Theater Preview: Traditional roles fragment at Boston Court production

By Lynne Heffley

May 17, 2016 9:54 PM PT

A kitchen worker with a toothache. A graceful cricket. A hoarding store owner, a marital betrayal, an elderly man with a dream, dark desires made manifest. In Theatre @ Boston Court’s staging of “The Golden Dragon,” by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, translated by David Tushingham, stories within stories connect in unexpected and haunting ways.

In this unusual production, Elizabeth Harper’s striking nocturnal lighting, and Sara Ryung Clement’s multilevel, stage-dominating structure of pipe scaffolding convey an atmosphere of society’s gritty underbelly. Yet Chinese cultural traditions are suggested, particularly in a varied use of the color red, and in choreographer Annie Yee’s Chinese dance sequences. The production’s centerpiece: the steaming kitchen of the Golden Dragon restaurant.

“We were interested in how the scaffolding and piping could mimic the urban landscape,” said Clement, “but also [refer to] the traditional forms — patterns of lanterns, Asian artwork. And then there’s the feel of a cage and of blood. Definitely, the blood imagery” (central to the play), “is very strong,” she said.

What this “blood imagery” means, how the play unfolds and how the seemingly unrelated themes converge — sound and composition by John Nobori provide additional visual and emotional layering — is crucial to the piece and won’t be revealed here.

“It’s fun to see when people, in talking about it afterwards, began to put together the pieces of how the stories interconnect, and who is who in relation to each story,” said director Michael Michetti, Boston Court’s co-artistic director.

But, if the production’s dreamlike and nightmarish elements seem surprising “when seen through a traditional American lens,” Michetti said, it is “quite German,” he noted, in its use of Brechtian alienation techniques, and elements of Expressionism and the Theater of the Absurd.

Within that context, while “virtually everything else is left up to interpretation,” Michetti observed, Schimmelpfennig makes two stipulations: that the actors narrate some of the stage directions, and that the roles in the script be assigned to actors of specific genders and ages, playing against their own ages, genders and ethnicities without any concealment of that fact.

With deceptively simple costume changes, courtesy of designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz, a Chinese boy is portrayed by a young woman (Susana Batres), a young man (Justin H. Min) plays an aged grandfather, and two young female flight attendants are played, respectively, by older and younger male actors (Joseph Kamal and Theo Perkins), each of whom has a beard. And Min and Ann Colby Stocking, among their various roles, personify two different species altogether.

“I think that ultimately it is an opportunity for us to understand what it’s like to look at the world though someone else’s eyes, in someone else’s skin,” Michetti said.

In addition to casting for diversity, Michetti looked for actors who “showed a kind of empathy for the characters they were going to play, but not necessarily visually inhabit.” “The Golden Dragon” cast members “have the acting chops to inhabit the sort of ineffable characteristics of these characters,” Michetti said, but as people, they “often explicitly remind us that they are not those characters.” The fact that Perkins and Kamal are bearded, for instance, he said, is a deliberate cue “that we are not watching women when they are playing those roles. The play wants us to be continually aware that it’s the wrong instrument playing the music.”

(Michetti’s actors, writes Los Angeles Times Theater Critic Charles McNulty, “work majestically in unison, transforming as effortless as figures in Ovid to reveal to us the fractured nature of a universe contained in a steaming hot little white carton.”)

“The Golden Dragon” has been on Boston Court’s radar for some time, said Michetti, but mounting it took on more immediacy as immigration and the worldwide refugee crisis began dominating the political discourse, raising issues of “otherness and what that means in our world now and in our nation.”

“Every time it seems that our world may be becoming one, where there is more acceptance and more understanding of people who are different than ourselves,” he said, “there are things that begin to divide us again.

“I think that’s very important for us as artists and as humans to investigate.”

What: The Golden Dragon

Where: Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena.

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Ends June 5.

Tickets: $35 to $39.

More info: (626) 683-6883, bostoncourt.com

LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.