Chanse, Sam

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    Review: In ‘What You Are Now,’ Memory Is a Dangerous Thing

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    In Sam Chanse’s affecting play, a daughter tries to understand her mother, who resists any reminder of her escape from the Khmer Rouge.Trying to understand our parents’ past lives can feel like fumbling through the dark, especially for the children of immigrants. Recollections are selective, and many people have lived through things they’d rather forget. The challenge — and heartbreak — of bridging that chasm is the subject of “What You Are Now,” an affecting study of memory and migration by the playwright Sam Chanse that opened on Thursday night at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan.Pia (Pisay Pao) knows hardly anything about her mother’s experience fleeing Cambodia in 1975, amid the country’s deadly takeover by the Khmer Rouge. But the pain of her mother’s experience has shaped Pia’s life, like an imprint, she says, seared into her cells. It’s why Pia is pursuing neurological research, looking for a scientific solution to her mother’s mental suffering.Pia’s mother (Sonnie Brown) carries herself like a ghost, looking lost behind the eyes and staunchly resisting any reminders of Cambodia. She’s also held herself at arm’s length from Pia and her brother Darany (Robert Lee Leng), whom she raised on her own in small-town Massachusetts. (The height of their mother’s physical affection is a stiff-elbowed pat on the shoulder.) If Pia can’t enter or soothe her mother’s mind, she channels that desire into studying the brain.Chanse’s play shifts back and forth over a 10-year span in Pia’s study of memory and its potential for manipulation. When she speaks to her mom on the phone from the lab, their conversations are limited to the mundane, like what’s for dinner and how Pia’s career is advancing. But when Darany’s ex-girlfriend (Emma Kikue) comes around gathering testimony for a nonprofit from survivors of the Khmer Rouge, Pia’s mother refuses to open up about the past.“What You Are Now” isn’t propelled by incidents or dramatic action, but ideas about how the mind works and the gradual revelation of personal histories. Pia dates and breaks up with a co-worker (Curran Connor) with whom she cleans rat cages. Darany and his girlfriend, who is half white, smoke pot and swap stories of how they relate to their shared Cambodian heritage. Pia’s mom loses her temper when she walks in on her kids dancing to Cambodian rock.As Pia, Pao is spiky and guarded, observing and responding to her mother’s behavior with the cool remove that a scientist might keep for her subject. As her chill (and way cooler) older brother, Leng makes for a loose and grounded contrast, all street-slang and curious heart. And Brown is quietly arresting as a woman both fragile and imperious, slouched like a comma but with a will of steel.Directed by the Civilians artistic director, Steve Cosson, the smartly minimal production unfolds against a cool-gray monochrome interior, like a slate wiped clean. Frames that might display family portraits hang empty, and what could be a wall clock has no markings of time (the set design is by Riw Rakkulchon). Characters appear isolated in the dark, as they connect at a distance on the phone or retreat into their own perspectives (the lighting design is by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew).Pia explores whether it’s possible to alter what we remember, and memory’s relationship to identity, by delving into empirical study rather than excavating and sorting through emotions. The play includes perhaps one too many descriptions of real-life experiments, which are limited in dramatic potential.But “What You Are Now” excels in unforced revelations about the human struggle to connect, and to share the messy and sometimes painful stories that make us who we are. Everything we hear and experience, and how we remember it, reshapes our brains, Pia says. It’s a scientific testament to the power of storytelling to change minds.What You Are NowThrough April 3 at the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan; ensemblestudiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Out of Time’ Review: Once Sidelined, Now Taking Center Stage

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      Five Asian American actors, all over 60, deliver monologues that touch on grief and heritage, on adult children and cultural cancellation.She is absolutely elegant, and completely isolated — a documentarian, microphone clipped to her chest, talking to an unseen camera about the last time she hugged someone.This will be the final film in the long career of this quietly charismatic woman, and the first in which she steps into the frame to center the narrative on herself. Although her real subject, she says, is someone near to her, now lost.“My Documentary,” written by Anna Ouyang Moench and performed by Page Leong, is the captivating opener to “Out of Time,” a collaboration between the National Asian American Theater Company and the Public Theater that gathers five new solo shorts by Asian American playwrights into a single program.The five performers are Asian American actors, all over 60, deep into careers in which their odds of working have been far tougher than for their white contemporaries. In “Out of Time,” they step into the frame — figuratively speaking, mostly — to tell wide-ranging stories that touch on grief and heritage and the pandemic, on adult children and cultural cancellation, on making art and pulling off an optical illusion.Not all of the art-making succeeds in Les Waters’s uneven production at the Public, but every actor is one you’ll want to see again, and that is a large part of the point. So is the potent sense of worldviews and experiences that the American stage has generally ignored.