The jokes on you, cracker mothafucka, and look who's laughing.

Saw YJL's The Shipment.
I say without reservation that Young Jean has a remarkable capacity for and agility with words, and a unique brand of wicked American humor that is based on irony/sarcasm. She also always goes after a disarming rhythm in her plays, one that teases, caresses, then pulls the rug from out under the audience. Watching her shows is like being tickled and being force-fed sliders while also being bashed in the head at the same time.
Though performed by an astoundingly beautiful and talented cast, I don't know if this was her most successful piece. Despite the NYT, I would say that the second half of the piece (which felt me like the play she really wanted to write) didn't earn its pay-off -- it's an extended cocktail party drama in which the host pretends to poison all his inane guests. The joke is supposed to be on the audience at the end when you find out that the black actors were playing white (read: racist) characters the whole time -- but this conceit was pretty apparent from the get-go.
I always wonder why her plays are so in-your-face, like to the point of being abusive to the audience, especially white ones. It's like she's tapped deeply into the fact that white people love to have their white guilt pumped up and paraded around and shat on publicly, particularly if in the hands of a such a witty wordsmith, because then they can feel absolved yet claim to have acknowledged their deep-seeded inherent racism and elitism and be able to laugh it all off in a neat package. There's a lot of racial shock-value to be mined and she's got a mainline to it, for sure.
My favorite part of the play was a song at the center of the play that was sung incredibly beautifully by three actors. That felt like the (literal) heart of the play to me.

what will happen to the kids?

Lloyd Suh's latest play, The Children of Vonderly, produced by Ma-Yi, is a story about an unusual Midwestern family of disabled people of all kinds of background who were adopted by the Jewish couple the Vonderlys, and what happens when the patriarch of the family dies. Well, what happens is, the widowed mom goes batty, the mentally impaired "kids" are left to fend for themselves while the physically impaired (but lucid) siblings fall in love with each other and run away -- or at least try to. The children of the Vonderly household are no longer children, really, so the play is really about their struggle for independence and their pursuit of happiness. It's a theatrically conventional play, but very well-acted all around. But I can't help feeling like the metaphor of the play was somehow being obscured by all the good acting, uber-realistic speech patterns, and set changes executed by stagehands in black. I mean, this play isn't really about disabled people and their struggle for independent lives, is it? It seems like if that were the point, the play should have been cast with actors who were actually disabled -- all actors were decidedly NOT disabled (as evidenced by their quick transitions in blackouts) except for Stephen Jutras who is a dwarf. Towards the end of the play, the writer (and the protagonist) seemed more interested swimming in the slick banter than actual catharsis or change.

In-Between Days

Remind you of The Cure song?

This new film ending its short fun at the IFC, which apparently the saving grace of the Sundance Film Festival this year, was written and directed by So Yong Kim. A simple, hands-off story without much dialogue (and what there is is mostly in Korean -- and subtitled in English), this feels-like-documentary follows the story of Aimie, an adolescent Korean F.O.B. in an unnamed (but clearly freezing-nipples cold) city in North America, as she negotiates school, an ambiguous love relationship, and an estranged mother. The stark, gravelly film was almost painful to watch, it was so well (as in subtly) acted. Jiseon Kim as Aimie is remarkably watchable -- to see her caught between Korean and Korean-American, child and adulthood, and all the gradations in between. I wasn't convinced about the use of sporadic voiceover (Aimie's imaginary letter to her father who left both wife and daughter), but nevertheless, it was an achingly beautiful portrayal of what it's like to be an immigrant.

Technology Kills Art?

Koosil-ja's latest version of mech[a]OUTPUT sounds great on paper. A multimedia work from the dynamic Korean-Japanese-American choreographer/singer re-de-constructing the classic noh play Dojo-ji from a feminist p.o.v. and live performer-technology interaction with video (a la Wooster Group), live 3-D game space, live music and a swinging digital bell.

Dojoji itself is based on an old Japanese legend in which a love-lorn woman spurned by a monk chases him into a temple where he hides inside a bell, at which point her jealous rage turns her into a gigantic serpent and she coils herself around the bell breathing fire and roasts him alive. Alternate versions have the temple monks' fervent prayers releasing the woman from her earthly attachments and ascending to heaven, or sometimes she is the one who hides herself away from the world in the bell where she transforms into her reptilian-monster self, and ultimately just slithers away into the river. yowzers. The noh play, of course, with a super-refined and rigid performance form passed down through centuries from performer to performer, is a slow, intense display of subtle emotion. As is the "Japanese" aesthetic of wabisabi focus is on restraint, and that which is NOT apparent, as much as it is about what is. To the western layman, noh would probably be intolerable to watch and boring as hell.

