Shadowy men
Crowded Fire and Chay Yew look at post-Joe Orton love and death.

By Robert Avila

Porcelain

RACISM AND HOMOPHOBIA confine like the bars of the prison cell where a profoundly lonely 19-year-old, John Lee (Jason Wong), sits for the murder of his lover (John Atwood), having confessed to firing six bullets into his body in a public bathroom in London. Lee, the son of a Singaporean immigrant and restaurant owner, barely registers any hardship in his incarceration, having long been shunned twice over – as Asian and gay – by the British society he grew up in. Instead he sits quietly folding red paper cranes.

Porcelain brought American playwright Chay Yew instant award-winning recognition when it premiered, in London in 1992 (it had its Bay Area premiere the following year, in a production at Theatre Rhinoceros). This acclaim clearly had less to do with its fairly conventional plot devices, half-developed subthemes, or occasionally amateurish passages than its daring look at the interplay of racism and homophobia, including their internalized dimensions, in the life and mind of its protagonist. To this end, the combination of the lyrical and the graphic in the play's dialogue, its mix of deep-seated violence with an equally deep longing and alienation, lend it a gritty and unflinching power that boded well for Yew's career, one which has since produced four more full-length works for the stage on similar themes (including the impressive Red, which was given its Bay Area premiere by TheatreWorks, in 2004).

Crowded Fire opens its ninth season by returning to Yew's first play, and director Mei Ann Teo gives Porcelain an elegantly designed, smoothly executed production, though one lacking enough in necessary intensity that the play's clunkier aspects can overwhelm it.

John (played by Wong with intriguing, unfolding complexity) delivers his story amid various voices and perspectives presented by a four-man ensemble. The whole thing is set in motion by a couple of overlapping plot points. An unscrupulous and bigoted psychiatrist (Kalli Jonsson) must determine John's frame of mind at the time of the shooting and so befriends him in an attempt to draw him out of his coolly detached shell, all the while passing on some of what he learns to a celebrity TV reporter (Brian Erlich). The reporter is doing a story on the Lee case and its relation to the illicit practice of "cottaging" (British slang for looking for and engaging in sex in public bathrooms), which leads to a series of interviews, including a particularly powerful one with John's anguished and uncomprehending father (Jeremiah Hill), who has renounced his son as much, one senses, for being homosexual as for killing a man. Other interviewees include a wide assortment of cottaging British males, many of them married, who come together in an underground democracy of sexual gratification for an often amusing, if also revealing, variety of rationalizations.

John gradually confides in Dr. Worthing, and in a series of flashbacks his confessions provoke, we learn that even here he felt himself apart from, and lesser than, the rest, until his fateful meeting with the tightly wound young man who would become his first love. Wong's performance brings out this desperate loneliness, longing for kinship, and internalized hatred with a subtle but moving immediacy, as the racial and homophobic epithets fired brutally at him by a chorus of encircling strangers find their counterparts in loveless sexual violence (an act carried out in complete darkness, though all the more disturbing for only being heard) and John's own convoluted crime of passion.

At the same time, the rest of the generally able cast don't always match the force of Yew's language, and, in some cases, they wrestle slightly but distractingly with their British accents. Moreover, the play itself throws up obstacles to appreciating its more inspired aspects. The use of the two-dimensional TV reporter to advance the story, for example, or the equally familiar and half-developed reliance on the psychiatrist-patient relationship, along with the use of Rorschach inkblot tests to mine John's psyche – these are all tiring conceits. Yew even throws in Carmen for a fairly weak doubling of the crime-of-passion theme. These feel more like clichés or failed gestures than fully carried-through ideas.

Yew introduces a more successful theme in the bedtime story John's father used to tell him, about a lone crow who tries to join a group of sparrows. This comes across effectively and artfully in a way thoroughly integrated into the few choice elements of Melpomene Katakalos's elegant stage design. John has been fashioning and arranging origami birds in his prison cell from the outset, and as he revisits the story of the ugly crow looking for a home among the colorful sparrows, an actor traces with a handheld lamp the path of a birdlike shadow cast by John's hands against a wall covered in the silhouettes of his paper birds. By the end of the play, this scene expands dramatically into a visually heightened representation of John's idiosyncratic mental retreat, or escape, from the profound social alienation that has become, literally, and almost redundantly, a prison.

'Porcelain.' Through December 17. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m. (no shows Nov. 25-26). Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy, SF. $18-$30. (415) 675-5995, www.crowdedfire.org.