Back to the Future
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage BACK TO THE FUTURE By Stefan Kanfer Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood...from what...
...Seldom have so many gifted Asian performers been crowded under one Broadway roof...
...Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior Chinese take their proverbs seriously, and there is no more serious adage than the one that warns: "Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in a different time...
...Although the leads are effective, some of the supporting cast at the Criterion Center Stage Right Theater has trouble maintaining cockney or pip-pip accents, and as a friendly quack, Olek Krupa cannot decide whether he is Hungarian or just sleepy...
...The vaulting set design of the Quay Brothers, Paul Anderson's lighting and Paul Ardirti's sound create a persuasively eerie atmosphere...
...For those who cannot get enough of the '50s, the Roundabout Theater Company has revived a very different kind of postwar drama, Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea...
...After all this hysteria the Guest of Honor arrives...
...For all of Ionesco's portentous reputation, we might be more enlightened if we did the same thing and skipped the existentialist message altogether...
...But these are minor considerations...
...will the Reverend persuade him to discard the old ways...
...If sexual identity was central to his first play, M. Butterfly, cultural and racial identity are his main concern in Golden Child...
...In the roles of the wives...
...But Londoners, still experiencing Austerity, were very glad to be unhappy as they watched the glamorous travails of Hester Collyer (Blythe Danner...
...It is a tribute to playwright Hwang that he makes these questions seem urgent and vital...
...Sir Terence, who was to become a master craftsman, was just learning his trade in 1952 when this work first appeared on the West End...
...In that last assignment she is artfully backed by three players who double as servants and fellow apparitions, Julienne Hanzelka Kim, Lisa Li and James Saito...
...But his statements live on, delivered by the one visible guest, The Orator...
...Their authors deliberately defy interpretation, but consciously or unconsciously the works rest on two cornerstones—memory of the Occupation, and fear of the Bomb...
...He called his surreal one-acter a Tragic Farce, and when The Chairs debuted in 1952 France, its impact was profound...
...Does he have a future in China, or will he have to flee West to become a stranger in a strange land...
...More celebrities enter, bearing such weighty titles as Field Marshal and Fabled Beauty...
...his work for Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park With George, Into the Woods and Passion all had a mannered, unconvincing air about them...
...To be sure, to deform feet means to create cripples...
...Gone, too, is the time when senselessness made sense...
...This is a thoughtfully and beautifully produced show...
...So saying, he and Old Woman exit via windows, leaping into the dark waters outside, lost forever...
...Those who had yet to see the production were pressed to buy tickets right away...
...Between drags on Gauloises, the crowd at Deux Magots made the Romanianborn playwright an intellectual celebrity on a par with Sartre and Camus...
...The trouble is, au fond this able quartet has nothing to say and little to play...
...But it is Soelistyo who buoys the production, mincing and giggling like a little girl, croaking like an old woman, thundering like a ghost out for vengeance...
...Barnfather gives The Orator a proper aura of banal self-importance...
...But as they burble about their 75-year marriage, depression sets in...
...The place is surrounded by water, an island in a cold and indifferent sea...
...Playing Old Man, Briers (familiar to moviegoers as Polonius in Kenneth Branagh's film of Hamlet) is as ironic and poignant as the script will allow...
...Besides, she petulantly observes, "No one ever said that feminine beauty was pretty...
...The same can be said of European plays bearing the label "Theater of the Absurd...
...Or will the little girl end like her mother and her "aunts," bound, in every sense of the word, to the past...
...Wen, Chin and Miyori give dimension and voice to a generation long gone...
...That year she was a girl of 10 and China was a feudal, almost medieval, nation...
...I have never cared much for James Lapine's direction...
...The Sunday painter leaves her chilly, remote husband...
...At the climax, a professional Orator (Mick Barnfather) will deliver the insights that Old Man has been pondering for a lifetime...
...In the scenes that follow, Kwong is transformed into his great-grandfather Eng, a prosperous merchant presiding over three wives, a retinue of servants, and a large village beyond the gates of his palatial home...
...His lesser work, Tire Chairs, currently at the John Golden Theater, is also an attempt to characterize a dark time robbed of meaning, encircled by hostility, bereft of religious consolation...
...Nonetheless, Ionesco has been well served by Martin Crimp'sjazzed-up translation, and by an extraordinary production...
...Now," Old Man announces, "our existence may end in a blaze of glory...
...Still more chairs have to be found, still more doors opened and closed as Pettypie and Poppety-poppet move with the speed of sound until everyone is seated...
...Addressed alternatively as His Majesty, the King of Kings and The Emperor, he takes the form of a huge and blinding light...
...Andrew Kwong (Randall Duk Kim) is a Chinese-American with little interest in his ancestry—until the evening he is awakened by the ghost of his grandmother Ahn (Julyana Soelistyo) and transported, Scrooge-style, back to 1918...
