Acting soars while ’60s staging falls flat in “˜Wind’
By Alex Wen
Feb. 18, 2004 9:00 p.m.
“The Wind Cries Mary” David Henry Hwang
Theater
“Bra burning doesn’t accomplish anything,”
quips Eiko Hanabi, the main character in playwright Philip Kan
Gotanda’s “The Wind Cries Mary,” playing at East
West Players through Feb. 29. “The men get more to ogle and
the breasts just sag sooner.”
Eiko, heroine and villainess rolled into one, is a
sharp-tongued, Hendrix-fueled, Kurosawa-derived Lady Macbeth on a
one-way acid trip to hell ““ all fire-brand intellectual
verbosity and “I am Woman” prancing.
As centerpiece to Gotanda’s laudable Asian American
transposition of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” to
America at the height of the Vietnam War (students will have a
field day noting the parallels), Jodi Long commits to the lead role
with a burning intensity that obliterates awkward and badly timed
physical choices. It’s an almost one-note performance, but
the script mercifully allows her a few quiet moments in which she
returns and fleetingly touches the depths of her otherwise
inscrutable character. In these too few moments most of all, Long
is absolutely riveting.
East West stalwart Sab Shimono memorably plays the scheming Dr.
Nakada, convincing in his self-affirming amorality, quipping that
he is “after all a Professor of Business.” Kelvin Han
Yee, as the maverick visionary, “yellow power” activist
and self-destructive genius, was forceful and vocally commanding,
like Eiko, the voice-piece of the play’s important discourse
on the Asian American experience.
Pity then that Gotanda’s otherwise well-written play, in
director Lisa Peterson’s hands, goes the way of the burning
bra (and the way of the burning hash). There is plenty of enigmatic
staginess to ogle, including an admittedly stunning coup de theater
of a closer, but nothing of true permanence to savor in the dying
embers of a sagging story arc that seems to want to go from here to
eternity in five seconds flat.
“The Wind Cries Mary” is an important
character-driven piece begging to be unveiled layer by layer. The
writing is worthy of trust. But Peterson’s direction
anticipates its wordless resolution in its hurry to deliver the
final payoff (masterful as that is).
The production also relies far too much on its symbolically
stylized yin-yang set, complete with ’60s mod furniture and
the jarring, gimmicky use of its overdone ’60s soundtrack. By
the umpteenth time, the choice of having the actors move off to
stage right and physically put on a vinyl record each time a song
was called for felt as tired and as worn as the grooves on those
old records.
“The Wind Cries Mary” desperately tries to soar, but
ultimately gets mired in Peterson’s efforts, deliberate or
otherwise, to make ’60s psychedelia the star of the show.
““Alex Wen
