April 2, 2003

Halfway home

hits the racist core of the Wen Ho Lee case but misses the mark on doomsday machines. By Robert Avila

Legacy Codes

IN THE POLITICAL storm surrounding the 1999 investigation of Wen Ho Lee – the Chinese American physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory wrongly accused of passing U.S. nuclear secrets to China – his defenders on the left never clouded the issue of Lee's racial profiling by the Federal Bureau of Investigation with any discussion of his disquieting employment designing weapons of mass destruction. Lee was simply an honest man targeted by the government because of his race and a deep-seated bias that still insisted on seeing the Asian as outsider. It was a frustratingly specific argument, akin to the value-neutral arguments on behalf of gays or women who want to join the military, in which the right of equal access to a job trumps the moral implications, however dire, of the job itself.

Cherylene Lee's The Legacy Codes, premiering at TheatreWorks and based on the Wen Ho Lee case, doesn't try to separate out the fact that the poster man for anti-Asian racism at the close of the 1990s was a problematic innocent (namely, a loyal employee of the government's WMD assembly line). In fact, the tension between Dr. Tai Liu (the character based on Lee, portrayed by Jim Ishida) and his son Erling (Trieu Tran) rests partly on the latter's rejection of his father's work. But ironically it's this very tension that gets Liu (or Lee) off the hook again. By absorbing the conflict in the generational divide between father and son, the play dissolves the contradictions of the real-life figure in the warm bath of family melodrama.

Playwright Lee (no relation to the scientist) makes fruitful use of the idea of legacy codes, the term for the computer simulations of nuclear explosions that Dr. Lee had allegedly passed on to the Chinese government, expanding it to encompass the multiple avenues of communication and the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. Mrs. Liu's cooking recipes, Dr. Liu's scientific work, Erling's rap music, and the emotional history of families all represent competing but ultimately complimentary legacies. The family and espionage plots thus shadow one another like the strands of the double helix (mirrored in Andrea Bechert's set).

Lee's previous plays also emphasize familial relations between generations, so it's not surprising she takes the personal as geopolitical tack. And the theme resonates, after all, with a broader multicultural perspective in the arts that, at its best, has led to invigoratingly sophisticated work. Moreover, The Legacy Codes, directed by Amy Gonzalez, remains ingenious in its layering of the theme, despite some stiff, declamatory dialogue, an uneven cast, and some hokey aspects.

But while rooted in projections and misunderstandings arising from personal histories, the story necessarily unfolds against a vast, grinding bureaucratic system that makes personal history essentially meaningless, obliterating individual choice and responsibility, and substituting for both the myth of national duty and enemy peoples. In enforcing the same shortsightedness that packaged the complexities of Lee's case as just another example of racial injustice, the story leaves alone the mindless system that caught up Wen Ho Lee in the first place.

Rather than leading away from such complications, playwright Edward Bond's take on American racism explores its totalitarian implications, in which capitulation to a system based on violence, racism, and xenophobia jeopardizes the liberty of all. Back in 1976, England's brilliant left-wing dramatist and longtime enfant terrible penned a pair of excoriating one-act comedies under the title A-A-America! If Bond's bicentennial gift to the United States is only now being unwrapped in Crowded Fire's daring American premiere, it hasn't lost any of its freshness.

Grandma Faust, a parody of a Southern folktale, refashions Uncle Sam (Michael Brusasco) as a barefoot bumpkin who conspires with the Devil, in the gnarled shape of Sam's invalid granny (Linda Jones), to steal the soul of a simple black man named Paul (Algin Ford), who naturally turns out to be not as simple as they imagined. The broad humor here competes intentionally (though not always successfully) with the violence of the theme, brought out in the casually sadistic language as well as the fanciful premise, drawn from the too-real trade in black bodies, that has two identical Southern belles (Sara Betts and Michele Leavy) vying for the chance to bake Paul into a pie.

The slightly more realistic The Swing makes for a surer second act. Paul returns as a servant to Mrs. Kroll (Jones), a widow performing leg shows for the coarse company of a Western boomtown, and her bookish and willful but emotionally fragile daughter Greta (Cassie Beck). Paul tells us that we are being given the more or less factual account of a lynching that took place in a public theater in Livermore, Kentucky, in 1911: "If there's gonna be a lynchin', you'll sit more comfortable if you know exactly what seat history's sat you in." But nothing prepares us for the subtle relationships and ironies that lace the journey. The limber work of director Christine Young and her fine cast make these details instantly familiar and authentic.

In the end a man sits tied to a swing, accused of rape and robbery. Suddenly the play we are watching is the patriotic entertainment of a particular day in 1911, in which the theater management invites us, the audience, to open fire at the man in order of ticket price, until he's riddled with more than a hundred bullets. In one deft gesture Bond offers a moment of complicity in the collision (and collusion) of past and present. This is lynching as spectacle, the theater of violence that consumed thousands of lives in the Jim Crow era, the vast majority of them African American.

Racism and outlaw justice are too much with us today to afford forgetting the harrowing history of lynching in this country. But Bond's inspired provocations do more than dredge up the past. There's a larger undercurrent of violence, of moral and social chaos, from which no one ultimately escapes. Far from a pedantic history lesson, Crowded Fire's smart and committed production demands an accounting of social responsibility. "Art," Bond says, "always concerns itself with the cruelty of a particular time."