...On Stage BACK TO THE FUTURE By Stefan Kanfer Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood...from what is Chinese...
...Sir William (Edward Herrmann), for an ardent commoner, Freddie Page (David Conrad...
...She cannot find the words...
...Little Ahn listens to the adults maneuver for position, hoping to pick up hints of her future...
...And in the roles of Others, Sarah Baxter pulls off a trick whose vivid effects will not be revealed here...
...He is also attentive to the local English missionary, Reverend Anthony Barnes (John Horton), and wonders about conversion to Christianity, the religion of the muchadmired West...
...Those portals swing open and bang shut as the arrivals commence...
...This scandalizes his household...
...Eng's colleagues regard him as a progressive...
...McEwan makes Old Woman an effective, if grating, foil...
...Irrational response to a crazy world was de rigueur in the postwar period...
...his bedraggled, haggish wife addresses him as Poppety-poppet...
...Her modesty was shameless...
...Its main contributions are a series of agitated comic gestures, thanks to director Simon McBurney, who has obviously spent a lot of time watching Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton...
...Second Wife (Kim Miyori) is less interested in the past than in power...
...Is Eng's interest in Protestantism genuine...
...She attempts to assuage the misery with assurances that he might have been a great man, except for—what...
...Ionesco (1909-1994) wowed postwar Paris by speaking of "metaphysical emptiness" and "nothingness made concrete...
...Tony Straiges' set manages to suggest opulence with a minimum of material, and Martin Pakledinaz' flattering costumes evoke a time of silk and gold, when the 20th century could still be held at bay...
...Today it seems as adolescent as acne and as obsolete as a 1952 Renault...
...In David Henry Hwang's new play, Golden Child, those words escalate from a moral instruction to a matter of life and death...
...Call a man your master and he's your slave for life...
...First Wife (Tsai Chin), hobbled since childhood, cannot countenance the thought of a young woman strutting like a European hussy...
...Everyone on the ?-list is invisible to us—but not to the couple, who address their guests deferentially and seek chairs for them...
...The brightest of his many children is the self-possessed "Golden Child" (Soelistyo as the 10-year-old Ahn), who overhears everything and forgets nothing...
...As she watches First Wife take fatal refuge in the opium pipe, she connives to seize control of the ménage à quatre...
...Entering in an ungainly outfit and outrageous toupee, he gestures in an indecipherable sign language before scrawling the bottom lines: "Angelsweep" and "God™ Is Gone...
...Double portraits of totalitarianism and apocalypse can be seen in Jean Genet's The Balcony, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Visit, and, most notably, Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, a parable of fascism infecting a society...
...In the process he and Hwang resurrect a scattered people and a vanished country quite unlike the Chinoiserie available at your local Blockbuster...
...For unlike them he is faithful to his wives (on long business trips to the Philippines, he opts for celibacy...
...Here, however, he uses the stage of the Longacre Theater like a star choreographer, artfully moving the cast through time and space...
...Or does he embrace the new religion because it will allow him to discard First and Second Wives and live monogamously with his beloved...
...Eng's most revolutionary notion can barely be spoken aloud: He wants to save his female children from the custom of foot binding...
...He offers a reason: "Maybe I do have gifts and talents, and just not the gifts to apply them...
...The paildecide to throw a party for all the prominent people of their epoch...
...But the practice is traditional, and in the land of ancestor worship what could be more hallowed than tradition...
...All they have is a mutual affection: The retired janitor calls her Petty-pie...
...Moreover, after a century of "Heathen Chinee" doggerel and films he wittily turns the fable, making his Oriental personae fluent and complex, while the Occidental is forced to speak in basic and hesitant phrases...
...But Mark Lamos' direction is crisp, the play is very high quality soap, and after all, it isn't fair for Masterpiece Theater to have a monopoly on British antiques...
...What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies...
...In the face of opposition her father sometimes wavers...
...Result: doom...
...Instantly, knocks resound at various doors...
...But she has a rival, the beautiful Third Wife (Ming-Na Wen), the only one of the three whose marriage was not prearranged...
...And if he examines them a little too programmatically (First Wife represents the old order, Second Wife, adjustment and survival, Third Wife, the modern world), his dialogue often reveals a Shavian gift for paradox: "I am constantly amazed at your rigid flexibility...
...A senescent couple, Old Man (Richard Briers) and Old Woman (Geraldine McEwan), live out the tag-end of their lives in a highwalled room...
...PICASSO once remarked that even abstract painting is representational, whether the artist intended it to be so or not...
...a handful of francs bought them a glimpse of the Void...
...In Ionesco's bleak 90-minute vision of the future, culture, history and even Paris itself are only distant memories...
...Kim, a classically trained actor, is reminiscent of Hamlet as he wavers between love and duty...
Vol. 81 • April 1998 • No. 5
