T. Charles Erickson Photos
Shannon Tyo.
On the bare stage of Long Wharf Theatre is one of those huge packing crates used for shipping props or sets. A man comes out of the shadows and pushes it further back, then opens its doors to reveal a theatrical space with a curtain and graceful designs on the wings. If you’re a regular theater-goer who hasn’t been in a theater since the Covid-19 lockdown began — and certainly not at Long Wharf Theatre’s stage at Sargent Drive, which has been closed since the spring of 2020 — that simple act of opening the crate to make theater on stage is striking, thrilling, magical.
The Long Wharf Theatre is back, resuming the season so darkly and tragically interrupted by the pandemic. The play is The Chinese Lady, by Lloyd Suh, directed by Ralph B. Peña, and it plays through Oct. 31 with a running time of approximately 90 minutes.
The Chinese Lady is based on the real-life story of Afong Moy — alleged to be the first Chinese woman to immigrate to U.S. soil, in 1834 — and her exhibitions as “the Chinese lady,” which included a tour of major cities and a command performance for President Andrew Jackson. Suh takes the facts of Afong Moy’s life and develops them into a fascinating meditation on performance, cultural difference, historical and contemporary injustice, and what I’ll simply call the mystery of identity.
In this two-person play, the performer Afong Moy (Shannon Tyo) is accompanied by her attentive translator and factotum Atung (Jon Norman Schneider). At the start, Afong Moy is fourteen and regards her audience (us) proudly from her seat in a display space concocted for her by U.S. importers of Chinese goods. Afong is one of the goods: sold (or indentured) by her father for a two-year contract to show to curious U.S. customers aspects of Chinese culture, such as eating with chopsticks, drinking tea and telling the story of the first accidental cup of tea, and — the great feat — showing how she walks on feet that were broken and bound as a child in the aristocratic tradition known as foot binding. Afong sees herself as a living emblem of tradition; Atung, she insists, is “irrelevant.”
As the play goes on, what at first seems an unfortunate fact of Afong Moy’s existence — to be an exhibit with no real life of her own — comes to be the only stable thing we know about her, and that she knows about herself. She is simply “the Chinese lady” — and the fact that Afong is still serving that purpose in a 21st-century play, for which we pay an admission price, take our seats, and sit and stare, points up the very real problem of accurate or sympathetic representation on stage. Afong Moy can be an exhibit, an emblem, a symbol, even a spokesperson (in Suh’s hands) for Chinese-American race relations. But when does she get to be herself?
Who is Afong Moy? Suh cleverly works in a key problem of her self-presentation. She speaks to us in beautiful, flowing sentences with, in Tyo’s captivating delivery, engaging modulations and asides. And yet, Afong has only rudimentary English, which is why she needs Atung, who is not, after all, irrelevant. We understand that her English is meant to be Mandarin Chinese, but only Atung understands that language. When he translates her fulsome speeches to Jackson we hear how little skilled Atung is in making her words live in English. The language barrier goes both ways: when Afong tells Atung to tell the President that his request to touch her feet is unusual, he replies that he’s not a usual man (implying “I’m the President!”). Translating Jackson for Afong, Atung says “he says he a strange man.”
Jon Norman Schneider.
The meeting between the President and the Lady, with Atung as go-between, is the best scene in the play. Here we get to see something of the context that surrounds the staged exhibit. Before this scene, we hear about how the exhibit travels the country to places with strange-sounding names, like Baltimore and Pittsburgh. But we hear little about what, if anything, Afong observes there (other than the use of forks and the wearing of shoes indoors). In the Jackson scene, by contrast, we see Afong as she looks to an audience member for whom she — and especially her feet — are a “must-see,” just so you can say you saw it. All her hopes of being an ambassador between cultures are thoroughly trounced and she doesn’t even know it. Atung, who gets to hear both sides of the conversation, gets lost in Jackson’s grand asides on the Opium Wars and relations with Britain against China. The idea of culture as a pawn in a game of politics reverberates beyond the encounter.
Schneider’s deft moving between Atung’s humble yet sly guise and Jackson’s brash demeanor is fun stuff, and the interplay sets up Schneider’s other great scene, when Atung confides to us a dream in which his complicated feelings for Afong Moy — as a protector, a lover, almost a double — work to the surface. At times, the play feels as though it might go in that direction, becoming an interplay in which the theatricality of their roles becomes the material to be deconstructed between them.
Instead, Suh — after glancing at the failed hopes and plans and the growing desperation that may have been part of the life of the real Afong Moy, with Tyo’s manner going through significant transformations — brings us up to date, in 2021. Afong Moy is no longer forced to be “the Chinese lady,” but is still Chinese-American. The real Afong Moy, we might imagine, found some kind of life in what used to be called the demimonde, a subcultural world inhabited by performers, artists, “freaks,” and those who simply didn’t fit in with mainstream culture (or the majority of any given ethnicity). We may never know. Suh is more concerned with the timeliness of Afong Moy as a voice for an ethnicity which, in the wake of what a later brash president called “the Chinese virus,” has suffered again the kind of persecution in the United States that Suh’s Moy keeps her eye on throughout history.
The Chinese Lady is beautiful to look at, of course. The creative team — Junghyun Georgia Lee (scenic design), Linda Cho (costume design), and Jiyoun Chang (lighting design) — build a space where a fantasy of Chinese culture thrives, and then tellingly dismantle it, a fitting end for many exploded myths we still crate around with us. Theater like Suh’s and Peña’s production of The Chinese Lady is remarkably effective at making us inhabit the space of identification and objectification that cultural ideas thrive on. Definitely worth a look.
The Chinese Lady runs at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., through Oct. 31. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.