‘Ho’ lacks who, where, when and why
There’s one moment when “Madame Ho” gives a glimpse of what it could have been. Late in the worldpremiere play, the title character, a Barbary Coast-era Chinatown brothel madam in full Victorian regalia, rides a galloping horse in the Sierra Nevada. “I got me freedom in the bank!” Madame Ho (Bonnie Akimoto) proclaims.
It’s the sort of image of an Asian woman that American theater doesn’t portray often enough: strong, joyful, loud, proud. When have you ever gotten to see an Asian woman, especially one in a bustle, be a cowboy?
But that’s one of the few clear moments in Eugenie Chan’s play, which opened Friday, Oct. 6, at the Exit Theatre, produced by Eugenie Chan Theater Projects in association with Intersection for the Arts and supported by 6NewPlays.
The fifth-generation San Franciscan wrote this show about her great-grandmother based on ancestral lore — “the family rumor mill, whispered fragments, faded memories or the barbed innuendo of a tight-knit Chinatown in the 1940s,” as she writes in a program note.
Directed by Jessica Heidt, “Madame Ho” feels just as inchoate as a wisp of a recollection, even though she’s assembled an ensemble of some of the finest Asian actors in the Bay Area. It’s often difficult to tell which of many small characters an actor is supposed to be portraying, whether they’re alone, to whom they’re talking, who has power and why that’s suddenly changed, whether they’re in Madame Ho’s brothel or somewhere else and whether a scene is over or a pause has just gone on longer than it should. For one character, Crow (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro), it’s hard to tell whether she’s human or bird or why she keeps telling us we’re in 1896, when it’s not at all clear whether or why the last scene took place in a different year.
As the play begins, Ho, as she’s called in the program, totters on, offering prayers to the hats and knickknacks that hang on Randy Wong-Westbroke’s spare set, above which Chinese supertitles are projected. Soon she cuts herself off, mid-offering: “You know the rest.”
The show takes a similar attitude toward its audience, acting as if it needn’t establish anything, as if we should already know the layout of the brothel, the pecking order inside it and how Ho came to run it. The lack of definition becomes especially frustrating when compared to what the show actually spends time on: reading aloud at length from a crochet instruction manual, for instance.
“Madame Ho” seems to want to depict its title character, her prostitutes and her daughter Daisy (Lisa Hori-Garcia) as full of humor, pluck and individuality even as they fully suffer xenophobia, sexual slavery and abuse. But you can neither feel for characters nor laugh with them if you don’t know who, where or when they are and why there are.