A 16-Sided Surprise in ‘Square’

So much blather about “thinking outside the box” has corroded our popular culture, it’s easy to overlook the potential of thinking if not inside the box, then at least thinking about the box. A box is a wonderfully loaded symbol. It is a visual signifier of both confinement and escape.

“The Square,” a project of the Mark Taper Forum’s Asian Theatre Workshop now at Actors’ Gang in Hollywood, looks at a passel of characters spanning 120 years, all relating in some way to a piece of land inspired by Columbus Park in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Sixteen playwrights of various ethnicities--eight Asian American, eight non-Asian American--contributed short plays (10 minutes or so in length) to this 16-sided polygon, conceived by Chay Yew and director Lisa Peterson. A 16-sided polygon, for the record, is called a hexadecagon. Uneven but eloquently staged and performed, “The Square” is at once square-like and indisputably hexadecagonal.

Each playlet falls into a specific time period: The 1880s, the 1920s, the 1960s or the present day. A character created by Mac Wellman in the opener, “My Old Habit of Returning to Places,” drifts in and out of the action all evening. An old woman (Emily Kuroda) finds herself in the square, talking to no one in particular. She searches for “a place where I might put down my packages . . . and rest.”

Some plays deal with those packages--identities carried to one country from another, baggage discarded along the way at great risk--more obliquely than others.

Han Ong’s “Untitled,” a lovely standout, finds two Chinese men standing on Bayard Street across from the square in the year 1880. The first man instructs the second in English-language pronunciation. The word “lonely” requires no elongated vowel sounds, the second man tells the first.

“English short always drop long and heavy ting,” he says. “No long ting in English. No heavy ting in English.” Loneliness, however, isn’t so easily dropped. Ong’s gently inflected poetry reveals whole worlds of feeling in a few minutes’ time, and director Peterson elicits delicate performances from Greg Watanabe, Dennis Dun, Soon-Tek Oh (as a third Chinese immigrant, skeptical of English) and Elizabeth Sung (as a faraway wife).

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Other works are more on-the-nose. Yew’s fervent “Scissors” is set just after the October 1929 market crash. In the park, a blind Asian man (Soon-Tek Oh) cuts the hair of his longtime secret lover, a white business tycoon (Arye Gross) also in his early 70s. Formerly master and servant, the tycoon and the manservant no longer live under the same roof. Between the snip-snip of the scissors, they talk about their children (“monsters”) and their love, across an enormous (but not impossible) cultural divide.

The playwrights involved in “The Square” read like a Who’s Who of contemporary stagecraft, some writers (Maria Irene Fornes, David Henry Hwang, Jose Rivera, Constance Congdon) more widely produced than others (Ong, Bridget Carpenter, Kia Corthron). In the weaker segments, you sense a writer fulfilling a thesis requirement, or detect a writer reaching for a tone that remains elusive.

The most buoyant of the offerings hit their subjects with force, plus a little grace, a sense of easy breathing. Ong’s “Untitled,” Ping Chong’s “Excerpts From the Diary of a Chinese Envoy,” Craig Lucas’ “Examination” and Philip Kan Gotanda’s “The Old Chinese Man” have little in common except a sense of completeness and eloquence. The best of these miniatures take the square of “The Square” and bend it every which way, much as America itself keeps bending and shifting.

* “The Square,” Taper, Too at the Actors’ Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends July 16. $20. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

Marcus Chong, Dennis Dun, Arye Gross, Emily Kuroda, Soon-Tek Oh, Saundra Quarterman, Elizabeth Ruscio, Barry Del Sherman, Elizabeth Sung, Jodi Thelen, Tamlyn Tomita, Greg WatanabeEnsemble

Written by Mac Wellman, Han Ong, Philip Kan Gotanda, Maria Irene Fornes, David Henry Hwang, Craig Lucas, Diana Son, Bridget Carpenter, Chay Yew, Ping Chong, Robert O’Hara, Jose Rivera, Jessica Hagedorn, Kia Corthron, Constance Congdon, Alice Tuan. Conceived by Chay Yew and Lisa Peterson. Directed by Lisa Peterson. Scenic design by Rachel Hauck. Costumes by Joyce Kim Lee. Lighting by Geoff Korf. Sound by Nathan Wang. Production stage manager Erika H. Sellin.