The San Diego Repertory Theatre commissioned a new work by Chicano comedy troupe Culture Clash in the 1990s, and the result was “Bordertown” — a collection of monologue snippets and sketches based on interviews with 100 residents living between San Diego and Tijuana.

A short play that is by turns poignant and funny, hardball and softball, “Bordertown” became a unique, wry ethnography of a hybrid culture, a so-called new Ellis Island between Mexican and American cultures.

Something, however, is lost in the translation required to import it from across the state border to an Arizona stage.

The show opens Actors Theatre’s 2004-2005 season, a clever five-show slate themed “American Dreams Redux” that includes “Nickel and Dimed” and “Death of a Salesman.” Likely timed to coincide with the upcoming elections (and including a healthy jab at Prop. 200), this “Bordertown” is done with cheaper labor — three very fine regional actors, Richard Trujillo, Gordon Waggoner and Portland, Ore.-based Andrés Alcalá — than bringing in the actual Culture Clash trio.

Directed by Los Angeles-based actor/director Diane Rodriguez and staged on a gorgeously sparse set that suggests they paved paradise and put up a parking lot, the trio navigates each scene, each character, with an inspired, choreographed mastery — though it’s plain that, like a photocopy of a photocopy, a bit of heart is missing without the Clashers, who have firsthand experience interviewing such disparate people as a redneck vigilante guarding the border, surfing stoners who teach a lesson about respecting borders and a Vietnam War veteran living in Tijuana because he can’t afford to live in the States.

More so than casting, what hinders the show is its occasional use of localization, of tinkering with certain San Diego-specific references to make them more Valley-friendly. So we get references to the Cardinals, Actors Theatre’s “A Christmas Carol” and Phoenix itself. The changes seem forced and awkward.

Still, there are enough powerful moments to make “Bordertown” riveting. The most poignant scene in the sketch docudrama comes later in the play, a piece in which the relationship between America (played by Alcalá) and Mexico (Waggoner) is illustrated by a bedroom tableau: America wakes from sleep, crosses over a fence and proceeds to hoist Mexico onto his hips and make violent, passionless love to her. When Mexico divulges her frustration with her loveless lover (“Our marriage is political”), America channels Ike Turner: “Honey, you need me. I’m the best thing you ever had.”

Ultimately, one comes away from the show wishing we could raise enough funds to commission Culture Clash to do for us what the group has done for so many other multi-culti mixing bowls across the country. Alas, after witnessing Actors Theatre artistic director Matthew Wiener take to the stage pre-show on opening weekend to beg for donations — the company is struggling, he said, and could threaten to drop a show from the season — we can assume a clashing facsimile will have to do.