THEATER REVIEW : A Telling ‘Woman Warrior’ : The Show’s Pomp and Pageantry Sometimes Stand in the Way of the Play

Many writers have spent chunks of their childhoods in bed, confined for illness. For Flaubert or Robert Louis Stevenson, a mandated bed-stay helped facilitate the changeover from observed child to adult observer. The young Maxine Hong Kingston spent one year in bed. In her autobiographical writings this happens after an incident in which she tortured a maddeningly passive school chum, a first-generation Chinese American girl like herself.

The image of the pigtailed young author in bed, floating over the stage, mute with the effort of trying to figure out who she is and how she is to assimilate, dominates the third act of a new play based on Kingston’s books “The Woman Warrior” and “China Men.” The books are nonfiction literature--a wondrous mix of autobiography, parental biography, myth and fantasy. A Kingston devotee, producer Martin Rosen worked for 10 years to bring Kingston’s unique “talk-story” to the stage.

Adapted by Deborah Rogin, the “world premiere production” of “The Woman Warrior” opened at the Doolittle Theatre Wednesday (after playing in Berkeley and in Boston last year). Its magical floating imagery is cousin to the less text-oriented work of Robert Wilson and Laurie Anderson. But imagery and other pageantry aside, the onstage “Woman Warrior” stubbornly falls short of the alchemy Kingston achieves in her books.

Rogin and director Sharon Ott (who first staged “The Woman Warrior” at the Berkeley Rep, where she is artistic director) have applied a theatrical imagination to this tale of a teen-age girl growing up in Stockton. Her emigrant parents have crossed an ocean only to transform from a teacher and a doctor into the exhausted proprietors of a dry-cleaning establishment, and she, too, is absorbing their culture shock. “Talk-story” is the mother’s forte; she is a teller of tales both true and mythical. Two stories hold particular significance in the daughter’s identity struggle. The fabulous fable of a woman warrior who avenges wrongs is offset by the horrible true story of a disgraced aunt’s suicide. These tales fill the girl’s imagination, and they fill the stage too, with impressive pageantry. Three characters, appearing about 20 feet tall, glide onstage above flowing gowns.

Taking his cue from Peking Opera, set designer Ming Cho Lee keeps the stage mostly clear for the dancing-stories and tableaux. His set is ingeniously simple and sleek, its backdrop a wall of pale panels, topped by a huge scrim.

The dance-stories culminate in a stunning battle in the third act, in which a twirling, kicking woman warrior (Kim Miyori) defeats a black-bearded warlord and his four henchmen, an acrobatic ballet with extravagant, gold-tassled costumes and flashing red-and-silver lances. The play is set to Jon Jang and Liu Qi-Chao’s arresting score, almost wall-to-wall music, which ranges from lovely, inconclusive melodies on violin and flute to the operatic drama of the battle.

Yet with all of this swirling theatricality, how is it that the play remains dramatically underdeveloped? “The Woman Warrior” is a ballet, a Chinese opera told in cross-cuts between the present, the past and myth. It resembles another recent production with a naive faith in the substitution of pageantry for character, “Black Elk Speaks.” Like that celebration of Native American culture, “The Woman Warrior” offers up cultural riches--the dances, the song, the myths--almost in substitution for a play itself. Terrible things happen, yet these works are essentially children’s stories: over-explained, declamatory and ponderously slow.

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Rogin’s mix of styles sometimes seems haphazard. In one scene, she drags in agitprop. As the girl’s emigrant grandfather recounts the rigid Chinese immigration laws of the early 1900s, railroad workers face the audience and recount the history of the laws and their dates, accompanied by a pounding and ominous drum. From a second-tier scaffolding, two fat capitalists in grotesque masks and top hats look down. Like “Black Elk,” the play often insists on its own importance. At just under three hours, insistence turns to tedium.

Three fine actors hint at the human beings in the story. Almost always onstage, Liana Pai is the daughter, a sober and sensitive guide to the story. The formidable Tsai Chin plays Brave Orchid, her mother, whose scowl from years of tedious work at the presses is always undercut with a lively mischievousness. Likewise, Soon-Tek Oh shows the poet lingering beneath the unreachable father.

“The Woman Warrior” is at heart the personal struggle of a girl attempting to define herself partially through a culture that she loves, but one that traditionally devalues her sex. In the penultimate scene, an exhausted daughter confronts her mother with a list of offenses. Why, for instance, is she always called a “little dog”? Tsai Chin’s eyes dart quickly, in search of an explanation for this absurd endearment, and the audience laughs uproariously. I believe that this laughter is partly relief at finally seeing a real scene between two people. This moment is a reminder of what is sometimes called the first rule of drama: Show, don’t tell. Therein lies the difference between a play and a pageant.

* “The Woman Warrior,” Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood, Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2 p.m.; also Feb. 19, March 5 and 12, 7 p.m.; March 16, 23 and 30, April 6, 13 and 20, 2 p.m. Ends April 23. $15-$47.50. (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000. Running time: 2 hours in 50 minutes.

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With: Michael Paul Chan, Francois Chau, Tsai Chin, John Cho, Janis Chow, David Furumoto, Alison Gleason, Charles Hu, Dian Kobayashi, Emily Kuroda, Brian Kwan, Dana Lee, Page Leong, Kim Miyori, Wood Moy, Soon-Tek Oh, Liana Pai, Luo Yong Wang, Donna Mae Wong, Man Wong, Jenny Woo, Peide Yao.

Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre, Martin Rosen and Nepenthe Productions, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Huntington Theatre Company, and James A. Doolittle present a world premiere production. Adapted for the stage by Deborah Rogin. Directed by Sharon Ott. Set design by Ming Cho Lee. Costumes by Susan Hilferty. Lighting by Peter Maradudin. Sound by Stephen LeGrand and Jon Gottlieb. Music by Jon Jang and Liu Qi-Chao. Choreography by Daniel Pelzig. Production stage manager Kimberly Mark Webb.