‘Country’ Covers Too Much Territory

The intention is as commendable as it is unwieldy. “ ‘A Beautiful Country’ chronicles the turbulent and rich history of Asians in America,” the program notes explain, “as seen through the eyes of an immigrant drag queen, Miss Visa Denied.” That last clause promises a specific, idiosyncratic and even funny perspective through which to filter what is surely too large a subject for any one evening of theater.

It may be possible to take an audience on a non-pedantic tour of a people’s experience in America--George C. Wolfe did it in “The Colored Museum”--but only by applying a strong, unified perspective. In “A Beautiful Country,” playwright-director Chay Yew dramatizes some highly vibrant and egregious pieces of propaganda, such as a 1941 Time magazine story called “How to Tell Your Friends From the Japs.” With less dramatic excitement, he stages the more predictable and familiar story of exploited labor, in this case Filipino migrant workers droning out a beat poem (“cut cut cut/into fish”) as they perform the repetition of work in a salmon-canning factory.

But the ribbon tying all of this disparate material together--Miss Visa Denied--is not a person with a fierce attitude, but a lost, ethereal, sensitive symbol. In fact, Miss Visa (Reggie Lee) is so theoretical that she never actually speaks, but only lip-syncs to the voice of other actors, or to the singer Madonna crooning “Vogue.” Not an interesting character in her own right, Miss Visa Denied is unable to serve as the evening’s cohesive center.

As part of its community programming, Cornerstone Theater is presenting “A Beautiful Country” in association with the Mark Taper Forum’s Asian Theatre Workshop and East West Players. The show, at the Castelar School in Chinatown only until Sunday, is a grab bag--incorporating amateur actors and professional, tragic scenes and comedic, music, dance and video, written scenes and first-person testimonials. Like a survey course, it tells a slice of Chinese-, Filipino-, Japanese-, Vietnamese- and Laotian-American history.

As a historian, Yew can be vital and tough. In “A Beautiful Country” he’s at his best staging a piece of racist theater from 1879 called “The Chinese Must Go,” in which his actors imitate the frilly style of the gaslight era while saying the most ghastly things. But Yew also has a weakness for artiness, for savoring his own poetry and sensitivity rather than invoking feelings from the audience. That tendency in his writing can be compounded by his direction, which tends to call attention to itself, whether with sheets and silhouettes or dreadfully earnest interpretive dance segments. One such number, performed by Cornerstone’s Page Leong, is backlit by a home movie of a family that is difficult to see. In this number, which ends with the filmstrip projected onto Leong’s stomach, we can only guess at what ideas are motivating a posturing conception.

Gwendoline Yeo, Nancy Yee and Jose Casas offer first-person testimonials that, while charming on their own terms, remain oddly unincorporated into the text. “I’m really proud of how far we’ve come” and “I do want to know my Asian heritage; my Chinese abuelo would have liked that” is raw testimony that sounds like the fruit of a school assignment, and Yew allows it to coexist sweetly beside the dark vaudevilles and the stories of suffering and violence, as if the people making the testimonials were oblivious to the teeming world around them. While this is clearly not Yew’s intent, it adds to the evening’s thrown-together quality.

The penultimate scene crosscuts between Lily Chin, mother of Vincent Chin, the young man who was clubbed to death in Detroit by two unemployed auto workers in 1982, and white supremacist Gunner Lindberg, who killed Thien Minh Ly at Tustin High School in 1996. As Lindberg, the outstanding Chris Wells recites from a letter in which the killer described the horrifically excessive stabbing as if he were making lunch. The material is extremely powerful (as it is in its raw form). Here, it is used as a bridge to the evening’s final chapter, which finds Miss Visa Denied being cleansed of her makeup and wig, apparently on her way to finding a more authentic identity. Once again, one can guess at the connection between these two events. As dramatized, the connection remains tissue-thin. “A Beautiful Country” has its moments. But it doesn’t achieve momentum.

* “A Beautiful Country,” Cornerstone Theater Company, Castelar Elementary School, 840 Yale St., Thur.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. Ends Sunday. Pay-what-you-can. (310) 449-1700. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.