THEATER REVIEW: THE CHINESE MASSACRE

 

Forget it is fake Chinatown 

By Ed Rampell 

If Karl Marx wrote: “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle,” one can add that American history is also the history of ethnic struggle. In The Chinese Massacre (Annotated) playwright Tom Jacobson takes a Howard Zinn-like “people’s history” look at Los Angeles, revealing a little known, yet significant, event in L.A. history. Long before the 20^th century’s Zoot Suit, Watts and L.A. riots there was a pogrom against L.A.’s then-200 inhabitants of Chinese ancestry in 1871.

There are few – if any -- more important, serious subjects than ethnic cleansing and genocide. Jacobson and Circle X Theatre Co. are to be commended for reminding us of this butchery and burning 140 years ago by dramatizing this stain – or rather, bloodstain – on L.A.’s record and reputation, rescuing the Chinese massacre from our collective amnesia. The killing of 18 Chinese men -- almost 10 percent of Chinatown’s population -- surpassed the number of victims of the Manson tribe yet is as forgotten as Squeaky and Charlie remain remembered.

It’s unfortunate that The Chinese Massacre’s bard undercuts not only the seriousness of his content but its power and cohesive flow with a self-reflective, self-indulgent form that repeatedly disrupts and distracts from what otherwise would be compelling storytelling. So-called “Annotators,” such as Lisa Tharps as ex-slave turned community leader Biddy Mason, frequently interrupt the drama, interjecting “footnotes,” commentary and the like. This, the aud is told, is done in the mode of Bertolt Brecht’s “Epic Theatre,” so as to “alienate” viewers from sentimental emotionalism in order to jog them into thinking about what is, after all, merely a staged performance, and what it all means. Get the point?

Brecht was generally content with just doing it (that is, building his Epic techniques into the body of his plays), but that isn’t good enough for Mr. Jacobson, who, we are told, has written more than 50 plays (although we’re also told that he has a day job), including House of the Rising Son, playing right next door on the Atwater Village Theatre’s other stage. To further compound matters, Annotators reveal that the fact-based drama is fictionalized, that dialogue is derived from sources outside the domain of the action and the like. For example, the central character, Lee Tong (West Liang), is fictionalized. This all reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock’s dictum that flashbacks must never lie about plots, or of a storyteller who keeps interrupting his/her own tale by saying,“But I digress” – and then persisting in doing so.

Although The Chinese Massacre does make reference to subsequent racial clashes between Angelenos, these end in the early 1990s. Looking back at the early, troubled history of Chinese immigrants 140 years ago in L.A., what are we to make of the impact of today’s large Asian-American and Asian population in Los Angeles County? It may not be politically correct to say so, and I don’t mean this as a values statement but simply as a matter of fact: parts of places such as Monterey Park seem more as if one is in Asia than America. The melding and conflict between people of Asian ancestry and those of other ethnic backgrounds continues today, and The Chinese Massacre provides some needed cultural context. Perhaps the best place to end the play could be with that UCLA white female student’s YouTube rant about Asian pupils in the library. Racism, alas, remains with and among us.   

In spite of The Chinese Massacre’s self-referring, tautological technique, viewers who enjoy their drama brewed strong and dramatizations of history will likely appreciate the annals of this not so La-La-Land.

The Chinese Massacre runs through May 28 at Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village. For more information: 323/644-1929; www.circlextheatre.org.

FILM REVIEW: RANGO

Rango (voice by Johnny Depp) and Beans (voice by Isla Fisher) in Rango.

Sometimes dirt hurts

By John Esther

Once an imprisoned chameleon living inside ("In Shreads") a little aquarium where his only friend was a plastic fish, a female doll torso, and his elaborate imagination, Rango (voice by Johnny Depp) winds up on an escapade from divided road to wholesale wilderness which will seriously challenge his sense of self in the delightfully surprising, entertaining, animated movie, Rango.

Stranded under a sweltering landscape with the unknown hidden under every rock and soaring above the cacti, after Rango survives a few car crashes, he and his zygodactylous feet hike it on over to the town of Dirt.

