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Strange Rain
reviewed by Natasha Yannacanedo
I had a very mixed reaction to Marian Yalini Thambynayagam's Strange Rain. Her writing is profound, provocative, and heart-wrenching one moment and then almost trite in others. As a performer, she has an incredible presence onstage. However, when the writing gets weak, everyone's performance greatly suffers. The work tends to break down when it becomes spoken word poetry and when it strays from a specific subject matter or story. I find the choreography suffers when the performers have to sacrifice their acting by forcing these words with their movements. At the top of the piece, the women begin speaking after dancing only briefly and I wanted much more dancing before the words intruded.
Pradeepa Jeevamanoharan's choreography is intriguing, specific, and riveting throughout. The composer and cellist, Varuni Tiruchelvam, has a beautiful, striking presence and her music brings a powerful, magical resonance to the piece.
My favorite moments are when Thambynayagam reveals her personal stories. A monologue about her father captures my intrigue. I particularly appreciate the monologue in which Thambynayagam relates her experience of being barraged by ignorant Americans as to her identity. The question of "What are you?" and the comment "you are so exotic" resonate with obnoxiousness. Also, when she reveals to her mother that she is gay, the scene is heart-wrenching. The audience has great empathy for the mother caught in her cultural perspective and her daughter struggling to claim her identity. Shaheen Nazerali particularly shines as the conflicted mother and as the hilarious, gossiping neighbor.
As dancers, Nazerali, Thambynayagam, and Vibha Gulati possess incredible dexterity, beauty, and grace. There is much potential in this piece and I would love to see Thambynayagam improve the spoken word parts. I am impressed by the feedback form she includes in her program that asks the audience in-depth questions about their response to the piece. She appears to be a woman ready to diligently work on her craft. I am always excited by work that allows women to claim their voice and identity. I would love to see Thambynayagam develop a one-woman show where she tells stories about her family because her personal monologues are incredibly gripping.
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Carry the Tiger to the Mountain
reviewed by Mark DeFrancis
Carry the Tiger to the Mountain is a play that tries to bite off more that it can chew. It enacts the tragic true story of Vincent Chin, a young Asian American who is beaten to death by two drunken Chrysler employees with racist motives during the early 1980s. The play tries to couch this story within the greater Asian American experience, the American gasoline crisis, and even tosses in a little Tai Chi. Sadly, by trying to tackle so much, this play stretches a little thin and loses sight of its core emotional issues.
The story details the death of Vincent Chin, but is mostly concerned with the plight of his mother Lily Chin and her trampled version of the American dream. Brought to America for an arranged marriage, she learns that both her husband and America are not the wonders she was led to believe. Obsessed with the idea of grandchildren, the loss of her son Vincent is a crushing blow which leads her toward activism, and ultimately, her return to China. Wai Ching Ho does all she can to render an evocative character and succeeds on every level despite the constant efforts of the script to make her into a crazy person. She has an unflinching focus and gives her whole being to the character and the world she inhabits.
Sadly, the world she inhabits is that of a depressing after school special. Jackson Loo, who portrays Vincent Chin, seems convinced he is in a musical and manages to muster only a flat, single-point-of-view character. But you can't really blame him. The play is chalk full of corny lines and overt messages which make the arguments so obvious that they lose their power. The result is that while the audience knows Vincent Chin was wrongfully murdered and that his assailants got away free, that same audience does not care that the characters on stage are victims. Credit does have to be given to John Daggett, whose creepy car salesman brings the play to life several times; and William Ryall, who manages to make his murderous drunkard into a believable and complex villain.
Despite its flaws, Carry the Tiger to the Mountain is a story that should be told and a story that should be heard. It reminds us of the horrors that modern man is still capable of; the dangerous complexity of the legal system; and how one man's life can become meaningless in the face of greater economic issues while being an inspiration to so many at the same time.
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Telemongol
reviewed by Daniel Kelley
Telemongol is a sketch comedy show based around the premise that three young aspiring television writer/producers have been given the chance to create a television station geared specifically towards Asian American tastes. The question the show asks is: what exactly does that mean? The sketches that follow are examples of the kind of programming that the station broadcasts—bickering news anchors parodying current events, sitcom parodies, late-night talk show parodies, commercial parodies, movie parodies, etc.
