Hard to Explain: Theory of Everything @ Hugo House
Writing a review of The Theory of Everything (Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Avenue. Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. Tix $14/$10) turned out to be hard. The first three or four things we thought to say about it all make it sound bad, when in fact it's pretty awesome and worth seeing. But to get to it: It's a play about identity and coming to terms with stuff, and is set on the roof of a Vegas wedding chapel where seven Asian-Americans gather weekly to look for UFOs. All of which makes it sound an awful lot like one of those "big point" plays that abstract themselves so that they can wear their heart on their sleeves, use metaphors to make a totally blunt point, and feature theatricality all in the service of trying to keep the audience mildly entertained while the writer beats them over the head with the big meaningful idea the play's all about. Sort of like The Mistakes Madeline Made.
Stan Asis as Hiro and Kathy Hsieh in The Theory of Everything. Photo by Rick Wong.
Hiro (Stan Asis) and Patty (Kathy Hsieh) are a middle-aged Japanese-Thai couple who run a wedding chapel in Vegas, where they (or at least Patty) take some joy in bringing happiness to other people. Hiro is actually privately deeply miserable, out of place in America and trapped in a cold, loveless marriage that went downhill when Patty discovered she was infertile. He wants to return to Japan. But she puts on a happy face, and seems smart enough that you get the impression she's trying to pull one over on herself as much as everyone else when she explains how she interviews all the couples who want to get married to make sure they're right for one another, and that it'll work out. She also believes in aliens and is convinced she'll see some some day.
For what it's worth, the motley crew of other Asians who gather at the chapel on weekends to help her watch don't really believe in aliens. They're all just friends, a couple generations worth of immigrants or the children of immigrants, who come together for a bit of company with an erstwhile extended family. There's Gilbert (Jose Abaoag) and his mother Shimmy (Leilani Bernobis), Filipinos, and Gilbert's long-time best friend Lana (Miko Premo), who, along with her brother Nef (Sam Tsubota), is an American-born Chinese-American. And filling out the cast is Patty's aged Thai mother May (Aya Hashiguchi), who spends most of the play lounging on a chair, sometimes asleep, sometimes only apparently so, a silent witness to the trials and travails of her cohort of friends and family.
The play opens with Lana and Gilbert storming in arguing; Lana's just flunked out of law school in San Francisco and has returned to Vegas a failure in her own eyes (and those of her parents, no doubt, who true to form have unrealistically high expectations for their daughter). Gilbert, a bit of a directionless slacker who works as a keno runner at a casino, for reasons unclear, suddenly proposes they get married. Over the course of the night, the characters all begin to confront uncomfortable realities: about sexuality, long-term relationships, about their tenuous relationship with mainstream American society. And then, Grandma May sees a UFO.
The script offers plenty of theatrical opportunity. Each of the characters has a monologue that lets them explore their back-stories without over-burdening the dramatic dialogue. Facilitating this is a phantasm who operates outside the main playing area (she's so mysterious we didn't see her listed in the cast!)--a woman dressed in some semblance of a traditional Asian outfit, but patently unclear: she might be an angel, she might be an alien. And she never does anything in the action of the play except to facilitate certain things (such as the UFO sighting, played out touchingly with paper lamps).
The production itself makes some really awesome use of lighting, too, which helps develop the various sorts of dramatic action. While the set is functional--detailed enough to escape being bland, but otherwise nothing to write home about--the creative use of lighting offers a brilliant list of extra possibilities. Exposed light bulbs hang dangling around the stage, serving as the illumination during the monologues, or sometimes used as an expression of a complex set of ideas during some of the dialogue. The phantasm interacts with them directly, illuminating and extinguishing them. And added to the dramatic power of exposed light bulbs are strands of garish Christmas lights and a array of paper lamps, all of which reminds us how much we love incidental lighting onstage. More designers should remember that $100 in cheap lighting at Ikea can accomplish more than $500 of wood and paint when it comes to sets.
Ultimately, the characters are fleshed out enough that the transformations (or lack thereof) never feel forced. And the script ultimately succeeds without the use of extra-terrestrials, which we appreciated. Some reviews have been unnecessarily unkind to this play. We honestly don't know where they're coming from. SIS Productions has delivered a show that's a cut above what we typically expect from fringe-type theatres. Yes, the performances were mixed, but no one was horrible and some of them were actually magnificent (Hsieh, Asis, Hashiguchi, and Berinobis all delivered). It's true that in the past we've expressed a lot of disappointment with plays that limit minority actors to shows that are all about being minorities, and then heap on a grab bag of issues on top of it. But Gomolvilas' script is competent enough to avoid most of those pitfalls, the characters are believable and fully developed; it's not didactic, in other words, and it offers a lot of theatrical opportunity both in terms of the acting and the production that the cast and designers admirably lived up to. Definitely worth seeing.
