Stage

...This sense of The Dance and the Railroad becomes clearer once we hear the di-gou in Family Devotions explain to Chester, who wants to escape his stereotypical American parents, that he must discover his origins-it's on your face, the old man says-before he can successfully leave home...

...The genre here is television situation comedy and the cross-cultural joke is that these relentlessly American types are Chinese or, in one instance, Japanese...

...The next generation is glossily American (the sets and cos- tumes shine like television advertisements) in its consumerism, its belief in publicity (Robert's pride in his role as kidnap victim), its acceptance of Willy Loman's concept of being well-liked (Wilbur's pleasure in being elected Mr...

...GERALD WEALESGERALD WEALES...

...Even so, Family Devotions confirms what The Dance and the Railroad had already indicated-that Hwang is an imaginative author who has his subject and the need to come at it from the most unlikely angles...

...The Christianity of the two grandmothers is a divisive faith, narrow and oppressive, and their celebrated family devotions are the kind of self-advertisement that Jesus warned against in the Sermon on the Mount (v...

...Although the ghettoizing labels of contemporary criticism-woman playwright, black playwright-disconcert me even when I use them, it is necessary to identify Hwang as a Chinese-American playwright...

...If Lone's tradition is primarily replenishing, the di-gou's can only be that through destruction...

...As Ma goes down to join the others, Lone stays for one final dance, this time not an act of separation nor of survival, but a dance for its own sake...

...Congeniality at the club...

...There are sardonic possibilities in the second clown as hero and a certain ambiguity in the play which suggests that Lone and Ma may be as much first and second clowns as master and pupil...

...Some reviewers have found it difficult to move from the familiar farce of the opening of the play to the presumed mysticism of this confrontation, but I suspect that the movement is from farce to farce, from television comedy to a kind of grotesquerie...

...Lone, who was taken from opera school and shipped off to America, practices his movements as a sign of separation from the other workers-dead men, he calls them...

...The most impressive set piece in the play is the opera that the two men perform...

...While Lone is putting Ma through the rigorous discipline of his art, down below the Chinese laborers are on strike, demanding the reinstitution of their shorter hours (it is difficult to believe that they ever had an eight-hour day in 1867) and an increase in wages...

...The tone of the last dance suggests that Lone is merging his Chinese self and the American context...

...Yet, that is an intellectual projection, an attempt to posit meaning rather than feel it...

...The action is double...

...When Lone brings news of the strike settlement, he is ready to celebrate by letting Ma dance the hero's role he covets, although he has explained that, with years of training, the younger man is never likely to be more than second clown...

...The Dance and the Railroad is set in 1867 on Gold Mountain, the name that Chinese immigrants, mixing the splendor of a dream with the hard rock of fact, gave to the American setting in which they helped build the transcontinental railroad...

...What's the matter," says the self-preoccupied Robert at the end of the play, "you act as though someone were dead,'' and then, as usual, he goes on talking about money...

...It is an assertion that is as much cultural as personal...

...An impressive beginning for a dramatist in his early twenties...

...If Family Devotions ends in an image of destruction, it too is tempered, this time by the artificiality of the form which allows the slaughter of attitudes not people...

...At least, that is a way to read the final scene in which the di-gou and the old women duel with the family history as weapon, and they drop dead when he shreds their fictions...

...It is a temptation to be avoided...

...If Lone's final dance suggests the positive note I indicated above, it has to be tempered by the fact that what awaits below, victory or no victory, is the grueling work on the railroad and the cruel rejection of the Chinese once their usefulness is past...

...Ma insists on dancing his own story, being the hero of his own opera...

...The integration of the opera and the strike is achieved by keeping the one off stage and by vivifying the other through the choreography and the dancing of John Lone, the collaborator without whom Hwang's play would be little more than an outline...

...The younger generation cannot escape their immediate surroundings, he indicates, without finding their own versions of the old women's religion, their parents' * passion for acquisition, unless they carry their Chinese identity with them...

...Family Devotions, occasional laugh lines aside, is burdened with jokes about tax shelters and Cuisinarts, with plastic people, with noise as a substitute for wit, with all those aspects of farce that suggest CBS's most recently canceled sitcom rather than American farce at its best...

...The Chinese face reflected in the high polish of Chester's violin, the Western instrument, is as neat an image for Hwang as playwright as I can imagine...

...Of the two plays, The Dance and the Railroad is the more effective...

...When the di-gou, the second brother, the distant relative from the mainland, comes, he challenges his family's Western masks-not as a Communist, as the Christian women suspect, but as a family force with older, deeper, truer roots...

...That, I assume, is what Hwang wanted to evoke, but is is a sometimes trying evocation and it does make the transition to the end of the play difficult...

...The play takes place at the top of a mountain where Ma (the characters use the performers' names), a bumptious innocent, comes to persuade Lone to teach him to dance the hero of a Chinese opera...

...The serious underlay of the fun-and-games is that all the generations of the family have adapted Western ideas and ways, but at a superficial level that not only denies the Chinese past but empties the Western present of content...

...With the example of the use of Chinese opera in Dance, one might be tempted, in approaching Family Devotions, to evoke ch'ou, the comic roles of the Peking stage (Ma's second clown), or to recall the domestic farce that sometimes accompanied classic Chinese theater...

...Matthew, 6:5...

...Stage CHINAMAN MAKING SENSE OF THE HYPHEN David henry Hwang, whose first play FOB won an Obie last spring, has two plays running at the Public Theater-The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions...

...Ma, a bridge between Lone and the other men, echoes Lone when he learns that the workers have settled for less than the desired wages and says that he does not want to be part of them, but Lone insists that they have proved that they are not dead men by sticking to the strike until they achieved victory, however compromised...

...His plays are attempts to make cultural sense of the hyphen that holds that double designation together...