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He Got The Story

by Paul Bass | Sep 22, 2006 12:41 pm

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Posted to: Arts

James Yaegashi as Isaac Lee and Jon Norman Schneider as Jimmy Lee.Woody Guthrie might not have liked the new play at Long Wharf. Unless he looked hard for a concealed kernel of hope.

It depends if the late folk troubadour felt the same way about plays as he did about songs. Here’s what he once said about his taste in songs: “I hate a song that makes you think you’re not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you are just born to lose.  Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing.” Guthrie wrote plenty of songs about Dust Bowl refugees and exploited farm workers. But he usually added a twist of hope to the mix, a sense that people can discover their humanity amid tragedy, or that they can do something about their despair.

If you relate in any way to the characters in Durango, Julia Cho’s emotionally draining world premiere which runs through Oct. 15 at Long Wharf—and most people will probably recognize some traces of their own dysfunctional families— then you can indeed leave the theater feeling, if not born to lose, no good to nobody, at least pretty bleak.

James Saito as Boo-Seng Lee.The play follows a father and two brothers on a car trip from Tucson, Arizona, to Durango, Colorado, to ride a famous train. The father, a Korean immigrant, has just been laid off his job of 20 years. He sees no hope for his future. (“Everything’s disposable now—people most of all,” a retiree he meets on the road consoles him.) The elder brother has just flown home from a scheduled interview at the one medical school he has any hope of attending; he blew off the interview and decides he’ll never amount to anything beyond watching porn on TV. The younger brother, the family’s hope, the one always trying to make everyone else happy, has just quit the swim team, of which he’s the star. He’s wrestling with his homosexuality; there appears little prospect of acceptance from his family.

The younger brother misses their mother, who died when he was young. He keeps an old photo of what he imagined was once a happy family. His brother disabuses him of the notion. Turns out mom and dad fought all the time during their arranged marriage.

The Lee family still fights a lot. In Durango they discuss their hopes, decide hopes are dashed. They reveal some of the secrets and personal disappointments and long-suppressed grudges behind their arguments. They hold onto other secrets.

Durango, the town, the tourist destination, fails to live up to its promise, of course. The Lees return home. They stare with empty eyes at the audience as the lights dim, no hope offered that they can or will change their miserable lives.

On one level, this works as tragedy, in that illusion-shattering, all-optimism-is-delusion outlook that defines so much tragedy. Julia Cho is an astute playwright; she draws engaging, full characters. Her script both introduces us to specific challenges faced by Korean-Americans while succeeding in mining universal verities in their family relationships.

But is Woody Guthrie right? Should a song, or a play, that seeks to expose cold, tragic reality just end there?

It takes some work, but it’s possible to find an unspoken thread in Durango that offers if not pollyana-ish hopes for a neat, happy ending a month or a year or a decade ahead, a reason to believe that one of the characters has emerged from this tragic trip with tools to find himself, to follow his dreams… bound to win, to be good for something.

He has learned how to write.

A subplot of Cho’s play centers on a notebook belonging to the younger brother, Jimmy. Jimmy guards it closely; it contains his secret passions he pursues when not exhausting himself trying to please his father. Jimmy sketches pictures of males with erections in the notebook. He draws superheroes in the hope of developing his own comic strip.

Older brother Isaac discovers the book’s contents. That leads to a confrontation about Jimmy’s sexuality, a depressing confrontation. But it also leads to an interesting exchange about superheroes. Jimmy wants his superheroes to be perfect, to rise above obstacles without failing in any way. Isaac insists that superheroes must have flaws. They must face defeat, near-crushing defeat, before they triumph. That makes them interesting. That makes people care about them.

Jimmy resists the idea. It’s simpler, easier, more immediately gratifying to stick to a sunny plot line as relief from his feeling of being trapped in a bleak teen existence. But in a series of imagined scenes involving his main superhero—some of the play’s most inventive moments—Jimmy gradually incorporates Isaac’s advice. In the final such scene, his superhero is ostracized, beaten. He gets up and pursues a new path. He will inevitably fly through the air again and save people. Just not the way he had hoped it could all work out.

Jimmy has become a writer. Or he’s on his way. Because now he has the tools to capture life in a way that serves more than himself. Writing will be more than an exercise in personal escape. He can tell a story that defies simplistic views of reality: both the overly optimistic view he originally sought, and the view, also too pat, that “real” life stops with the depressing unveiling of tragedy. Yes, life can stink. It doesn’t work out as planned. But you can emerge from tragedy and use it to count for something, to contribute to the world, to pursue your own muse.

Maybe Woody Guthrie wouldn’t have found or been satisfied with that kernel of hope. Maybe it’s not what Julia Cho had in mind; maybe she didn’t implant that silent hope in her tragic ending. I’m wagering that she did.

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