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3 hours ago
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This debut by Vietnamese-American playwright Katie Đỗ travels across realms. It begins in the afterlife, with a whimsical scene of heaven as a place that is built out of a character’s happiest moments on earth.
The play spans several decades in the life of one family, and mixes naturalism with dreams, fantasy and interior life. That makes it formally inventive but the switches render the drama diffuse, leaching its emotive power rather than adding layers.
It has, at heart, a mother-daughter relationship. The indomitable but depressed Mai (Tuyen Do) has been hurt by her unfaithful husband, Long (Jon Chew), and is disapproving of her daughter, Tâm (Molly Harris), who strives to please Mai but – to her ire – wants to become a writer rather than settling down as a pharmacist. There are rows between them, especially around her relationship with Huy (Zheng Xi Yong), who Tâm has begun dating, but they do not delve particularly deep.
The play takes place mostly in America and covers intergenerational friction, migration and artistic aspirations – more than it can possibly deal with in 90 minutes. Directed by Jennifer Tang, the play does not feel big enough to span a lifetime, with some scenes so short that they cannot sustain the emotions they are trying to evoke. The characters feel slight, too – although there are attempts to reveal their psychologies, these are spoken out loud.
The drama seems led by incident and all that happens across Mai’s lifetime. Long comes and goes; so does Tâm who heads to Iowa, to study creative writing, and then to New York. Christianity is a feature in the play but is rather literally depicted, with characters speaking of going to church rather than exploring any underlying meanings about what it means to be faithful.
The mother-daughter relationship intensifies towards the end, as the drama settles into straightforward realism, and becomes more moving. When it loops back to the afterlife, you get a glimmer of what this play could be, with greater focus and intensity.
