The girl is the only child of the oldest of three wives to a Southeast China businessman (Kim, again). He's just returned from a three-year trip with an unnatural attraction to Christianity. The girl, Ma Eng, witnesses her family's heart-wrenching transformation from old Chinese values to modern Western ones as her father seeks personal freedom in a foreigner's God. But though the tale of this family's collision with history is finally a tragic one, Hwang maps this path with the same delicate, uncompromising humor found in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. "Jesus saves," the second wife spits, when the little Ma Eng tries to defend her drug-addicted mother. "And he will save me and destroy your mother."
No matter how cruel or sorrowful the moment, Hwang implicates his characters in their own fates. No one is entirely victim or villain, clown or hero. At one point, the father challenges the first wife (embodied with venomous wit by Tsai Chin, who also appeared in The Joy Luck Club) about the barbarous practice of foot-binding. Confronted by the stench and ugliness of rotting flesh, she hisses, "No one ever said the feminine beauty was pretty." But later, when she confronts her husband about his lingering traditionalism, she articulates a proto-feminist analysis of her relationship. The turns of character and language keep the story shifting like shards in a kaleidoscope, each moment reflecting a new perspective on the whole picture.
From Kim Miyori's conniving second wife to John Horton's well-meaning reverend, the actors acquit themselves with unassailable intelligence. But Chin's spectacular deterioration from the noble, needle-tongued first wife to a heartbroken opium addict gives the play its tautest emotional fiber. In giving her the wisest, wittiest lines in the play, Hwang makes us fall in love with the character who we -- as members of an obsessively future-driven culture -- have the least in common with. In her dissolution, we witness what happens when history reaches out and smacks our reality past recognition.
-- Carol Lloyd
Speak, Memory
You Never Cried. Choreography by Chris Black. Original score by Erik Pearson. At Dancers' Group Studio Theater, 3221 22nd St. (at Mission), Feb. 20-March 1. Call 824-5044.
San Francisco is not a dancey-dance town. Dance here tends to use movement to explore ideas outside of movement. Sometimes, the connections between a work's reigning themes and its dancing are hugely intriguing; they can rearrange your thinking or your heart. But more often, the movement is too doggedly directed by its motivating idea, and ends up being limited by it. If local choreographers have a common fault, it's that they don't spin out far enough from their seed idea to allow dance its capacity for expansive metaphors. Though her dancers don't fully realize the choreography's swiftly dissolving patterns, Chris Black's exceptional You Never Cried (half of an incongruous double bill with the comedic dance-theater group Squad) unearths a world of movement with the question: If memory were a dance, what kind of a dance would it be?
The show is staged to have the dancers using the studio's dim entranceway as an exposed backstage. Throughout the piece, they emerge from this corridor, slip back into it, and stand within, stock still in a staggered line -- a silent audience and time line for the main action. The piece opens when one woman enters, faces us with feet firmly planted, and begins to gesture and coil her upper body with staccato precision. After others join her, the movement patterns become larger: wide careening arcs, spiraling turns, and plunging plies. Performed both in unison and in rounds, the sequences also grow increasingly intricate, with the 13 dancers forming a large circle, concentric circles, sharp diagonals, and facing lines. They move with the speed of necessity.
And yet their movement, curling in on itself, takes the longest possible route between two points. When, for example, dancers spin back from where they've spilled, their turns are reversed, rewound. Even the score is used indirectly. Erik Pearson's music is made up of many parts: dissonant single notes; a penny whistle tune that evolves into an Irish ditty; the sonorous chants of monks; and cascading piano chords. The movement follows its delicate melodies and the beats between beats rather than its rhythm.
You Never Cried is textured like memory, though its power doesn't depend on our recognizing that. The movement is weighted without being released; large without devouring space; plastic, angular, and inevitable. The floor patterns are a sea-swirl of unassimilable thoughts. Throughout, Black drops images of remembering. A scratchy tape catches an old woman reminiscing, her words unintelligible. Various dancers sit on the only prop, which is a chair, to prompt their bodies to mimic the cadences of old age -- arms shaky, heads askew, eyes staring off somewhere -- before they join the other dancers in more sprightly moves. A sudden group portrait takes shape smack in the middle of the 30-minute work; everyone is clustered together with faces frozen, the pose held for only an instant before dissolving. Like memory, You Never Cried slips unstoppably toward the inexpressible.
-- Apollinaire Scherr