With such fecund material and willing and skilled collaborators at hand, it is difficult for me to admit that mech[a]OUTPUT was a exciting as someone's master's thesis. There was no seamless marriage between concept and art -- there was high concept, flapping dryly in the wind, and there was great skill, embodied in Koosil-ja's heartrending voice and fierce physicality. But the two seemed never to meld or complement each other, leaving both heart and brain to drift off. It also didn't help that the transitions were handled with utter clumsiness and artlessness. Perhaps with the aid of an editor or director, these elements could have been shaped into a theatrically satisfying event. But as is, it was output to be forsaken.

Church of YJ Lee

What, I am in Vienna, with YJ's Songs, and I am blogging about Church? Well it's a rainy day, and I've been meaning to write this for a couple days now. If I wait any longer I might forget everything about the show, which was totally rockin'. Church was a joyful, insidious, delightful, WHITE and absurd celebration of the Christian faith. For YJ to set her play as a mock-church service, for me, was the perfect marriage between form / content. The strength of her uncompromisingly sharp and shockingly funny writing shined through the series of testimonies, sermons and prayers, interspersed with song and dance.

I didn't mind being berated, criticized and lectured at in this context, because the frame of the church protected me from YJ's rampage against the inanity and complacency of urban-liberal culture. Instead I could enjoy the magnificent performances. And though some texts were uneven (the mummy monologue - fucking brilliant almost peed my pants -- could have done without the dream text) the whole event was exhilarating. For someone like me, for whom religion only inspires contempt, revulsion and horror, this play was an incredibly opening experience, a liberating embrace of the beauty, foolishness, and passion (and the human desire for) of community through faith. Religion as interpreted by the staunchest atheist and most committed believer.

The Wily Theater of AsianAmerica

If you don't know already, I have a pretty violent love-hate relationship with theater -- but it reaches another level of intensity when it comes to "Asian-American" theater -- or "Asian-American" anything. I don't know if any of you other "Asian-Americans" feel this way... but when I went to the Second Generation's 10th Anniversary Reading Event TEN and found myself amidst a throng of Asian-Americans, I was not filled with irrepressible pride and sense of community -- in fact I felt extremely self-conscious and kind of embarrassed. Like, "Look at that big crowd of Asian people over there, they're there because they're Asian." I don't know how to make sense of this -- I don't feel that uncomfortable going to see an occasional film at Imaginasian. But there is something about cultural identity being thrust to the forefront of the agenda that makes me lose my appetite. A lot. Not that I don't like being Asian. I love it. But I don't consider it THE defining characteristic of my personal identity, and don't feel the need to talk about it incessantly and get worked up about it all the time. It's more like, OK, enough about ME, can we just talk about what's important?

So as you can imagine, I was already feeling rather nauseated as I was shuttled into the Public Theater (feeling as if we were all waving a flag saying "I'm Asian and Proud!") and the terribly delivered cheesy curtain speech didn't help either:

Over 350 actors auditioned for these 10 10-minute plays for 2 evenings
celebrating the 10 years of Second Generation (blablabla) Thank you so much for
supporting us, and continue to support us in telling our stories, because it is
SO important for us to share our stories of being Asian in America with the
world...

Am I a bad Asian for wanting to barf at this speech?
And for those of you who aren't "Asian-American" and wonder what the "Asian-American" plight is all about (particularly for the second generation), it encompasses the following, according to the ten plays that were read last night:

• Being isolated, estranged, ostracized, stereotyped, exoticized within the context of a predominantly white mainstream culture.
• Not speaking the language of your 'motherland.'
• Having evil parents who over-discipline and have outrageous expectations and make their children develop insane paranoia and self-doubt and social retardation.

And how do Asian-Americans react/counteract these things? Some suggestions offered by the playwrights were:

• Get really bitter and angry and cold.
• Figure out how to break rules.
• Satirize yourself.
• Stick to the urban centers; avoid the country.
• Never leave the house and watch anime.

