Prophetic Drama Evokes Some Jitters : Race relations: The play focuses on African-Americans and Korean-Americans, depicting boycotts, name-calling and beatings. It was written by a Monterey Park native before the recent unrest here.

Elizabeth Wong, a promising New York playwright who grew up in Monterey Park, found herself back home last week, plunged into controversy over her latest work.

“Kimchee and Chitlins,” Wong’s second play, is the story of a TV reporter covering a conflict between African-Americans and Korean-Americans in New York City.

Almost like a videotape of recent troubles in Los Angeles--where the rift between blacks and Koreans has resulted in several violent incidents, including the shooting death of a black girl by a Korean-born grocer--the play centers on allegations that a black woman was beaten in a Korean-American-owned grocery store. Scenes include boycotts, name-calling and beatings. Although given only a staged reading and not a full production on May 18 at The Music Center Annex in downtown Los Angeles, the project gave a few Angelenos the jitters, coming as it did on the heels of the worst urban rioting in this century in which hundreds of black- and Korean-owned businesses were the targets of arson and looting.

Nervous callers concerned about how African-Americans and Korean-Americans were portrayed phoned The Music Center repeatedly last week, requesting copies of the play, Wong said. Reporters from African-American and Korean-American radio stations and newspapers requested interviews, as did others from Voice of America and KCET, Los Angeles’ public television station.

And the audience of 250 was assured before the reading that Wong did not rush the piece to completion to capitalize on the city’s troubles. It was written two years ago.

“The selection was not a last-minute choice; the timing is coincidental,” said Yet Lock, chairman of an Asian-American theater group affiliated with The Music Center.

For Wong, 33, the prophet’s laurel was an uneasy fit. Away from her Greenwich Village apartment and temporarily in her mother’s home in Monterey Park, where she grew up, the playwright downplayed the work’s topicality.

“It’s not a timely thing, it’s an ongoing thing,” she said of the issues addressed in the work. “The play was written in November of 1990. If you opened your eyes, you really could see what’s happening out there.”

What prompted Wong to open her eyes, she said, was a bad piece of television journalism. A local black boycott of a Korean-American grocery store came across her TV set in New York as an incomprehensible jumble of chants and shouts, she said. The New York reporter provided no background, no explanation.

Infuriated, Wong set about asking why.

Why the boycotts? Why the anger? Why the conflict?

She collected a five-inch stack of newspaper articles and then plunged into her own heart and mind to attempt to discover the roots of racism.

“I’m a former reporter; some old instincts don’t die,” Wong, who majored in journalism at USC, said of her methods.

She is also a former Angeleno, who experienced racism on the while growing up, Wong said. The first lesson, Wong said, came when, as a 13-year-old in Monterey Park, a sandwich shop owner refused to wait on her. An Anglo friend finally stepped to the counter and placed the order, explaining to Wong that the owner would not serve her because she is Chinese.

“My friends had to tell me,” she said, recalling the naive Baptist girl who did not believe racism existed. “That was a horrible feeling.”

A second lesson, closer to the heart of her play, occurred during USC graduation ceremonies when a black girlfriend refused to stand next to Wong. Blacks wanted to stand together and raise their fists in a black-power salute, she said.

“I told her I was a minority, too. But she said I couldn’t possibly understand,” Wong said.

After graduation, Wong went on to a career in journalism. She worked first in television and then newspapers, but always felt “vaguely restless and dissatisfied,” she said. She longed for a more personal voice than that allowed in newspaper articles. When she hit her 30th birthday, she left the Hartford Courant in Connecticut to write plays.

Her first, “Letters from a Student Revolutionary,” was produced last year in New York by the Pan Asian Repertory Theater. Similarly topical, it was based on letters Wong had exchanged with a Chinese student who disappeared after the demonstrations at Tian An Men Square in 1989.

“Kimchee and Chitlins,” which refers to a Korean salad of spicy cabbage and an African-American dish of pig intestines, was one of three plays selected to be read at The Music Center as part of an outreach effort by the Asian Pacific American Friends of Center Theatre Group.

The program, chaired by Lock, provides exposure for Asian-American playwrights whose work may be produced later by The Music Center.

But unlike the other plays, Wong’s work--with its assortment of African-American, Korean-American, Anglo, Latino and Chinese-American characters--clearly broke the confines of the other two plays read to question how all races can get along now.

“You put a spotlight on the problems, but there were no answers,” complained one theatergoer during a passionate critique session after Monday’s reading. It was a lament seconded by many and for which Wong had no answer, either in her play or during the discussion.

Later, she confessed that her work offered no concrete, step-by-step solutions--except for hope, personified in the play by a Korean-American grocer who, though driven out of a black neighborhood, still returns to his favorite black barber.

“I’m the last person people should ask,” Wong said. “But I’m perfectly willing to hold up a mirror.”