“My Documentary” is a beautiful piece of writing. A life story that’s a love story, too, it has a bruised awareness that “misunderstanding something very important as you’re living it” is a human tendency. In Leong’s hands, the nameless documentarian is compelling in a lean-forward way: Funny, sharp and warm, she has a whole cogent argument against hugging at work, and remembers her own sons in their earliest years as “agents of chaos” in her life. Connection and solace are what she’s seeking with her film. They’re also what the monologue brings.A series of long, sheer fabric curtains (by the design collective Dots) form most of the set for “Out of Time,” and when we first glimpse Mia Katigbak in Mia Chung’s play “Ball in the Air,” it is through them as she crosses upstage, intently playing with a paddle ball. You know the kind: wooden paddle, rubber ball attached by a string.It’s an intriguing start, and Katigbak — a founder of the National Asian American Theater Company and a dependably excellent mainstay of downtown theater — is a fine paddle ball player, it turns out. But the monologue is all confusion, written in short chunks that seem to come from three different strands of narrative that aren’t so much braided together as stacked on top of one another: one about an election, one about a friendship gone wrong, another about a car ride, if I’ve parsed them right. They might make perfect sense intercut in a film. Here they blend together muddily.Rita Wolf, behind a curtain and onscreen, in Jaclyn Backhaus’s monologue, “Black Market Caviar.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe sole moments of clarity concern the optical illusion: a ball that Katigbak seems to make disappear in midair. (Steve Cuiffo, New York theater’s go-to magic guy, is listed in the program as a consultant.) Later, speaking directly to the audience, she tells us how it works. You’ll come away with that knowledge, anyway.The program’s rough patch continues with the next play, Jaclyn Backhaus’s “Black Market Caviar,” a gorgeously layered monologue foiled by Waters’s staging. Performed by Rita Wolf, it is a message of love and comfort spoken by a woman named Carla, 30 years in the future, to her younger self. In the script, Backhaus says that Carla appears in “a portal from somewhere that opens before you on December 31st, 2019.”Maybe it was the urge to mix things up that enticed Waters to place Wolf at such a chilly distance from the audience, veiled behind a curtain, seated in profile and talking to a video camera. We see her in close-up on a screen downstage, her image frustratingly out of sync with the sound of her voice, which travels faster. But is watching someone on video what we’ve come to the theater for?The screen prevents the vital communion between actor and audience, making it harder to hear Backhaus’s play — about a genetic predisposition toward cancer passed down from one generation of women to the next in Carla’s family, and about undoing the trauma that came from keeping that scary fact a secret.“Don’t succumb to the fear,” Carla counsels, surely knowing that the mere fact of her being alive so far in the future is heartening.“Be afraid,” she says, “and live your life.”The program bounces back with Naomi Iizuka’s “Japanese Folk Song,” starring Glenn Kubota as a silver-haired retired banker named Taki, speaking to his grown daughter about his life — and his loathing of jazz, including the Thelonious Monk song that gives Iizuka’s monologue its name.The script carries a poignant dedication, “to Takehisa Iizuka (1934-2020),” and the playwright has said that Taki is strongly influenced by her father. The character tells the audience, in a quick prologue to the play, that he is not the real Taki but rather a stand-in who looks like him. This, then, is theater as a tender, comic, aching act of remembrance.Leonie, the famous septuagenarian novelist in Sam Chanse’s “Disturbance Specialist,” the final monologue, is very much not retired, though a younger generation who deems her tweets problematic is trying to make her go away. In response, Leonie has shown up defiantly at her alma mater to give a speech.Performed by Natsuko Ohama, it’s a thoughtful play, discursive and entertaining, with sympathy for a lifelong artist-activist who worked hard to earn a place at a table where white men were so much more freely welcomed, and who abruptly finds that place threatened. Yet Leonie, for all her indignation, recognizes that her detractors may have a point.She was young and furious once, too. And she knows that, even at her age, she must adapt to thrive.Out of TimeThrough March 13 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      5 Monologues, Each a Showcase for Asian American Actors Over 60

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      “Out of Time” at the Public Theater is intended to showcase the talents of older actors. “People want to dismiss your stories,” the show’s director says. Not here.They might be asked to play a person lying in bed, dying of a stroke, or someone’s horrible mother, or a beloved grandparent struggling with dementia.“Commercially speaking, ‘old Asian lady’ is a huge amount of my opportunity,” the actor Natsuko Ohama said recently. “I like being ‘old Asian lady.’ But it has its limitations.”The director Les Waters became even more acutely interested in those kinds of limitations as he was watching a dance performance choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at the Skirball Center in 2020. The dancers in it, he recalled, were “older than usual.” He was struck by what he saw.Waters, who most recently directed Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.” on Broadway, and Mia Katigbak, the co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, had met a few years back at a festival and had agreed to work together at some point. Three years later, they were together at dinner, and Waters could not help but share what he called “an insane directorial megalomaniac’s vision.”What if there was a show that started at night, ran until the morning, and featured a succession of talented older actors telling stories — demonstrating just how much they were capable of?“Out of Time,” which began performances Feb. 15 at the Public Theater, is not quite as ambitious as that original vision. But it is intended to showcase the talents of older actors all the same. It will feature five performers delivering five new monologues — centered on themes like memory, parenthood, and identity — in a show that will run roughly 150 minutes. All the playwrights and all the actors are Asian American. And all the performers are over 60.Ohama is performing a 40-minute monologue by the playwright Sam Chanse.