THEATER REVIEW : Soloists Draw on Their Family Stories

Dan Kwong and Amy Hill know their California roles. These two talented solo performers--who premiered mostly successful new works on a shared bill at the Japan America Theatre over the weekend--mix Asian and American culture with wry humor, performing panache and family stories.

Hill’s “Reunion” and Kwong’s “Monkhood in 3 Easy Lessons” give you a good idea of the stylistic range of today’s solo outings: She’s in theater, he’s in performance art. At the core of each, though, there’s a belief in the cult of autobiography. And Kwong’s work especially pivots on a kind of personal racial politics that, while it may have driven much of the genre for the past few years, is a duller cutting edge than it used to be.

“Reunion” is a character monologue yearning to breathe free. The show, ably if haltingly directed by Anne Etue, has two intercut parts: Hill in an extended impersonation of her own mother and Hill in a series of quickie sketches of other anonymous women. The former is meticulously crafted and clever; the latter is extraneous.

By interrupting the mom monologue with vignettes, Hill seems to be trying to make this 50-minute piece into a broader statement about women’s lives. (Either that, or she just wanted a chance to sport a sequence of psychedelic wigs). But the splice job doesn’t work, and the core is still Hill as mom, telling tales about Japanese and American husbands and schmoozing the audience with typical mom woes like why divorced daughter Amy doesn’t have a beau.

Kwong also draws his inspiration from his gene pool. He weaves striking, multi-focus stage pictures around simple monologues about his Chinese and Japanese grandfathers, ironic accounts of his own childhood and litanies of the trials facing Asian-American males. He masterfully fills the large Japan American Theatre proscenium stage with a gallery of pristine images, backed by music, video sequences and movement-based interludes, some of which feature dancer Lisa Mene Nemacheck.

Kwong has a droll sense of humor and a muscular but lyrical way of moving that reflects his martial arts training. He’s at his best when these qualities come through in the satiric commentaries and the segments that underscore non-narrative text with gestural choreography. In one such scene, Kwong talks about Asian-Americans straining to meet expectations as he walks, then runs, on an accelerating treadmill.

Kwong is capable of very sophisticated stagecraft, but he needs to apply the same amount of rigor (and editing) to his 90-minute text that he does to his staging. Both of the grandfather monologues, for example, are about half-again too long.

He also goes on too long with persecution anecdotes--such as stories of kids being bullied--that don’t really illuminate the complexity of the Asian-American situation. You’d never know from listening to his litany that L.A., a city where Korean-Americans were targeted during last year’s riots and is only 10% Asian-American, might just elect a Chinese-American mayor.