Last of the Suns," Alice Tuan's play about a Chinese family in America, ambitiously juggles issues of assimilation, coming of age and the role of women. At its center is the assertion that the act of leaving one culture behind and settling in another is a violent change with warping emotional consequences. And though Ms. Tuan has depicted a full network of relationships here, her focus is clearly on the women, who are not merely unhappy; they are harmfully twisted. The play is being presented through Sunday at the Theater for the New City by the Ma-Yi Theater Company, an important troupe in the theatrical mosaic of New York that focuses on work by and about Asian-Americans, and "Suns" is emblematic of this company's value. It does not entirely work, but directed by Chay Yew, it is a thoughtful, complicated and creative work that struggles with ideas and the stagecraft that can best express them.

Ms. Tuan, a Chinese-American who grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs, writes in a program note that the seed for the play was planted as she watched MTV with her 93-year-old grandfather, and the play is rife with such striking cultural juxtapositions.

The central character is General Sun (Ching Valdes-Aran), once a Nationalist officer who opposed Mao Zedong. The play takes place on his 100th birthday in Southern California, where he lives with his weary, penurious son (Ron Nakahara), severe daughter-in-law (Mia Katigbak) and their combatively selfish, thoroughly American teenage son (Pun Bandhu), and where he is called Yeh Yeh and treated with impatience, ridicule and some remnant of reverence.

Yeh Yeh is in a state of advancing dementia characterized by infantilism on the one hand and hallucinatory dialogue with mythical Chinese figures, Monkey King (Eric Steinberg) and Eight Pig (Kati Kuroda), on the other. All of this is dramatized by Ms. Tuan and presented with a nod to formalistic ritual — it's a bit precious actually — by Mr. Yew on a largely bare stage floor. We are also privy to General Sun's memories of his days of power, which include chopping off the heads of Communist sympathizers and exercising the primacy of a male at home, where his wife is an obedient servant, and he keeps a young concubine as well.

The plot is catalyzed with the surprise return home of Twila (Tess Lina), Yeh Yeh's 24-year-old granddaughter, who vanished five years earlier after a famous humiliation. She had been a rising figure skater, a potential world champion, until she fell several times in a televised competition. Was it purposeful, a revolt against the mother who showed her love only with discipline and never with tenderness? Was it the pressure of representing Asian-Americans? Was it the conflict of being raised in a home where the tradition of subservient women clashed with American feminism?

Ms. Tuan's script addresses these matters with a genuine sense of the ambiguity they deserve. You would wish, however, that her language had more of a lyrical flavor (her ear is a bit tinny), and that the female characters, especially Twila, were not so stridently and unsubtly plaintive in their declarations of woe. Toward the end Ms. Tuan seems to be carrying out an agenda more than telling a story.

Among other things, for the actors this complicates the task of creating sympathetic characters, and Ms. Lina and Ms. Katigbak end up a little on the whiny side. Even so, their multiple roles — Ms. Lina is also the general's concubine, who has had her feet bound in the painful Chinese tradition; Ms Katigbak was the general's unhappily submissive wife — make a graceful point about how established cultural practice on one continent shapes life on the other. Ice skates, after all, have distorted Twila's life as surely as foot binding distorted that of her grandfather's concubine. And the constrained rage of the wife in China finds an outlet in the American mother's obsessive pushing of her daughter to achieve prominence.

Ms. Valdes-Aran is impressive in a role that ranges from sword-wielding executioner to wheelchair-bound invalid. By casting a woman as General Sun, Ms. Tuan and Mr. Yew register the absurdity of the Chinese perspective that gender is fate more effectively than any of the language in the script.

LAST OF THE SUNS

By Alice Tuan; directed by Chay Yew; sets by Sarah Lambert; costumes by Rebecca Dowd; lighting by James Vermeulen; sound by Fabian Obispo; Peking Opera movement coach, Jamie H. J. Guan; fight choreographer, Michael G. Chin; production manager, Kim Guzowski; production stage manager, Cynthia Curtis. Presented by the Ma-Yi Theater Company, Jorge Ortoll, executive director; Ralph Peña, artistic director. At the Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village.

WITH: Ching Valdes-Aran (Yeh Yeh), Eric Steinberg (Monkey King), Kati Kuroda (Eight Pig), Tess Lina (Twila/May Lee), Mia Katigbak (First Wife/Ni Lee), Ron Nakahara (Ho Ping) and Pun Bandhu (Sonny).

Fuente: The New York Times
Mayo 2003