Lip With Clout : John Leguizamo is knocking them out with ‘Mambo Mouth’ Off Broadway and his performance in ‘Hangin’ With the Homeboys’

NEW YORK —  On Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a vagrant ambles by a street corner where a photographer is posing actor John Leguizamo against a mural painted on a building.

“Hey man,” he asks a bystander, “isn’t that dude a fighter? What’s his name?”

“John Leguizamo. But he’s an actor,” comes the reply. “He’s in a show called ‘Mambo Mouth.’ ”

“ ‘Mumble Mouth,’ huh?” says the grizzly denizen of these mean streets as he walks on. “I knew he was a boxer.”

Leguizamo laughs at the story. “A boxer, huh?” he says. “Yeah, I boxed a little, but not professionally. I love boxing. I’d make a good junior welterweight.”

Standing 5 feet 7 and weighing 147 pounds, the 26-year-old Colombian-born New York actor is in fighting shape to meet the rigors of starring in his self-penned solo show, “Mambo Mouth,” which recently transferred to a limited 12-week engagement at the Orpheum Theatre following a successful six-month run at the American Place Theatre.

The hit show (winner of an Obie and an Outer Critics Circle award), which HBO will film this summer, served to bring the actor out of relative obscurity. After stints Off Broadway and minor film roles in “Casualties of War” and “Revenge,” Leguizamo has been thrust into the glare of national attention--a celebrity further reinforced with the release of Joseph Vasquez’s film, “Hangin’ With the Homeboys,” a character study of street punks that won him praise in the New York Times as “an actor of virtuosic range.”

“Doing this play is like the Olympics,” the actor says. “I hadn’t had a hamburger in three years. When I started performing, I had one every day. I needed the energy. This play is like a test to your body, a test and a half.”

In the course of nearly 90 minutes, Leguizamo conjures up seven roguish characters populating a Latino universe hobbled with poverty, violence and overactive hormones. From the priapic 14-year-old Loco Louie (The Sperminator) to the transvestite-hooker Manny to Agamemnon, the oleaginous public-access television host, Leguizamo offers acerbic portraits of people incapable of escaping their own small appetites and grand delusions. Confident of their own skewered wisdom, these disenfranchised Latinos wring laughs from the pain they hide behind a swagger, leer or scowl.

A person of no small appetites himself, Leguizamo percolates with a nervous energy as he wends through East Village streets looking for a Thai restaurant he has recently discovered. He is a keen observer, at one point noticing someone pompously holding forth to his friends on a movie. “The pontificator,” Leguizamo says mockingly. “ ‘Well, the main theme is an existential argument. . . .’ ”

Once settled into the restaurant, Leguizamo says that the mordant tone of his show simply reflects his world view. “Originally, I was going to call the show ‘Acid Mouth’ because that’s what my mother called me when I was young,” he says. “I had a mouth on me that wouldn’t quit. Sure, I mock these characters a little bit, but I’m not looking at it from the outside. Most of these characters come from my life, my family, my experience.”

Leguizamo adds that “Mambo Mouth” came out of a personally felt frustration that Latinos in this country are “invisible,” a populous but fragmented cultural entity with no role models on television, radio or film, beyond occasional stereotypes. “I looked around and thought, ‘Where is everybody?’ ”

The show itself, however, has been assailed for reinforcing what some consider to be negative stereotypes: the sexist Latin lover, the drug-dealing street hustler, the “self-hating Hispanic” looking to “pass.” In “Mambo Mouth,” he passes as Yakimoto: “Why settle for being Latin trash when you can settle for so much more, like being Japanese ?” Given the criticism, it’s just as well that he didn’t call the show by an earlier title, “Spic-o-Rama.”

Leguizamo is sensitive to the charge, defending his recognizable characters as “prototypes,” not stereotypes, imbued with depth and dignity. New York’s Latino press, he says, generally has been supportive as have audiences. “I don’t want to be defending myself,” he says, “If people don’t like what I do, that’s them. But I don’t think that what they’re saying is truly valid. What ties all my characters together is that they’re really special. They all have something that makes them feel important.

“Writing this play was like an exorcism,” he adds, “from the self-loathing and all the ugly things that I feel I carry around in myself and other Latinos carry around in themselves. You have to, every time you feel it, smack it around in order to reach another level.”

Born in Bogota of a Colombian mother and a Puerto Rican father, Leguizamo grew up in Queens where his family moved when he was 5. He took care of his younger brother because both his parents worked. When, at age 8, he was sent back to Colombia for a year, he was glad to escape the alienation of America. His parents tried hard to assimilate, he says, keeping his hair cut short because “it was curly and wild.”

“I think I felt more ashamed than they did,” he continues, “though my dad was afraid of talking because of his accent. I remember one time we went for a weekend in the Poconos and they gave us a cabin deep, deep into the woods, away from the main house. My dad thought for sure that was because we were Latino. You pick up on things like that.”

