Hwang’s Three Wives’ Tales

Maybe it’s the intersection of playwright and venue. With its elegantly acted, designed and directed Los Angeles premiere of David Henry Hwang’s “Golden Child,” East West Players has mustered its strongest production in a year, now on stage at the David Henry Hwang Theater.

It’s all the more impressive considering “Golden Child” isn’t a peak Hwang achievement. Loading up on the anachronistic zingers, the sort of aphoristic banter that makes so many people so devoted to “The Lion in Winter,” Hwang relays an autobiographical family story.

The time is 1918-19 in a village near Amoy in southeastern China. We meet Hwang’s great-grandfather and his three wives, coexisting uneasily. Confucian businessman Eng Tien-Bin (Daniel Dae Kim) has returned home after three years of traveling and deal-making. Change is in the wind, and veiled insults perfume the air.

He informs his opium-addled First Wife (Amy Hill), his not-so-subtly strategizing Second Wife (Emily Kuroda) and Third Wife (Kerri Higuchi), the youngest of a highly competitive trio, that a visitor is due. That visitor is the Rev. Anthony Baines (Robert Glaudini), a missionary who sees in his host a ripe potential convert. Western notions of monogamy spell trouble for the household, at least for two of the three wives.

Hwang focuses on a pair of apt, matching symbols throughout, those of the bound feet of the women. Crippled in the name of beauty and conformity, the wives blanch at Tien-Bin’s orders to unbind the feet of his teenage daughter (Melody Butiu), borne by First Wife. She is the golden child of the title.

As the wives jockey for position, Hwang lets loose with the one-ups-womanship. “If you can’t live with dishonesty, you have no business calling yourself a woman,” says one character. Later, one admonishes another that “we don’t try to kill ourselves in front of the help.” Some of these punch lines are funnier and more plausible than others.

“M. Butterfly,” Hwang’s biggest popular success, disarmed audiences with its zesty blend of gender and cultural politics. The blend of the personal and the historical in “Golden Child” isn’t as secure. Around the time of the play’s 1997 Southern California premiere at South Coast Repertory, Hwang said he wanted to contribute an alternative viewpoint to the 1991 film “Raise the Red Lantern,” which in Hwang’s eyes stressed a milieu of passive victimization. “Golden Child” gives its female characters a voice, to be sure. Often, though, it’s the same voice. On second viewing, too, something seems to be missing from the great-grandfather. He’s more a sounding board than a man undergoing the change of his life.

For all that, Hwang writes highly playable and enjoyable scenes, especially his Act 2’s two-person encounters, each its own strategic chess match. Director Chay Yew maximizes the snap and formal tension in every standoff.

Hill’s fearsome but touching First Wife works wonderfully with Kuroda’s hilariously self-effacing Second Wife, a woman determined to “go Western,” to not be left behind. Higuchi makes Third Wife an artful example of honey and steel. Butiu’s watchful Eng Ahn details, cleverly, the young woman’s playful streak, and she has the technique to make the piercing emotional blowouts vivid and alive. And though he’s not bothering with a British dialect, much, Glaudini’s missionary offers the humor of the culturally challenged. This man is no match for these power plays.

Throughout, in the spotlighted right-hand corner of the stage, Phuong Tieu plays the stringed erhu, evoking a world of its own, overlapping our own. Scenic designer Victoria Petrovich’s tightly framed picture-frame of a stage focuses our eye on an abstracted bamboo forest, smartly lighted by Jose Lopez. Joyce Kim Lee’s costumes are equally persuasive and characterful.

With much of “Golden Child,” you sense Hwang struggling with a tonal question. How glib can I make my blood relatives? How can I successfully infuse this world and these dilemmas with my own sardonic comic sensibility? “Golden Child” may not resolve those questions. But in the right hands, which they are here, the questions hold the stage, and they’re worth asking.

* “Golden Child,” East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 N. Judge John Aiso St. (formerly San Pedro St.), downtown. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. No Saturday matinee today. Ends Feb. 20. $25-$30. Some $15 rush tickets available one hour before curtain. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Melody Butiu: Eng Ahn

Robert Glaudini: Rev. Anthony Baines

Kerri Higuchi: Elizabeth Kwong/Eng Eling, Third Wife

Amy Hill: Eng Siu-Yong, First Wife

Daniel Dae Kim: Andrew Kwong/Eng Tien-Bin

Emily Kuroda: Eng Luan, Second Wife

Written by David Henry Hwang. Directed by Chay Yew. Set by Victoria Petrovich. Costumes by Joyce Kim Lee. Lighting by Jose Lopez. Music by Joel Iwataki. Fight choreographer Diana Lee Inosanto. Production stage manager Ricardo Figueroa.