A lot of these things rang true for me, but I also didn't feel the need for these things to be publicly addressed. In all honestly, the most interesting thing about the evening for me, was not the content of the plays, but the form.

The TEN-MINUTE PLAY is an odd little genre, bite-sized theater that are more like sketches. In many ways it draws out the best in artists -- writers don't dawdle about in unnecessary extraneous details and go for the punch with precision and economy; actors tackle the text in broad strokes, fast and bold decisions. It's easy to capture an audiences' attention for 10 minutes (as opposed to 2 hours) and, even if you bore them, it's over in ten. Of course, no theater would fully produce a single ten-minute play for a 4-week run -- so one wonders what truly is the purpose of this truncated form. But everything seems to be evolving to be shorter, faster (and therefore more shallow? Continuing exploration of the topic with Tmonkey)

To my great surprise and unexpected pleasure, the plays last night were all passably good, and probably the best writing I'd seen from many of the playwrights. Like Chiori Miyagawa, for example, whose works in the past I've found rather elusive and esoteric. Her City Lights presented a series of morphing vignette/conversations between two women, usually one white and the other Asian, about life in a small (affluent, educated, white) town in upstate New York. No doubt she was processing her experiences teaching at Bard. Much of it was trite, but funny, if a bit scathing -- something different from her usually opaque style.

Other memorable slices (reconstructed & approximated): In Michael Golamco's Heartbreaker a teenage boy tells his sister that her boyfriend is "so white he's a snowman, with a carrot for a nose." David Henry Hwang's ridiculous The Great Helmsman in which two comrades (women) vie for the amorous affections of their great leader through a battle of communist slogans infused with over-the-top sexual innuendo. And the playful tv mockumentary-style Asian Accents in the Key of Sucky Sucky by Qui Nguyen, who explores the profoundly disturbing phenomenon of the lack of Asian accent in the English spoken by the next generation of Asian-Americans "konnichiwa muthafuckas" -- sure signs of a culture in collapse.

But the most remarkable piece of the evening was Julia Cho's Round and Round, a devastatingly moving piece about a married couple breaking up. I'd seen her Durango and BFE, both of which I found kind of stilted, predictable and tedious, so I was really surprised to find this one so compelling. Sue Jean Kim (who was in BFE) and Rajesh Bose were just terrific -- very watchable, honest performances. The play begins with George (Bose), a linguist, speaking to the audience expressing his concern about the recent inexplicable change that has occurred in his wife. She used to be so upbeat, but now she cries a lot, at the drop of a hat, at long-distance phone commercials, at nature shows when animals of prey are devoured by predators, at nothing. Mary (Kim) who's been sitting there gazing off into space the whole time, asks George why he's talking about her again, when she's sitting right there, hearing every word he says. Thus the story unfolds -- Mary wants to leave George because she seems to have lost her faith in their ability to understand one another -- she wants to go out dancing, and it seems obvious to her that there are thousands of reasons to weep in the world, and she is disturbed that George seems to be emotionless. He didn't even grieve when his grandmother died. George has three chances to say something to change her mind (a theatrical mechanism [i.e. light change] allows one possible storyline to play out, then time warps back to a prior moment to play out another storyline, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure). The funny thing is, in a way, all three times, George is saying the same thing, to varying degrees of being understood. He is saddened by the fact that as a linguist he learned so many languages, but never the one that his grandmother spoke. That of the 6500 languages in the world today, half of them will be extinct in ten years, and he cannot bear the idea that their private language born of two people should die. In the end, though, she leaves, and he is left to ponder from the beginning, expressing his concern about the recent inexplicable change that has occurred in his wife. She used to be so upbeat, but now she cries a lot, at the drop of a hat, at long-distance phone commercials, at nature shows when animals of prey are devoured by predators, at nothing...

This was so successful and poignant, because the crux of the play was the tension around a human relationship, rather than a concept or agenda about race, white-bashing, or finding empowerment after being victimized.

---> Asides from Kim & Bose, the acting overall throughout the evening was pretty uneven, some stellar moments by Allison Mui and the glib Yung-I Chang -- who seem to be, according to the playbill, the two least experienced actors of the lot. hmmm

I feel I've done my Asian-American duty for the year by attending this event, so now I can go back to staying at home with my Asian-American boyfriend to make rice for dinner and play video games and watch anime all night, without guilt. Whew!