Leguizamo also picked up on his parents’ ambitious plans for their children, though at first he was loathe to do anything about it. Even though they lived in Queens, his father insisted that his older son attend a high school in lower Manhattan because of its better reputation. Yet, the acid-mouthed youth soon rebelled against his strict parent, engaging in pranks that led to his arrests, first for truancy and then for commandeering the PA system of a subway train with a pal.

“I was a lot like Loco Louie in those days,” he recalled. “Anything to get a girl in bed, anything to get a laugh. When you’re the butt of a joke, it’s tough. You have to turn it around and make it about someone else. It’s like a hot potato going around.”

Leguizamo learned to play a tough audience. He constantly refined jokes in class, trying them out on black and Latino buddies, guys who were not unlike those in Vasquez’s film. “We goofed, did crazy things, looked for parties,” he said. “There were drugs, but nothing too heavy, mainly just craziness.”

With no Latino role models to latch onto, Leguizamo said that, like Yakimoto, he tried to identify with other cultures. “I wanted to be black for a while,” he said. “I loved the expressiveness, but mostly I loved the family feeling. . . . Then I wanted to be white, then Jewish for a while and then I became a born-again Latino.”

His conversion came when, at 19, he says he found himself the only Latino in his drama classes at New York University. Earlier, a guidance counselor had steered him toward acting as a way to channel his youthful rage. He decided then that theater and film could provide a forum for exploring the Latino culture. But he knew he needed to adopt a more aggressive approach and include a broader audience if he were to avoid playing “knife-wielding drug addicts and janitors.”

In a brief appearance on “Alive From Off Center,” a PBS performing arts series premiering on KCET on July 12, Leguizamo expresses his conviction in a rap poem enunciating stereotypes and labels. It ends with a call to “all mis hermanos and hermanas , mambo kings and cumbia queens, Aztec lords, Inca princesses, every Hernandez and Fernandez: It’s time to make our move, time to take our place.”

Leguizamo himself answered that call in 1989 when he began writing “Mambo Mouth,” after splitting up with his girlfriend, Caroline McDermott, an actress who is now his fiancee. “When you don’t have sex, you’re more creative,” he says, digging into a bowl of spicy Thai soup.

“Whew! Great soup! This’ll clean up your body, man. Potente!”

Latino sexual potente is much on the minds of most of the characters in “Mambo Mouth,” who appear to be trapped by their inability to think above crotch level. The suave Agamemnon is the prototypal Old World Latin whose self-worth is tied to his amorous tally sheet.

“Latinos deal with drive all the time,” Leguizamo says. “But I think it’s more environmental than innate. When you’re poor, you don’t have a lot to brag about. All you’ve got is sex and the way that makes you feel important. Latino men are trapped by certain beliefs and pressures that they have to have mistresses, that women are there to take care of children and make the meals. You make all the decisions. You know, Ralph Kramden.”

Leguizamo says that as a “New Age Latin,” he is not driven by ego-stroking desires that have traditionally defined Latino men, including his father, he says, whose skirt-chasing ruined his parents’ marriage.

“We’re all softer men here than we were in the old country,” he says. “I won’t get in a fight as easily on a matter of respect. I still get upset if someone looks at my girlfriend funny, but I don’t go off the deep end. My dad used to have tons of fights over my mom. He (once) pushed a guy through a plate-glass window once because he was disrespecting her. My girlfriend still has complaints about me but they’re not about that. It’s that I’m too emotional, too crazy.”

Certainly, one has to be something of a “New Age Latin” to put on makeup, a wig and a dress to create Gladys, the hot mami who holds court every afternoon in the project playground. Although Gladys is not part of “Mambo Mouth,” she is part of the sequel, “Discount Dreams.” The new show, which the author is in the process of finishing, is about a lower-middle-class family’s troubled assimilation into urban life.

“They’re not marginal, they’re wanna-bes,” he says of the family that also includes three brothers, a cousin and a father. Meanwhile, a preview of the bitchy charismatic matriarch can be glimpsed on Leguizamo’s half-hour special on “The Talent Pool,” a series on cable’s Comedy Central network, which will air on July 13.

“Gladys can talk, she can dish, she’s the queen,” says Leguizamo, adding that his female characters are invariably based on his mother, a strong woman who taught her son what he terms are the most important lessons in his life: “To embrace and be open to every experience.” It was she, he says, who gave him the confidence to express himself through writing.

Leguizamo says that he hopes to continue to write works that can help “unify Latinos and give us a sense of who we are,” a Latino Spike Lee of sorts.

But he is also aware that his boomlet of fame can disappear as fast as it materialized. That is simply one of life’s lessons he learned at the age of 8 when his family was planning on moving back to Colombia. For the previous two or three years, his parents had worked themselves to the bone, investing all their earnings in the purchase of electronic goods and furniture, which they planned to resell in Colombia.

Upon their arrival in South America, however, they discovered that all the merchandise, including their own personal belongings, had been stolen. They returned to New York, leaving Leguizamo with his grandmother for a year. “It devastated my father, but my mother just went back to work,” he says. “No judgments, no revenge, no grudges.”

“This has never been about the success,” he says concerning the prolific output of the past year. “I just had things I needed to say.”