The idea behind Telemongol seems to be to take these staples of sketch comedy, but put in them Asian and Asian American characters, stereotypes, and celebrities. Thus "Dr. Phil" becomes "Dr. Pho," a diminutive, judgmental owner of a nail salon, a condom commercial advertises "Genghis Khan-doms," and a parody of The Surreal Life features Sammo Hung and George Takei battling Bai Ling to the death.
The ensemble of Telemongol is uniformly excellent and hilarious. Greg Watanabe, performing at one time a dead-on George Takei, at another the slimy news-anchor David Oh-Yeah, gives a wonderfully engaging, funny, and varied performance throughout the evening. Charles Kim, as the confused Jake Gyllenhaal half of "Brokeback Gold Mountain," and later as late-night celebrity Kim-Jung Il, is equally nuanced and hilarious.
Yet despite the originality of the premise, and the strength of its ensemble, the actual sketches themselves tend to feel stale. Though perhaps there has never been an Asian or Asian American parody of Brokeback Mountain or Desperate Housewives, other parodies exist in abundance, and as a result of that, those sketches tend to feel recycled, and are carried more by the energy and charm of the performers than by the sketch writing itself. This, coupled with the fact that the majority of sketches in Telemongol are these kinds of pop-culture parodies, makes the show as a whole not as strong as its premise has the potential to be.
The most successful sketch of the evening, however, is one is neither a pop-culture parody, nor anything I had seen before. It's a sketch about an Asian history show that features the grandson of Marco Polo—Larry Polo—approaching the emperor of China with a variety of gifts—all of which the West had taken from China originally (firecrackers, noodles, etc.). The sketch is masterfully constructed, cleverly written, well paced—with excellent character work from all involved—and a payoff that may be the biggest laugh of the evening. Telemongol is worth it if for that sketch alone.
The production values of Telemongol are extremely high. Though there is no set to speak of, Ivy Y. Chou's colorful and sometimes hilarious costumes do a great deal to set the scene for each sketch. Dennis Yen's sound design and music help keep the pace of the evening up, and ease transitions between sketches.
While some of the sketches seem recycled, with the help of an energetic and hilarious ensemble, Telemongol remains an enjoyable and unique sketch show that's worth seeing, even if it's just for a few brilliant sketches.
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Happy Valley
reviewed by Loren Noveck
Set in Hong Kong during the years leading up to the 1997 transition from British colony to Chinese rule, Happy Valley takes its title from the Hong Kong neighborhood in which its central characters reside. It's ironic as well, of course, because at least in this particular historical moment, the upper-middle-class British-educated Hong Kong Chinese who live there aren't particularly happy; they're riddled with anxiety and terrified as to what this change in government will mean for them. The Chinese characters spelling "Happy Valley" (at least according to Wikipedia) literally mean "horse racing ground"—also relevant here, since the Happy Valley racecourse is the primary bonding ground for the adolescent Tuppy and her uncle and guardian Chester, a horse trader for the upper-class British of Hong Kong. Chester and Tuppy always spend her birthday at the racetrack.
Although the Filipina nanny Winnifreda is the primary parent in this household (mothering Chester and Tuppy alike), Tuppy retains a child's hero-worship of her uncle. A lonely and seemingly friendless child, Tuppy's only close connections are Winnifreda, Chester, and her beloved pet chinchilla (a gift from Chester), and she needs constant reassurance that Chester loves her best. Perhaps unwisely but understandably, Chester spins stories for Tuppy designed to make her feel special—rather than orphaned and in the care of a somewhat feckless adult—most notably that she's really the illegitimate daughter of Queen Elizabeth, placed in Hong Kong as part of a secret plan to retain British power after the handover.
Many Hong Kong Chinese are leaving for Britain in the time running up to the handover, but Chester is determined to stay. But as the day nears, and his British contacts and clients are disappearing one by one, Chester starts to feel desperate. So when he encounters Victoria, the mainland-born Chinese secretary of one of his departed British clients, who is herself desperate—for a wealthy husband—a partnership that is half business, half sex is born. Then Victoria becomes pregnant, Chester marries her, and Tuppy's world cracks open at the seams. The frantic pace of the collapse of Chester's business only exacerbates the tension between Tuppy and Victoria—despite the Chinese contacts he gains through Victoria—and hastens his decision to leave Hong Kong for good.
