STAGE REVIEW : ‘Green Card’ in N.Y. Lacks the Heart to Work as a Play

Two things first: Yes, writer-director JoAnne Akalaitis has made some changes in “Green Card” since it was commissioned by and presented at the Los Angeles Mark Taper Forum in 1986. And, no, the changes have not transformed this 2-year-old docu-panorama about immigrant Angst into a play.

“Green Card,” then as now, remains a collection of notes in search of artistic synthesis. At the Joyce Theater, where it has surfaced as part of this summer’s American Theater Exchange--and as one of only two Los Angeles institutional theater entries into the First New York International Festival of the Arts (the other is Stages’ “Pavlovsky Marathon” at the Cherry Lane)--”Green Card” continues to approach the internal problems of cultural uprooting externally.

Where a play on this subject begs for the cumulative impressionism that theater excels at, Akalaitis delivers a literal string of statistics in a variety of direct-address speeches to the audience.

It’s a peculiarly dry and untheatrical choice by a writer-director who, in her lengthy tenure with New York’s Mabou Mines, has dealt heavily and well in symbology and indirection. Note her “Dead End Kids,” a highly abstract indictment of nuclear destruction, which traveled to the Taper in 1984. Where, theatrically speaking, “Dead End Kids” was a graduate treatise, “Green Card” is a primer.

Why the difference exists is a puzzlement, except that it does not feel like a conscious choice. Perhaps it’s a problem inherent to commissioned works that can be straitjacketed by an obligation to deliver. And perhaps Akalaitis, who had never spent much time in Los Angeles, remained too much of an outsider to get a visceral grip on her sprawling, amorphous subject.

Whatever the reasons, “Green Card” is a well-intentioned work, but not dredged up from a personal wellspring.

It has its moments: The Latina maid’s simple and telling description of the houses she cleans; the outrageously frivolous view of Cambodia offered by a diplomat’s wife; the classes where the central European Jew teaches the Asian how to pronounce words, and both do it wrong; the stand-up comic who opens the show by name-calling the ethnic minorities in the house.

Most of the reworking centers on Act II, but what Akalaitis has done is stir the pot without changing the recipe. Good as they may be, “Green Card” depends entirely too much on its technological adornments: slides and multimedia effects that often conceal a theatrical bankruptcy. There’s enough war footage in the second half to flesh out “Apocalypse Now.”

Late in the script, the writer does acknowledge the ravages of cultural dispossession, but does not embrace them from the heart. The approach is perfunctory, with all the passion of a medical report.

Style and superficiality may be the culprits. Where are the tough, poetic ruminations of Velina Houston’s “Tea” (a play about the cultural adaptation of Japanese-American war brides)? Or even the sentimental rush of something as basic as Mark Harelik’s “The Immigrant”? The focus on the individual experience enabled audiences to identify with both those plays. “Green Card’s” capable 11-actor ensemble is given such a sketchy range of thumbnail characters to portray that it’s impossible to fundamentally connect with any one of them.

Across town at the La Mama Annex, Tadeusz Kantor’s “I Shall Never Return,” a study of cultural guilt and loss spoken in Polish (when it is spoken at all), presents a contrast and an unintended reproof. It is a theater of essentials--precisely the elements lacking in “Green Card”: A deeply personal point of view and a subjective vocabulary of aural and visual anguish. You don’t have to understand the text to get to the heart of what is being communicated.

It is the difference between information and knowledge; prose and poetry. Why “Green Card”? Why here? Why now? The Taper has offered more organic if not more indigenous work over the past two years.

At an arts festival symposium Thursday, playwright Tom Stoppard said he thought “work informed by the subconscious” to be the most successful. “What you’re working on can lose its force,” he said, “if you become too aware of your editorial stance.”

And that’s “Green Card’s” trouble. Exactly.