Like the "good people" of any little redneck town, Dirt immediately casts Rango as an outsider. To impress the various quasi-reptilian, amphibious, marsupial, rodent characters, Rango tells a few tall tales. With hides and hares yet no proof to back his fibs, the town becomes smitten with the stranger. Of course, as ill luck would have it, someone calls Rango's bluff and he will have to prove his worth, especially to Beans (voice by Isla Fisher), the lonely ranch girl with true grit and a strange defense mechanism.

After he manages to imprint his legend amongst the wild southwestern inhabitants, the Mayor (voice by Ned Beatty) makes Rango the Dirt Sheriff; and that is when his work becomes downright ornery difficult. Rango may have convinced the town he killed seven bandits with one bullet (false) and a bird of prey (true), but his real challenge will be to find out who has been stealing the precious water supply.

"He who controls the water, controls everything," the Mayor explains. Hopefully Rango, at the right time and place, will be capable of anything.

With a renewed sense of hope found in the form of the one they call Rango, the notably un-cutesy town folk, cold-blooded and warm-blooded alike, form a posse and go hunting for the stolen water, only to find more and more hardship, treachery and even a little murder along the way.

Pushed to the stink of collapse, once Rango looses everything he figures this is his real existential test and he forms a plan to get payback Dirt. There is never a doubt he will succeed by film's end, but the movie does have its charms.

As far as the hack director/leading man team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise this is the second time Gore Verbinski has made something worth watching once (the first and last time was the 2005 film, The Weather Man, starring Nicolas Cage) and the first movie starring Depp since the 1998 film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- a film Rango incorporates into its narrative -- that may be worth watching twice. Written by John Logan and based on a story by Logan, Verbinski and James Ward Byrkit, it seems pretty clear they had Depp in mind when writing Rango and he does do an adequate, occasionally inspiring, performance at it.

(At any rate, Depp is an actor whose considerable talents continue to be wasted for big paychecks, punished by poor script choices and woefully encouraged by pitiful Oscar nominations. I look forward to the day he stops playing some eccentric malcontent and gets back to the level of acting he reached during the 1990s.)

On another hand, casting director Denise Chamian made some very intelligent voiceover casting choices in the form of Fisher (about time!); Beatty, who sure can squeal, also plays bad pretty well (i.e. He Got Game; Shooter; last year's overlooked The Killer Inside Me); Bill Nighy as the awesomely mean Rattlesnake Jake; Harry Dean Stanton as the ugliest of the ugly, Balthazar; Alfred Molina as the "Spanish" sagebrush sage, Roadkill; Gil Birmingham as the philosophical native, Wounded Bird; the diurnal owls who make up el Grecia-chorus (George Delhoyo, Verbinski, plus others) and Byrkit, who marvelously plays Waffles -- my favorite character in the movie.

They and the others make for a good cast who embrace Logan's smart, playful dialogue, often with characters mumbling/speaking simultaneously (Oh, Altman). Set in the southwest, the screenplay willfully blends many familiar Spanish words (e.g. amigo, ese, loco) in with the English dialogue, which seems a calculated choice to not only include Spanglish-speaking viewers, but also to remind viewers the intrinsic part Latinos have played in terms of North American geopolitics -- from storytelling to music to idiomatic developments -- throughout our country's history.

Then there are some dialogue humdingers worthy of Lautréamont, Lewis Carroll or a good Coen Bros. film: "He basked in the adulation of his compañeros as he sunk deeper into his own guacamole," the chorus tells us; "It's a puzzle. It's a mammogram," Waffles announces; "If this was heaven, we'd be eating pop tarts with Kim Novack," retorts Spirit of the West (Timothy Olyphant), channeling the Malpaso Man.

Keeping in tune with Rango's rambunctiousness, the score by Hans Zimmer and a soundtrack featuring Los Lobos are riotously rowdy and, frankly, quite gutsy for a film marketed toward family consumption. Be sure to stay for the rip-roaring song during the final credits.

However, via its quest to secure the box office base, Rango is not going to drown out anyone's sense of entertainment entitlement. Eventually the good guys drink up and the bad guys get washed away as the film proudly riverruns toward the false conclusions that the powerful get splashed with their comeuppance and the good guy swimmingly emerges over all adversity while getting the girl in two boots to boot. Watering it down for mass consumption, regardless of Rango's attributes, it is not going tragically Chinatown or the United States of America today.