There's a lot of interesting material here about the class dynamics among the different social levels in Hong Kong—the British, the Hong-Kong born Chinese who consider themselves British, the mainland-born Chinese trying to carve a professional foothold for themselves in this place of wealth and power, the peasant girls from the mainland trying to find husbands among the British and Hong-Kong Chinese, and finally, at the bottom of the heap in Hong Kong as they are everywhere else, the immigrant workers, like Winnifreda, who've left their own families behind to serve the rich in another country.
Aurorae Khoo's script conveys a lot of information about the scene in Hong Kong at that moment, but the characters and their relationships aren't particularly compelling. Although the play takes place over an extremely eventful period of over a year, there doesn't seem to be any change or growth in the characters, even with the major change in the family dynamics caused by Chester's marriage. Most of the second act is taken up by spiteful encounters between a petulant Tuppy and a childish Victoria. Winnifreda, with her keen understanding of the power dynamics that shape her life, and her constant attempts to bring peace between Victoria and Tuppy, becomes the most interesting character in the play—she's also the only one who seems to have emotional impact on the other characters.
Some of the performances are quite strong; Katie Leo, who has cameos as both Queen Elizabeth and the dying Deng Xiao Ping as well as playing Victoria, is bracing as Victoria and extremely funny in her smaller roles, and Maria Kelly brings a touching warmth to Winnifreda. But even strong acting can't overcome the listlessness of the characterizations. I learned a lot about the social structure of Hong Kong from Happy Valley, but I didn't feel connected emotionally to the play.
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Refugee Nation
reviewed by David Ledoux
Refugee Nation opens with the image of an actor slowly walking across the stage with a ball of tin foil in his outstretched hands, followed shortly by an actress in the same fashion. They both proceed to circle a small temple center stage and throw the foil at the temple as if they were bombs. The bombs remain on stage for the duration of the piece as a constant reminder of the violence that provoked all of the subsequent stories of the evening.
What follows is a series of vignettes in which actor/collaborators Leilani Chan and Ova Saopeng act out a series of scenes dealing with the displacement, lack of national identity and generational divide among Laotian refugees and immigrants as a result of the American-led secret war in Laos. Chan and Saopeng's acting of the various characters is wonderful. They bring a specificity and truthfulness to each person they portray. Refugee Nation, which is a TeAda production, is also being developed in collaboration with Legacies of War, an organization that attempts to "raise awareness about the history of the Vietnam-era bombing in Laos, to provide space for healing the wounds of war and create greater hope for a future of peace."
While I like the idea of the opening image, I don't think it works. We know it is tinfoil in their hands and it becomes even more obvious when we hear the dull ruffling thud of the foil falling to the stage. It is hard to take an image seriously that is obviously attempting to communicate the horror of the bombings of Laos with actors pretending to be planes throwing foil around the stage.
I did appreciate the humor they are able to bring to the material. A pair of morning talk show hosts teaching the audience a Laotian greeting; a man railing at how difficult it is to find a Laotian restaurant in the city; and a very confused old man stopping the action of a conversation to ask the audience directly, "Who is this woman? Where did she come from?"—all of these are effective and engaging moments that reveal a great charm in this play with a dark underbelly.
This dark underbelly is never fully revealed however. We do not ever see the magnitude of the event that the play is about. I'm not talking about staging gruesome images of war or having actors screaming and sobbing in horror, but I am talking about finding moments that reveal how transformative war was in their lives. I never felt like I was seeing characters who were deaply affected by their past.
Now this is a tricky point because I suspect this was a conscious choice, and even though I didn't necessarily "get it" I am unfortunately not the target audience for this piece. Actually I feel a little unqualified in reviewing it. There were many Laotians in the audience the night I saw it, and there were a great many of them that seemed truly moved and impacted by it. I think this is the important point. Theatre has the ability to reach specific communities and deal with issues that affect those communities in a room where artist and spectator are together. I was struck by the beauty of this with Refugee Nation.
This may not be a piece that will be done regionally or off-Broadway for years to come, but who cares. It doesn't want to be that. It is doing something much more important. Refugee Nation has the potential to go out and truly affect Laotians and help to restore a sense of identity and pride that was partially destroyed by the cluster bombs of America. I wish them the best of luck and truly admire their passion and purposefulness in developing Refugee Nation.
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