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Art and revolution By Robert Avila
IN THE UNITED States, China's Cultural Revolution offers a fairly black-and-white picture (increasingly favored colors over here), with not much room for ambiguities. In 1966 Mao unleashed the extra-governmental mass purging of "intellectuals" and "imperialists" (and Mao's political enemies) from public life. The movement's mostly teenage frontline forces, known as the Red Guards, began that year systematically destroying ancient art, artifacts, and books, replacing a priceless human legacy with the worst of human excesses. Over the next 10 years, an ever wider circle of internal enemies faced unemployment, mass roundups, detentions without trial, confinement to work camps, torture, and murder. There are vast differences in history and political traditions between China and the United States, of course. But it should be harder by now, given the galumphing American empire and burgeoning police state, to dismiss such events as something entirely alien to our experience or imagination. Watching a scene onstage recently, in which a patriotic Red Guard teenager uses bamboo poles to "interrogate" a man wearing a gunnysack over his head, evokes more than a window onto Chinese history. Some of our own reflection inevitably stares back at us in the glass. Singapore-born American playwright Chay Yew's Red, in which the above scene occurs, reflects on the gray areas that make up the majority of social space, especially in a time of repression. It does so with style and intelligence, pulling up the immediate social-psychological roots of authoritarian systems (whether ancient or more recently spun) in what seems, only at first, a straightforward story. Sonya Wong Pickford (Allison Sie) is a successful Chinese American author of lurid "ethnic romances." Once a poor and illegal immigrant, she now hunts for a serious subject. This and more she finds in the shuttered remains of a Beijing opera house, where memory and imagination brew her a heady history lesson (personal and political) in the shape of the great diva Hua Wai Mun (the excellent Francis Jue) and a young revolutionary named Ling (Grace Hsu). Yew's drama, now gracing TheatreWorks' Palo Alto stage in artistic director Robert Kelley's well-wrought and engaging production, contains the Cultural Revolution in a nutshell – or rather, in a cleverly refracted family melodrama simultaneously played out on the stages of high art and high-as-a-kite politics. Hua readily embraces the idea of having a book written about him – he's intent on not being erased from history. As the play moves dreamlike between different periods of time, for example, we see how the master artist hides his own painful apprenticeship, recapitulated in another form with his onetime student Ling. His total commitment to his art merges with a desire to be a willing foot soldier in Mao's revolution. His famously passive female stage roles belie a formidable patriarchal streak. Jue relates Hua's intriguingly incongruous aspects with exceptional flair and keen insight. The smooth incorporation of elements of Beijing Opera lends Yew's sly but essentially realistic story of an artist in a time of repression a stylized, almost allegorical dimension. As we watch Hua go from the artifice of his greatest operatic role ("the white-haired damsel") to the imposed artifice (including dunce cap) of a public confession, the classical form morphs into agitprop – the same stage serving as platform for both art and politics, even as the line between the two blurs. And still, behind both dramas lies a deeper, hidden, private reality. All three characters, in fact, develop by contradictions (dialectically, you might say). Pickford (played by Sie with a vague agitation beneath a serenely intelligent surface) is in Shanghai to write a serious book, yet shies away from the disturbing details of Hua's story. Meanwhile, Ling (who gains considerable depth in Hsu's formidable performance as her character's story unfolds) is a willing executioner of China's traditional ("counterrevolutionary") culture, and – as the play travels in time – a child who dreamed only of the opera stage. These tensions play into a debate about the role of art in society. If Pickford's career serves as a foil to Hua and Ling, aghast at the trade in literary exotica, she justifies her work as giving Asian Americans (adrift like everyone else across the shoals of American mass culture) "a sense of belonging – a history." This idea shocks the young revolutionary, who shouts back at her, "All art is political! Decadence, filth, lies – we want art to have responsibilities!" Prompting Pickford to respond, penetratingly, "Who's 'we'? You?" Such dialogue, while provocative, is ultimately heavy-handed. Yew moves beyond rhetorical thrusts and parries, however, in the fluid relationships between the characters. Here the dynamic between art and politics arises from a set of social roles and power relationships – between master and apprentice; parent and child; state and subject; torturer and victim – that get reversed more than once in the course of the evening. Yew subtly underscores the point when pet phrases, like Master Hua's injunction to "put some heart into it," come back later in the mouth of a former underdog, who's now having her day: in the gray areas mapped by these relationships, freedom and authority create both individuals and monsters. 'Red' runs through Aug. 8. Tues., 7:30 p.m.; Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 2 p.m.; Aug. 7, show at 8 p.m. only); Sun., 2 and 7 p.m. (Aug. 8, show at 2 p.m. only), Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto. $20-$50. (650) 903-6000, www.theatreworks.org. |
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