FESTIVAL ‘ 90 : ‘Chess Piece’ Fills in Some Lost History : Theater: Los Angeles visual and performance artist May Sun wants Chinese women to claim their place.

It’s a curious fact that in Chinese chess there’s no queen. To Shanghai-born and Hong Kong-bred Los Angeles visual artist May Sun, the omission is culturally symbolic and she has corrected it with a vengeance.

In “The Chinese Chess Piece,” a curated festival performance work debuting Thursday on a giant chess board of a set on the floor of the gymnasium of the Hollywood Methodist Church, there’s not a bishop or king in sight. This is a game of queens only, thank you--Chinese women claiming their place in history.

Sun, a well-known local painter and environmental theater performer, conceives projects visually, and her work is characterized by an acute cross-cultural sensibility.

“I had always thought of Chinese chess as a format for a theater piece,” she said, “and the real-life women in this show have always stuck with me. But it was my husband (theater director Guy Giarrizzo, who staged the production) who came up with the idea of using chess pieces as a metaphor for the characters.”

Sun, 35, who emigrated here from Hong Kong when she was 16 and made her way into the Los Angeles art world through UCLA and art gallery exhibitions, reaches deep into her mainland China roots and her American life to create her performance art. “I set out to challenge the image of Asian women as passive and submissive,” she said. “We want to dramatize strong, pioneering Chinese women.”

The “we” is Sun and husband Giarrizzo. They merged their disparate racial and artistic backgrounds in a collaborative effort on both the script and the set design of “Chinese Chess Piece” (which features colorful props, furling banners and even a river of real water that divides the basketball court-sized chess board).

The production, with an eclectic mix of Chinese, blues guitar and synthesizer music, recounts in the manner of a surreal face-off the lives of four women. Two of them, movie actress Anna May Wong and aviator Katherine Cheung (now 85 and living in Chinatown), mirror the role of famous Chinese women in Los Angeles history.

Among the performers is one of the best-known Asian-American actresses in the local Chinese community, Beulah Quo, playing silent and post-silent screen actress Anna May Wong as seen toward the end of her life.

Wong, sad and tragic in her personal life (she retired from movies in the early ‘40s at the age of 36) grew into minor cult status and even to something of a legend despite--or because of--classic Hollywood stereotyping, which invariably cast her as the villainess/playgirl/woman of mystery.

The young and beautiful Wong is played by actress Marilyn Tokuda, who also portrays the less familiar flyer Cheung, who emigrated to Los Angeles from China in the 1920s and became, said Sun, “the first Asian-American woman to get a pilot’s license.

“She was the Chinese Amelia Earhart,” Sun said, “and, unlike the unhappy Wong, had a great life.”

Sun herself plays a narrator-dream figure, and actress Jing Hong Zhang, who came here three years ago after a career as an opera star in Shanghai and Beijing, portrays Sun’s real-life aunt (Gong Peng), a former Red Chinese political power figure.

“I had two aunts, my mother’s older sisters, who marched with Mao,” Sun said proudly. In fact, the dramatized Peng marched right on to become Chou En-Lai’s main translator and was China’s assistant foreign minister before her death in 1970.

“In the play she personifies the modern Chinese woman and the ancient woman warrior,” Sun said.

Giarrizzo and Sun, who have been married nine years, boast of an ideal working marriage. They collaborated once before, on the 1986 performance piece, “The Great Wall or How Red Is My China,” which explored the contemporary Chinese-American psyche.

But the work that most established Sun’s reputation was her 1988 “L.A./River/China/Town,” in which her activist grandfather is seen fighting with Sun Yat-Sen in the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and which also dramatized the 1871 massacre of 19 Chinese men in downtown Los Angeles. Immigrant history is no trivial matter to Sun.

“Chinese chess . . .” Sun mused. “It’s funny how historically the game wended its way from India to China and then to Europe. But in China they lost or dropped the queen. In a sense, these women in our piece are the queens Chinese chess doesn’t have.”