THEATER
“Porcelain” is fearless, but a little dated.
Chay Yew’s take on gay Asian identity in “Porcelain” remains singular.
Tinged with the darkness of Sarah Kane and the trauma of “Angels in America,” the play is a brutal look at what it means to be an outcast among outcasts — a monster, a ghost and fragile plaything all at once. To be gay and to be Asian, Yew suggests, is to endure homophobia from your family and sexual rejection from the blond-haired, blue-eyed men that populate London’s gay pubs. It is to belong nowhere. To be gay and to be Asian, in other words, is to be no one.
Anchoring this fearless production from Caduceus Theater Arts Company — a new company founded by Houston-based doctor Michael Heard — is the rapturous Bao Quoc Hoang, who plays a gay Chinese-British teenager in prison for murder. Hoang does the play’s title justice with a performance that is pristine and subtle yet forged with heat, a showcase of endurance and finesse that never leans on the easy melodrama the script presents. He doesn’t look the audience in the eye, rather shifting his face and shoulders to show that his character, John Lee, isn’t comfortable in his own skin.
John sits in the center of a black minimalist set punctuated by a background of shifting reds and blacks (projections change from Rorschach blots to red paper cranes to images of a crow — the animal is a symbol of social alienation). Four “voices,” played by four white male actors, stalk and haunt John as they go from one character to the next.
These characters include an aggressive television broadcaster covering John’s murder case, a boyfriend of John’s and a psychiatrist tasked to determine whether he was sane at the time of the crime. These voices circle John like vultures while he sits in the middle, hands demurely on his knees, waiting to receive judgment and punishment. It’s a hostile, often uncomfortable setup that illustrates the imbalance of power using the language of dance.
Dain Geist walks a fine line between villain and sympathizer as the psychiatrist, who starts off as a racist homophobe and slowly learns to see the world from John’s point of view. Director Bonnie Hewett oversees some well-crafted scenes that balance depictions of abuse and violence with tricks of lighting and music that make them artful and effective. This is satisfying theater that makes strong artistic choices then sticks by them.
But “Porcelain,” while a refreshing and provocative choice for a production, doesn’t always make a case for itself in 2018. Written in 1992, Yew presented a view on gay Asian identity that remains fundamentally tragic. Scenes of the voices yelling “queer,” “chink” and “poof” at John over and over again would have no doubt been audacious in the early 1990s, but today, such victimhood reeks of an outdated worldview.
The decades since the play’s premiere, after all, have seen both sexuality and race rise out of the realm of hushed taboo into a place of integration, mainstream acceptance and empowerment. “Porcelain” does not offer John empowerment because theater was not there yet — John was written to be first and foremost acknowledged at a time when society would rather pretend he didn’t exist.
“Porcelain” says, “Look how tragic it is to be gay, to be Asian.” Then the world changed. Now being those things is also normal, funny, sexy, weird, boring or all other states of existence not traditionally included in the minority-victim narrative. Right now, Bao Quoc Hoang is stellar as a man who gives up everything, including his body, to be gay and Asian. But in the future, I hope Hoang returns to the Houston stage to play a DJ, or a jock, or a bad boyfriend or a self-absorbed artist living in Brooklyn — really, any character who is Asian and doesn’t have to be punished for it.