Kevin Byrne Photo
Julius Ahn as Guang.
It’s fitting that Stuck Elevator, before arriving back in New Haven for a grand summer unveiling, is having its world premiere in San Francisco. It’s a city with a strong tradition of political theater, and New Haven’s Aaron Jafferis, who wrote the libretto, has spent his career riveted on using language, from hip-hop poetry to drama, for social change.
Stuck Elevator, which I had the opportunity to see last week in previews at the American Conservatory Theater in San Fran, is a perfect fit: The tale of a Chinese immigrant trapped in an elevator for 81 hours comes pre-packaged with an air-tight metaphor in a city long populated by Chinese immigrants.
The long-gestating show was snagged for a major production by ACT after it was seen in workshops through the Sundance Institute.
Jafferis is a true son of New Haven, a proud Hillhouse grad who currently teaches drama and hip-hop poetry in the New Haven schools (who has been affiliated with some projects that received modest support from United Way of Greater New Haven, where I work). Over the years he has developed a strong urban voice, and has quietly evolved an impressive national theater resume that includes a Richard Rogers Award, a Sundance Institute/Time Warner Fellowship, and the New York Musical Theatre Festival’s Most Promising New Music Award. He has been named The Dramatist Guild’s “50 to Watch” among many honors and awards. (Think of that next time you see him wander into Coop High School.)
I’ve seen some of Jafferis’ work, but not for a while, and never with a professional crew. Since the show was still in previews when I saw it, I am precluded from a thumbs up/down review. That will have to wait until the show plays the Festival of Arts & Ideas in June. (A word of advice: don’t miss it.)
But I can say this: Stuck Elevator, directed by Chay Yew, is based on the story of an illegal Chinese immigrant (here named Guang, played by the opera singer Julius Ahn) who was trapped in a New York City high-rise apartment’s elevator for 81 hours, afraid to summon help for fear of being deported. Jafferis’ collaborator, the composer Byron Au Yong (the two met at NYU where Jafferis received his MFA), understood just how stuck Guang, and other immigrants, really are. Guang is trapped in this vehicle designed to lift, as he is trapped working overtime shifts for meager pay as a delivery man, trying to save enough to send money home and pay off his “snakehead,” the human smuggler paid to get immigrants passage in a shipping container. The steel cage elevator of the set doubles as his workplace and as the shipping container.
Harold Shapiro Photo
I had been expecting a show based on Jafferis’ (pictured) powerful urban poetry, and it took only a few minutes to reorient and expand my appreciation for his artistry. Yong’s ambitious score sits well within contemporary musical theater idiom, melodically based, with intricate harmonies. The story is told through Guang’s internal monologue, sung through, with dream sequences featuring actors playing his wife, his son, his boss’ wife, the Hispanic cook, etc., breaking the show out of its steel cage. Jafferis’ hip-hop rhythms and lyricism do appear in these breakout scenes, but overall the tone of the piece is post-Sondheim storytelling, with part street theater attitude.
The story will resonate in any city with a large Asian population, which, of course, includes San Francisco. But the universality of the fate of the faceless worker, the guy delivering your dinner, the men trimming your lawn, is a truth throughout America’s wealthy enclaves, no less true in New Haven than Nob Hill.
In San Francisco the show featured supertitles, with some sections early in the show sung in Chinese with English translations. In Guang’s world, we are the ones without the visa.
