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Lighter touch works
for ‘Joy Luck Club’The Joy Luck Club: Playing 8 p.m. Thursdays to Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Aug. 13; Kumu Kahua Theatre; tickets $5 to $12; call 536-4441.
By John Berger
Special to the Star-BulletinTHE names of the characters are the same but Kumu Kahua's restaging of "The Joy Luck Club" isn't quite the same show that opened its season 10 months ago. The changes aren't as immediately noticeable as in Diamond Head Theatre's repeat of "The Princess and the Iso Peanut," but a different director and a predominantly new cast make the new "Joy Luck Club" a different, although equally satisfying experience.
Kumu Kahua artistic director Harry Wong III is directing this time. He doesn't trivialize the emotional traumas experienced by several generations of Chinese women but his interpretation has a lighter ambience than that of Reiko Ho who directed the piece last September.
Charlotte Dias (Ying-Ying St. Clair), Elissa Dulce (Lindo Jong) and Blossom Lam (An-Mei Hsu) reprise their roles as indestructible Chinese immigrant women. Valerie Falle (Suyuan Woo) joins them in creating a marvelous new ensemble. The four daughters are also portrayed by different actors.
Susan Kim's adaptation of Amy Tan's tale of four Chinese women and their dysfunctional relationships with their Chinese-American daughters remains compelling.
One of the most interesting changes is in Dulce's portrayal of Lindo Jong. Lindo had no mercy for anyone last fall and was the witch we loved to hate throughout Act I. Wong and Dulce have softened the character. Lindo's claws are still sharp but she seems just a little less venomous. It's a still great performance by Dulce.
Dulce is also convincing and captivating later in the narrative as a flashback scene shows Lindo's life as a hapless but sharp-witted child bride stuck with a disinterested childish husband (Stu Hirayama).
Hirayama and Dulce share a sweeter moment in the scene that shows how Lindo met her second husband after she immigrated to the United States. The couple had to communicate in simple English because they spoke different Chinese dialects.
Dias and Lam likewise do excellent work once again. Not only do they have powerful scenes as Ying-Ying and An-Mei, but they are equally engaging when they portray their characters as innocent children growing up in China.
Meredith Desha (Jing-Mei Woo) is the narrator and thus the most visible of the daughters, but the order in which the others' stories are told, and the rivalry between Jing-Mei and Waverly Jong, quickly brings Nani Morita (Waverly) to the fore as well. Michelle A. Kim (Rose Hsu Jordan) and Monica K. Cho (Lena St. Clair) register more slowly, but they equal Desha and Morita in giving solid secondary performances playing women of previous generations. Morita stands out as an ancestor who committed suicide under circumstances that would ensure a better life for her daughter.
Kim makes a welcome return to local theater after several years' absence. She's cute and competent in several scenes but the shadings of emotion she adds to her final scene with Eric Dixon Burns (Ted Jordan) is the payoff.
Burns adds petulance to the other unpleasant character traits of Rose's soon-to-be-ex. Mathias Maas and John H.Y. Wat join Burns and Hirayama in playing an assortment of jerks, clods and losers -- and also as the mothers' basically decent second husbands who had no idea that the women were marrying them on the rebound or simply for convenience.
Jing-Mei's reunion with long-lost relatives in China registers as less important than the success of the four sets of mothers and daughters in gradually achieving understanding and mutual respect. Each mother-daughter pair finds some degree of closure with the past, and with each other.
Costume designer Naomi Gallant-Thigpen defines each mother/ daughter pair by color. BullDog (lighting), Keith Kashiwada (sound design) and Richard Shaefer (set design) share credit for the minimalist setting that effectively suggests the time and place.
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