Staging of
By John Berger
‘Joy Luck Club’
a triumph
Special to the Star-BulletinAdaptations rarely improve on the original. Kumu Kahua's season opening production of "The Joy Luck Club" may be a rare exception. The script is Susan Kim's adaptation of the Amy Tan novel. The interpretation is a triumph for director Reiko Ho and the exceptional quartet of actresses who portray the four indomitable Chinese immigrant women whose life experiences define the story.
Each woman came to the United States after escaping emotional mutilation in China. One took revenge on her unfaithful husband by killing their child. Another was freed from an unsavory situation when her mother committed suicide on an auspicious day. The third tricked her in-laws into releasing her from an empty and unconsummated marriage. The fourth lost her infant children while fleeing the Japanese Army during the seven-year holocaust that the Japanese trivialize as "the China Incident."
All four rebuilt their lives and started new families. All four found their "made in America" daughters distressingly American and rebelliously un-Chinese in outlook and attitude.
The dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships spill over into other facets of the daughters' lives. One marries a Chinese American but is soon divorced. Another marries a Caucasian. Two have crumbling or empty relationships with insensitive men.
As Kim shares the mothers' stories we come to understand them better and our sympathies shift. Gradually their adult daughters come to understand them better too.
Ho does remarkable work weaving all this together in her directorial debut at Kumu Kahua. Raelene Chock (Suyuan Woo), Charlotte Dias (Ying-Ying St. Clair), Elissa Dulce (Lindo Jong), and Blossom Lam (An-Mei Hsu), are marvelous as the four women.
Dulce (Lindo) quickly becomes the coldly manipulative mother we most love to hate in Act I. Lindo slowly evolves into a far more sympathetic character in Act II, and Dulce likewise warms and softens as Act II plays out.
Lam has a great heart-wrenching scene as An-Mei throws a priceless heirloom into the ocean in a desperate attempt to appease the dragon that has taken her youngest son. Dias is coldly matter-of-fact as Ying-Ying explains the nature of a tiger person to her daughter.
Chock, Dias, Dulce and Lam are also convincing when portraying the four women as young and innocent girls in China.
Michelle Sekine (Jing-Mei Woo) ultimately emerges as author Tan's point of view and thus the most important of the four daughters. The sporadic rivalry between Jing-Mei and Waverly Jong brings Roselani Pelayan (Waverly) to the fore more quickly than Wendy Taira (Rose Hsu Jordan) and Laurie Tanaka (Lena St. Clair). All four do double duty as women of previous generations and various secondary characters. All four handle key scenes effectively.
Kim and Ho preserve "The Joy Luck Club" as a fascinating window into the cultural mores of pre-communist China, but make it more inclusive. In Act I the mothers and daughters are antagonists. As the multi-generational stories play out in Act II they become allies. At the conclusion each mother-daughter pair has achieved some degree of understanding and closure. Jing-Mei's reunion with her long-lost half-sisters in China seems less important than that emotional reconciliation.
Woody Chock, Stu Hirayama, Steven Jones and Patrick Torres portray various men. Almost all are exploitive one way or another. Those who aren't have little more insight into the women's emotions. The second husbands seem decent enough; perhaps they're fortunate to have no clue that their wives married on the rebound or simply for convenience and not for love.
Ho and costume designer Jeni Kido follow Kim's suggestion that family units be indicated by color. Keeping track of who is who isn't all that difficult but the color scheme certainly helps. Richard Schafer's simple set -- two risers with a space between them -- suffices to suggest a wide range of environments. Keith Kashiwada (sound design), BullDog (lighting), and Michael Harada (props) add the bits and pieces that lets the audience imagine the rest.
Even firm fans of the novel or 1993 film can expect to enjoy this version of Tan's tale. "The Joy Luck Club" is a triumph for Kumu Kahua.
Joy Luck Club
On stage: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Oct. 3. No performance this Friday.
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