You for Me for You
Mia Chung
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| Elissa Beth Stebbins, Kathryn Han & Jomar Tagatac |
The driven desire against immense odds to escape despot
regimes where personal freedoms are few-to-none, food is scarce to the point of
hunger, and family members are often at risk of being whisked away in the
middle of the night is certainly a part of our current, global
consciousness. Every day we read or
watch clips of refugees fleeing across dangerous borders and waters to
countries that may or may not welcome them – our own country now being among
the latter group of countries shunning many refugees. What we may sometimes overlook is how excruciatingly
difficult that initial decision to leave actually is – no matter how deplorable
are the conditions – and how retching it is to family members who find themselves
separated, a pain that never goes away.
In her 2012 play that premiered at Wooly Mammoth in
Washington, D.C., You for Me for You, Mia Chung employs
fantastical elements, humor, time/space fast-forwards and flashbacks, and a
number of symbols and metaphors to provide a sometimes searing, sometimes
confusing look at the refugee’s experience – both from the perspective of
making it across the border and from being the one left behind. Crowded Fire Theater presents an imaginative
version of You for Me for You at the
intimate Potrero Stage (formerly, Thick House), with impressive production
values and a fine cast. Under the creative
direction of M. Graham Smith, this rendition is so nonlinear and jumbled at
times in its references, reversals, and dream-like sequences as to leave the
audience in a final state of blur as to what really happened.
Two sisters in the beginning sit in front of a sole bowl of
rice and a small side of kimchi, both clearly near starvation and both
reluctant to take the food from the other.
Their North Korean existence is portrayed vividly and with an element of
dark-humor caricature as dismally bleak for the individual trapped in a society
where all is focused on a supreme leader.
The younger sister, Junhee, begs her older, more cautious and sicker
sister, Minhee, to come with her to “cross over.” As they are led in the dark by a smuggler
(Junhee literally dragging the scared Minhee who does not want to leave behind
her currently-absent husband and son), they are warned, “The Crossing has a
large appetite.”
In fact, Junhee soon successfully finds herself in front of an
immigration officer to get into the U.S. while Minhee is swallowed into the
bottom of a dry well before she can make it across the border. There, she is left to hover in darkness,
fear, hunger, and regret.
The bulk of the play’s one hundred minutes is then devoted
to the experiences of Junhee’s assimilation to become an American and to
Minhee’s memories and hallucinations (or at least, that is what I interpret
them as) of her search for her lost son and husband. Throughout, the play never lets us forget the
unresolved pain of the two sisters’ separation nor the power of their love for
each other.
Both Grace Ng and Kathryn Han leave memory-lasting images in
their singular, sensitive, and often searing portrayals of Junhee and Minhee,
respectively. Ms. Han’s Minhee is at
first calmly self-controlled in her near-slow-motion reactions to her own
desperate situations. All that changes
as she begins her mind-driven, panicked searches in often strange, non sequitur
sequences for her young son lost to one of the regime’s notorious reeducation
camps and for a husband who supposedly sacrificed the son for his own political
ladder-climbing. Ms. Han displays an impressively
wide range of emotions from quietly lost and resigned to frantically determined
and bravely assertive as the mother-wife-sister left in a hell with nothing but
her fantasies.
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| Grace Ng & Julian Green |
The play’s script alternates many times between scenes of
Minhee’s dreams and Junhee’s first few years after arriving in New York where the
need for scenes to be parallel in actual time plays no part. Grace Ng’s Junhee provides an informative
and plausible face to Every Immigrant in modern-day America as she maneuvers
from job to job – steadily, step-by-step figuring out and beginning to thrive
in the American experience of frozen yoghurt shops, baseball games, and stores
full of goods of every imaginable sort.
She gradually transforms from the silent, nodding, and rarely
understanding just-arrived to the now-knowing, much-assimilated persons we pass
every day on the street whose amazing, background stories of suffering and
survival are no longer outwardly readable. Junhee along the way meets a different sort of
immigrant, an African-American man just arrived in NYC from Alabama -- a happy,
easy-going, highly likable Julian Green whose unnamed Man is ever persistent in
his patient and persistent pursuit of the shy Junhee.
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| Grace Ng & Elissa Beth Stebbins |
The immigrant’s experience is particularly illustrated
though Liz, an ever-changing character who shows up in Junhee’s immigration
journey in roles such as border processor, fast-food cashier, patient in
hospital, and hospital personnel manager.
Elissa Beth Stebbins is award-deserving for her several cameo
appearances. Her speech is first heard
by Junhee as a jumble-mumble of nonsensical syllables, later as a mix of words arranged
in an order not making sense (and punctuated by more nonsense sounds), and
increasingly with each new role finally progressing to full, understandable
speech. Her performance is perhaps the
best example of what it must be like to arrive not knowing a language and
immediately thrust into daily motions of shopping, working on a first job, and
trying to discover the norms of a new culture.
Jomar Tagatac takes on a number of varied, North-Korean-based
roles ranging from a cartoon-like doctor to a money-hungry smuggler who has a
change of heart to the lost husband of Minhee (among a number of other
roles). It is as this final part that he
is particularly powerful as he describes to his wife the tortuous journey
toward his own demise – all the time as tears and mucous flow from his eyes and
nose.
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| Jomar Tagatac, Kathryn Han & "Bear" |
Watching Mia Chung’s play means having a high tolerance for letting
scenes float by and either letting go of the ones that do not always make a lot
of logical sense or just accepting that ambiguity is the desired norm. We are not given a lot of clues how to
interpret, for example, a smiling, Yogi-like bear that repeatedly appears in
some scenes. We never quite know if we
are watching what actually happens to Minhee or what she is remembering in a
fevered dream or what she wishes in her mind would happen as she drifts into a
hungered stupor. And as the play draws
to its climax, events become even more hazy as to what has been real and what
has just happened and why.
But in any case, there is no argument that David K.H.
Elliott has created a lighting design and James Ard a sound design that are
both stellar in the telling of these often-surreal sequences. Each has out-performed for a theatre as small
as the space before us, and their ingenuity enhances the overall experience
immensely. Lynne Sofer’s contributions
as dialect coach certainly pay off for each of the actors, from the drawling
Man from the South to the incredible verbal acrobatics of Liz to the Korean
accents which sound very authentic to the untrained ear. Maya Linke’s most visible element of the
scenic design (a large cellular model in the background ... or is it a
honeycomb?) is part of the play’s unexplained, mysterious symbolism, but her
other elements of the many changing scenes easily flow in and out and work
beautifully (as also do Michelle Mulholland’s costumes).
Leaving behind the necessity to understand what occurred and
did not occur in some realm of reality, the audience viewer of Crowded Fire’s You for Me for You certainly leaves with
renewed impressions of the would-be and actual immigrant experience from
countries much different in culture, safety, and independence than ours. And in this day and time, that in itself is
certainly a major accomplishment and a key reason to see Mia Chung’s freewheeling,
often puzzling, but always intriguing play.
Rating: 3 E
You for Me for You
continues through April 1, 2017 as a Crowded Fire Production at Potrero Stage,
1695 18th Street, San Francisco.
Tickets are available online at http://www.crowdedfire.org/.
Photo Credits: Pak Han
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