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesKubota will perform Naomi Iizuka’s monologue, about a man much like the playwright’s father.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt is a first, officials at the Public maintain, even if the first is a tad specific: The first production in New York theater to be written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over the age of 60.“This is to say: ‘Older people in the theater exist,’” Waters, 69, said of the production’s purpose. “We’re here, we’re underused and we have experience.”“As an old person myself, I find people want to dismiss your stories — I did it to my parents all the time,” he added.“Hyper-consciousness” in casting these days means you’ll often see one old person featured in an ensemble, making for “its own kind of tokenism,” said Katigbak, who is 67.“This project addresses that,” she added, “because it centers the old character, the old actor.”The message will be purposefully reinforced by the fact that the actors will be giving long, demanding monologues, some of which run more than 40 minutes and approach 5,000 words.In her monologue, Anna Ouyang Moench, who wrote the 2019 Off Broadway play, “Mothers,” captures a grieving documentary filmmaker dealing with both personal loss and professional rejection.Naomi Iizuka’s piece features an elderly Japanese man who loves Scotch and hates jazz, while Sam Chanse introduces audiences to a novelist who is giving a speech at her alma mater despite (or in spite of) having apparently been canceled by the students she is addressing.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Leong said.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe playwrights also include Jaclyn Backhaus, whose breakout work “Men on Boats” was a 2015 Off Broadway hit; and Mia Chung, whose “Catch as Catch Can” will return next season, after a 2018 New York premiere.Waters and Katigbak said the playwrights were not given specific prompts, except that their monologues should be “of the moment.” Given that they were created during the pandemic, isolation — and an examination of how loneliness metastasizes and manifests when family and friends all but abandon you — pervades almost all of the works.In a round-table discussion earlier this month, the actors said that living through the last few years has made them intimately familiar with the feeling.“My mother, who turned 97 in August, sits at home and watches TV all day because all her friends are gone,” said Glenn Kubota, who will appear in Iizuka’s monologue. “To see what she has to do on a daily basis just to amuse herself is really eye opening. I’m getting a glimpse of what maybe I will be facing 10, 20, years from now.”Many of the works are also at least somewhat autobiographical. And a few of the playwrights, who are all younger than 60, have created characters that resemble one of their parents. In some cases, in the process of acting, editing and rehearsing, the characters have evolved as their creators have reflected more deeply on themselves and those close to them.The monologue by Iizuka, whose well-regarded “36 Views” opened at the Public almost two decades ago, features a Japanese man who, in peeling back the layers of his life, recounts the time a bomb fell on his house leading him to wander around Tokyo and end up inside a candy shop.Iizuka said the character is strongly influenced by her father, who died in December 2020. “It’s about trying to find joy and pleasure, but also running up against your own mortality,” she said.She shared photos of him with the show’s creative team, who in turn provided them to Kubota. Iizuka said the actor has an “uncanny ability” to capture her father’s “feisty, tart-tongued humor.”“I’ve found this process incredibly nourishing,” she said.Kubota noted that the script had changed considerably — from a first draft he felt was filled with anger to the one he is now performing that mostly expresses love.“Hopefully I can do her work justice,” Kubota said, “because I’m going to be talking about her father in front of all of these people.”As co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, Katigbak helped get the project off the ground.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Every time I work on something new,” said Wolf, “I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesSince the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic roughly two years ago, the number of documented episodes of race-based hate toward people of Asian descent have soared, leaving Asian Americans in New York and beyond to endure what has at times been daily dread about their own safety and also the well-being of their older parents.The monologues mostly avoid racial animus and lean toward more universal themes. Even still, Katigbak emphasized that in “Out of Time,” audiences will hear the universal stories through Asian American voices — a rarity in the theater, even in 2022.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Page Leong, who last performed at the Public in “Too Noble Brothers” in 1997, said of the roles that come to members of her community. “It’s also connected to being relegated to being the surgeon or the lawyer.”Rita Wolf, who has had roles in Richard Nelson’s recent plays, including “The Michaels,” said, “So much of it is about opportunity.” She added: “Every time I work on something new, I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized. And I think about how they did not have opportunities to do something like this.”Ohama is performing Chanse’s work, “Disturbance Specialist,” which recently clocked in at 40 minutes and 21 seconds and 4,998 words. She joked about doing such a piece at her “advanced age,” since it takes hours and hours of memorization.“When you are our ages, life is there inside of you, so we don’t have to worry about the acting so much,” Ohama said. “But what is concerning to the older actor generally is: Do I know my lines?”“We have dedicated ourselves to this art form,” she added, “and the thing about us older people is we don’t get a chance to show that very often.” More