at Northwest Auditorium and then at the Freud Playhouse in 2003.
At the first performance, however, the show’s reception, specifically the show’s title, was met with protests.
“Of course, when you’re about to present something to an audience that has no audience (yet), who’s putting up “˜N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk’ posters across campus, we were scared to death,” Gregley said.
But Gregley said the show received a phenomenal response from the students afterwards.
“It seemed like they’d all been wanting to talk about this dialogue, but nobody knew how to bring it up,” he said. “Once we did that, it was like a breath of fresh air.”
Added Agustin, “We discovered that there are three very different words with three very similar stories.”
Upon graduating from UCLA, the friends, along with Reinhart and Seagle, formed an independent theater company, Speak Theatre Arts, to bring the dialogue that started at UCLA to other performing arts centers and universities.
On the national tour, however, Speak Theatre Arts met once again with protests from groups ranging from NAACP to Neo-Nazi activists.
“It’s prejudging a show by a title that is words that are used to prejudge people,” Agustin said. “It’s so ironic.”
The fans, however, quickly outnumbered the protesters; many protestors, upon watching the show, soon discovered that the title meant something beyond derogatory language.
“A lot of people have asked us, “˜With a title like “N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk,” how does it play in the South, in the Midwest?'” Axibal said. “They think that there are a lot of racists out there and that people might boo us, but the truth is that there aren’t a lot of hard-core racists, there aren’t a lot of malicious people. There are people who are ignorant because they haven’t been exposed to diversity.”
The trio seek to continue exposing others to their message upon their return to Los Angeles.
“Hopefully, this run will generate some kind of positive feedback, so we can … get on a grander scale of doing this,” Gregley said.
But for now, Gregley says he’s satisfied with connecting with audience members in each performance, however many people may be in attendance.
“Each show is just beautiful in its own right,” he said. “Whether it be 15 or 1500, it’s reaching people.”