A Family’s Anguish Unleashed in ‘Dragon’

Unstable and unsettling, the plays of Frank Chin are like bucking broncos. Or try Chin’s own metaphor: that writing for the stage is like “making war.”

He should make it more often. Since the creation and publication of “The Chickencoop Chinaman” (1972) and “The Year of the Dragon” (1974), he has concentrated on other battles in other media (such as his famous, feuding tensions with Maxine Hong Kingston (“The Woman Warrior”) and David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”), writers whom Chin has called “racist” and “fake.”

Now, East West Players has revived Chin’s anguished comedy “The Year of the Dragon,” staged by Mako, co-founder of the theater now making its home in the David Henry Hwang Theater. (Chin’s issues with Hwang explain why the playwright wasn’t planning to see the production, at least before the opening.) It’s not a perfect play, or production. Yet there’s enough angry vitality in Chin’s depiction of a disintegrating San Francisco Chinatown family--and in the best of Mako’s ensemble--to activate the slow fuse.

In contrast to “The Chickencoop Chinaman,” which heaped poetry atop fragmentary storytelling, “The Year of the Dragon” is relatively straightforward. We’re in the apartment of the Eng family. The time is Chinese New Year’s Day 1976. On the couch sits a silent China Mama (Shizuko Koshi), the first wife of Pa (Dana Lee). Pa has sent for her so that he can, in his words, “die Chinese.”

“That’s Pa’s problem,” says Ma (Momo Yashima), his second, Chinese American wife, nodding in the direction of the sofa early on. “Nothing to do with us.”

More than one reunion’s afoot. Sis (Mimosa) has returned with her Anglo husband, Ross (Brian Mulligan), who approaches this family visit as an excursion in “exotic” cultural slumming. Young Johnny (Trieu Tran), meantime, is packing heat and heading for trouble. Pa blames his “No. 1 Son,” Chinatown tour guide Fred (Keone Young), for Johnny’s transgressions. Pa wants Fred to call him “Pop,” just like the fawning offspring of Charlie Chan.

“The Year of the Dragon” is filled with the flotsam of pop culture: Charlie Chan, references to “Flower Drum Song” and the like. Fred is the embodiment of smiling self-loathing. He makes a living pretending to be the quintessential jokey Chinaman; his tour-guide pitch begins and, chillingly, ends the play. He doesn’t know who he is, or where. He is, in a phrase found in Chin’s “Chickencoop Chinaman,” a “miracle synthetic.”

Director Mako and his cast struggle in Act 1 to find the ideal, deceptively breezy pacing. Everyone’s more comfortable and successful in Act 2, when the play shifts to smaller, more concentrated encounters. Young and Lee in particular rise to the occasion, going at some very painful interpersonal warfare with real power. In the end, Chin’s work is a father-son play, bittersweet in the extreme.

Many audiences like their stories more comforting. Mako and company respect Chin’s ambiguity, his jaundiced yet vivid viewpoint, warts, over-explications and all. The apartment setting, with suggestions of Chinatown exteriors, is nicely filled out in Yoichi Aoki’s scenic design, very 1976 without making a fuss about the period.

It is a period play, no question. But Chin’s depiction of a family going under remains potent. And it’s too bad the world hasn’t gotten more Frank Chin plays since “The Year of the Dragon.”

* “The Year of the Dragon,” East West Players, David Henry Hwang Theater, Union Center for the Arts, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Little Tokyo. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. (No matinee Feb. 3.) Ends Feb. 25. $20-$30. Some $15 rush tickets available one hour before curtain. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Shizuko Hoshi: China Mama

Dana Lee: Pa

Mimosa: Sis

Brian Mulligan: Ross

Trieu Tran: Johnny

Momo Yashima: Ma

Keone Young: Fred

Written by Frank Chin. Directed by Mako. Scenic design by Yoichi Aoki. Costumes by Dori Quan. Lighting by Frank McKown. Sound by Miles Ono. Property master Scott Fujimoto. Production stage manager Ricardo Figueroa.