Fayette-Nam at the AATC

As part of my subscription to Thick House Theater, I received a ticket to Fayette-Nam, the Asian American Theater Company’s world premiere of Aurorae Khoo’s play; I was a little wary going in, but I found it a rich and enjoyable evening.

I was a little wary because I loathe ethnic uplift and groupthink and I hate theater that’s all about cardboard figures representing different groups shouting slogans at each other, and those are the kinds of the things I expect from any theater group that's ethnic-specific, and the summary – an African-American soldier goes AWOL before being shipped out to Iraq and hides out with an Asian-American woman and her daughter, with whom he is in a love triangle; the mother runs a donut shop and dreams of Paris and the daughter is a pyromaniac – just sounded a little too self-consciously quirky for my taste.

The synopsis oversimplifies the subtle and complex interplay among the characters. Khoo expertly conveys a sense of Fayetteville, a waystation for soldiers that sustains a tense and fragile community of service industries (mostly cheap restaurants and strip joints). The family unit is also tense and fragile and surprisingly enduring.

Laura-Lai Lee, the mother (played by Lisa Kang), and her children, Debbie Lee and Connor Lee (Kathleen Mendoza and Kenneth Tan Ronquillo, respectively), all dream of getting away but also know that, given reality, they aren’t really going anywhere. Debbie has been booted from Columbia University because of an arson incident (the details of which are slowly revealed, and which increase the complexity of what could have been a one-dimensional character; Debbie isn’t as bold and different as she likes to pretend). Connor is a teenage boy who is trying to break away from his mother and sister; he wants to join the football team but ends up as equipment manager, not being athletic or popular enough for the squad.

Laura-Lai envisions herself in what is very much a tourist’s fantasy of Paris – the Eiffel Tower, baguettes, the Champs-Elysees, l’amour! – but is stuck in her donut and eggroll shop, the Hole and Roll. It’s easy to see why the young black soldier, Jerome Dupree (played by Jon Gentry), already far from his home in Oakland, missing his grandmother and longing to escape the strippers and his boasting buddies for an authentic connection, is drawn to this woman as well as her daughter.

Race and gender stereotypes do surface, but in an almost casual way that comes from character and situation, not ideological need (though I was a little dubious that Laura-Lai would really describe her former husband as like a pound cake, yellow on the outside and white on the inside – this woman fantasizes about Paris, and the man she’s been seeing, a retired officer known as the Major, whom she fears losing, is white, so being Chinese just hasn’t seemed that important to her). I think the script could use a little tightening; we go to Paris or hear people described in food terms maybe once too often, but the play doesn't lapse into the predictable and I was never bored. Credit should go to the playwright, and also to the director, Duy Nguyen (the AATC’s Co-Artistic Director), as well as the talented cast.

You have a few more chances to catch the show, which is scheduled to close July 11. Click here for more information or tickets, and here to see the YouTube video.

Haiku 188

Skateboarders hover
Waiting for the tourist herd
To clear the plaza

*******

San Francisco fog
Rolls a winter day over
Our blue summer sky

Philadelphia 10: stained glass

These are all from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The top two (the coats-of-arms and the halberds) are from the collection of arms and armor. Most of the others are from the medieval galleries.


Glass of course can break (or be broken) fairly easily, and thrifty churchmen would reassemble windows out of disparate fragments, creating a jumbled collage that looks very post-modern.

Mythological animals abound.

Cute duck! (below)

Antique allegories can be colored in a startling way that looks very contemporary.

That's a very acid shade of green.

Philadelphia 9: random doorways (and some windows)

Haiku 187

(in praise of Baba the Turk)

You thought it was love.
It turns out you were a joke.
You stay self-possessed.

Philadelphia 8: The Lion Slayer

Rocky in Triumph is not the only statue around the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I particularly liked this dramatic lion-slayer at the bottom left of the stairs (left as you face the front of the Museum).

The approach to the museum has plenty of attractive greenery, including lots of pale hydrangeas, as well as statues.

One of the things I liked about this statue was that different angles and approaches give you a different dramatic sense of the action.

I vaguely recall from my previous trip that this is supposed to be Theseus (and the companion statue on the right, which I will post later, is supposed to be Hippolyta killing a tiger) but my admittedly cursory search into Fodor's and the Museum's own Handbook of the Collections didn't turn up subject or sculptor. Since the Museum building has a very Grecian look, presumably this is a classical hero being heroic.

It was muggy and overcast most of the time I was in Philly, and the sun was sometimes coming from unfortunate angles when I was wandering by something snap-worthy, so I was experimenting with different settings and angles.

The pictures look one way in the camera, and another when I look at them on my computer at home, and yet another way when I post them here. It wasn't until I saw the enlarged pictures on my computer that I realized several shots had feathers suddenly sprouting out of our hero's head. A bird had landed while I was arranging angles and I didn't notice until I could examine the pictures at leisure.

Haiku 186

Redbreast and bluebird
Pirouette from branch to branch;
We're eyeing ripe figs

Independence Day

(Philadelphia, at the Liberty Place Mall)

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly
long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic. . . .

from Robinson Jeffers, Shine Perishing Republic

(Philadelphia, on the way to the Museum of Art)

Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen; let them deliver you in the time of your tribulation.

Book of Judges, 10:14, KJV

(Philadelphia, at the Fairmount Water Works)

These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,

I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,

The men and women I saw were all near to me,

Others the same -- others who look back on me because I look'd forward to them,

(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

from Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Haiku 185

Explosion, glitter,
Dark sky streaked with bright fragments:
Green, red, golden, blue

Haiku 184

Glimmer through the trees
As the train rounds the corner
We crane down the tracks