Strokes too broad in family drama
It’s not really clear why there needs to be calligraphy in “Calligraphy,” TheatreWorks’ regional premiere seen Wednesday, March 15, at the Lucie Stern Theatre. Sure, it’s a beloved pastime that Noriko (Emily Kuroda) has passed down to her daughter Hiromi (Mia Tagano), whom she raised in the U.S. “Everybody needs something that’s just for themselves,” Noriko says of her hobby. But why couldn’t that take the form of another activity, even another traditional Japanese one?
Same goes for the butterflies that adorn Erik Flatmo’s set and David Lee Cuthbert’s video
projections. Noriko mentions butterflies just once, in a throwaway moment at the beginning of the script. Are they there to attest to the many transcontinental migrations — physical, familial, psychological — that characters make? To tell us the four women at the play’s heart are as delicate as diaphanous insect wings?
The whole premise of Velina Hasu Houston’s drama, under the direction of Leslie Martinson, feels equally arbitrary and contrived. Noriko and her sister Natsuko ( Jeanne Sakata), who still lives in Japan, haven’t seen each other in years, not since Natsuko condemned Noriko for marrying Eamon (William Thomas Hodgson), a black U.S. soldier, and leaving Japan for the States. The deaths of their husbands, coupled with exacerbating memory and cognition problems for Noriko and mobility issues for Natsuko, motivate a reunion, staged by their two daughters Hiromi and Sayuri (Elizabeth Pan), both put-upon caregivers who keep in touch via early video chat technology. It’s 2000, and orb-shaped webcams offer halting video feeds in all their grainy, pixilated glory, next to projected windows of “Minesweeper” and “Solitaire.”
Nobody really wants that reunion to happen — the sisters because of their resentments, the cousins because of the inconveniences — yet the script allows them to overcome each of their obstacles, emotional and logistical, with little more than an “aw, shucks” before everything’s hunky-dory again and it’s back to yet another serving of tea. When over the course of mere moments, Noriko pulls a 180 in surrendering her driver’s license and then later reckoning with the extent of her neurological issues, it’s not because either scene earns those major realizations but only because the show’s story line dictates that they be so.
Houston’s dialogue commits a variety of sins. It’s overwrought. “My mind may not remember, but my heart won’t forget,” Noriko says. It’s trite, but maybe you can’t have an American family play until someone says, “A promise is a promise” and “Your mother is still your mother.” It also over-explains: “Your mom raises you Japanese in America, and I grow up American in Japan,” Sayuri says, long after we got the point.
While the scenes between Hodgson and Kuroda are tender, aptly conjuring the breathless first blush of love as well as the way memory can mingle seamlessly with the present, much of the other acting is declamatory. Tagano’s tone never varies from that of a lowlevel, half-hearted whine.
Eventually, “Calligraphy” manufactures some hysterics and a feel-good resolution, but all that was telegraphed from the show’s opening scenes. “Calligraphy” is the kind of play you’ve seen without even having seen it.
The script allows characters to overcome their obstacles with little more than an “aw, shucks.”