Risky business

A thought-provoking Festival

by Johnette Rodriguez

FIFTH ANNUAL WOMEN'S PLAYWRITING FESTIVAL; Self-Obsession in Blue, by Kelleen Conway Greenfield, Henry's Holiday, by Julie Lewis, and Some Asians, by Alice Tuan. At Perishable Theatre through June 22.

The three winning plays from the more than 300 submissions to the Fifth Annual Women's Playwriting Festival, which are currently in production at Perishable Theatre, have little in common except their playwrights' willingness to take risks with their material. In Some Asians, Alice Tuan, a second-year Playwright Fellow at Brown University, looks at three moments in the history of China, beginning with the soon-to-be transition of Hong Kong back to the Chinese, after a 99-year "lease" by the British. In Self-Obsession in Blue, Kelleen Conway Greenfield, of Seattle, strands two aimless twenty-somethings in the desert, their self-absorbed waiting for salvation less Godot-like than Feifferian. And in Henry's Holiday, Julie Lewis, of Utica, takes on such heavy contemporary themes as childhood abandonment, domestic violence and spiritual revelation and turns all of them topsy-turvy.

Lewis's play is a difficult mixture of tone and attitude. Just when we think we should be sympathetic to Holiday (played with great finesse by Marilyn Dubois) for her violent, abusive 16-year marriage to Henry (who portrays his character's change of heart with amazing credibility), she begins to communicate with a giant sausage named Frank (played with comic panache by Joshua Allen). Granted, we have already been introduced to her alter-ego in flash-backs, Flash Holiday (Joy Tashijian), but we are not prepared for her reaction to Henry's conversion to a mild-mannered guy.

She's not just suspicious that he might be planning some new scheme to torment her ("his only creativity was sadistic"), she's convinced he must be doing drugs to have had such a turn-around. She's determined to get him back to the old Henry, perhaps because she's dug herself into a masochistic hole and believes that she deserves what he dishes out; perhaps it's all she can expect from her father's complete rejection of her when her mother died; perhaps it's what she's used to and she can't figure out how to adapt to a new system in her marriage.

Whatever the reasons, she turns to her imaginary friend Frank and to his vengeful ideas about dealing with Henry. But it's a hard sell to an audience. However much a playwright tinkers with form, she must pay attention to character development to avoid what seem to be arbitrary motivations.

Self-Obsession in Blue finds Wanda (Valerie Bernstein) and Zoe (Jen Hays) broken down by the roadside, their '72 Pinto in need of some major work, as are the young women themselves. But Zoe refuses to get a job "just to pay her creditors," and she feels that everything she does is just a waste of time. Wanda is the optimistic one, eager to converse with, confide in and console Zoe, in order to pass the waiting hours as well as to figure out her own feelings. Bernstein is great as Wanda, her hopefulness intact even under the deluge of Zoe's cynical posturing. Hays makes us believe Zoe is as aimless and self-centered as her lines reveal. Yet underneath her toughness lurks a little tenderness, as she tries to comfort Wanda over the death of their dog.

Playwright Greenfield brings us face-to-face with contemporary ennui and lack of ambition, as she illuminates a growing segment of society -- those young people who are disillusioned with the daily grind but convinced that "the world owes them a living." The lucky ones get past this phase of their lives -- they set their goals and get on with it. The unlucky ones wait, like Wanda and Zoe, as unhappy in their boredom as they ever were in an everyday routine but too stuck in their own inertia to change their future.

Some Asians reaches farther than the other two plays, not just geographically and historically, but in its adept use of language and satire. Its three segments go back in time, beginning with July 1, 1997, when England withdraws from Hong Kong.

In the play, England is epitomized by a British captain of 1898 (Richard Noble) who arrives at the doorstep of the poet Honey Kong (Joanna Liao), asking for admittance to her chamber. They both know that he has come to penetrate her borders and lie with her for almost a century (such sexual references abound in the text). What keeps the obvious metaphors from becoming stale is the countdown of years by Honey Kong and the replies from the captain as to the salient event of each year. Liao sustains Honey's ferocious rage over her position and Noble embellishes the captain's responses with a comic flair.

The second section finds Marco Polo and his noodle carrier, Olo Poc Ram (Russell Kellogg and Richard Morra, respectively) wandering in the dark, looking for the way back to Italy. They discuss the noodle and Marco Polo's plans for it -- different shapes, different sauces. Morra works a marvelous puppet as his character and answers in aphorisms that Polo dismisses. In one short conversation, Tuan insightfully pinpoints many of the cultural distinctions between East and West: in ways of eating, thinking, planning, believing.

In the last section, during the long-lost "Bong Dynasty," complete with Emperor Mui Po (try it backwards) and his Ministers of Light, Bud, Bong Water and Smoke, we see the origins of China's seduction of Honey Kong. Her beautiful poem about the moon is mirrored in Mui Po's obsession with the moon and his self-absorbed addiction (he is fervently portrayed by Masayori Oka). Tuan's play on words has Mui Po reflecting on some other "asians," such as "fornicasian," "inebriasian," "titilasian," and "cockasian."

Costumes by Caitlin Ward and set designs by Monica Shinn for all three plays are terrific. Although Tuan's piece is the most successful in its stretch, the acting in all three plays is on target. Though they are quite different in subject and tone, each play in the Women's Playwriting Festival is daring and thought-provoking.