‘GREEN CARD’: FOUR POINTS OF VIEW : A PLAY THAT STACKS THE DECK

Friday, July 4, marks the 100th birthday of the Statue of Liberty. The Mark Taper Forum’s current show, “Green Card,” concerns the immigrants attracted by Miss Liberty’s torch from the days of Ellis Island to the time of the boat people. Here are points of view on JoAnne Akalaitis’ play from writers whose families came to the United States from Korea, Mexico, Germany and Ireland: Sophia Kim finds “Green Card” patronizing. Victor Valle thinks it strikes a nerve. For Mark Wurm, it’s bad rhetoric. For Dan Sullivan, it’s good poetry.

“Green Card” left me confused. It struck me as a Monty Python cartoon where anything can be jumbled together.

Starting off with Jewish immigration, we see the flight from European persecution to the land where the streets are paved with gold. But then “Green Card” veers off, complaining of exploitation of immigrants by “Americans.”

The complaint is misplaced. Of course, to the immediate immigrant, the gold was more often than not fool’s gold. In my opinion this didn’t matter. Even in a land of actual prejudice, there was still more than enough opportunity to go around for the immigrants’ children.

The rules of the game were: Learn English, assimilate in looks and manners, and then celebrate your ethnic past. For us offspring, American society, compared with the rest of the world, is a place where different backgrounds can be a source of accommodation and strength, rather than division.

The play then jump-shifts and puts down this “land of opportunity” with a fast-food mantra by a chorus in Hawaiian shirts. Now, I don’t mind some good criticism of the materialistic and banal nature of American society, but the connection to immigrants is tenuous.

If “Green Card” has spent its first half trying to make us believe in the pathos of immigrants coming to a land of McDLTs and (non-dairy)shakes, as opposed to a land of eternal values, then it’s the play which is confused, not me. A better life is simply grounded in a matrix of material well-being. The truth of that was passed on to us in kitchen klatch from parents and grandparents.

And even if it’s an appeal to intellectual snobbery, it misfires. No less an aloof intellectual personage than Thomas Mann knew how to celebrate his becoming an American citizen: He said “Now, you can call me ‘Tommy Mann’ ” and went out for an American meal of pancakes.

On the easy questions of why American society has an eternal hold on its immigrant offspring, the play is dead wrong. The hard questions, it does not even address. To borrow Thomas Mann again: What is it about us that took the cream of European intelligentsia during the world war and then drove Mann and so many others away again with our parochial political paranoia?

In short, the subject of immigration is really gratuitous to the play’s anti-consumerism. The play’s derogatory ethnic language adds insult to injury, but doesn’t carry the argument anywhere.

The second act deals you a real whammy. Here, through CIA straw men, the U.S. is taken to task for imperialistic wars; creating refugees; having these refugees stream to America, and then leaving them both unwanted and exploited.

European immigration is made to serve the play’s political polemic. The syllogism: If you have sympathy for European immigrants escaping persecution, then you should have sympathy for the victims abroad of American persecution, and you should prevent them from being exploited here.

It is unfair and wrong to use immigration this way. Beyond cavil, immigrants should belong to American society. But I object to using immigration as the back-door approach to complain about American foreign adventurism. The results (immigration) may look similar, but the causes and issues (in American foreign activity) are different.

“Green Card” attempts to compel a negative conclusion about American foreign activity from immigration results. It does not wash. It most certainly does not convince.