‘Office Hour’ has misfires on shootings
A reunion of Glickman Awardwinning playwright Julia Cho and Berkeley Rep, with a play examining a threat of a mass school shooting, might sound like an auspicious prospect. In the wake of the Parkland, Fla., massacre, has there been a more urgent time to find art that examines our national ritual of asking why no one saw the signs and prevented slaughter, art that probes into the dull ache of fear these killings instill in us, the narratives we typically hear about shooters?
“Office Hour,” which opened Friday, March 1, under the direction of Lisa Peterson, presents itself as having those laudable goals. But in pursuing them, Cho’s play manipulates its audience to the point of irresponsibility. It doesn’t unpack our American nightmare so much as steep you in alternately trite and preposterous versions of it, painted in pools of blood, then laugh at you as if it were just kidding,
throwing away whole scenes with that laziest of playwriting devices: “It was just a dream, a fantasy!”
Cho is no amateur, but even in its opening moments, the show declaims rather than evokes. As creative writing adjuncts Gina (Jackie Chung), Genevieve (Kerry Warren) and David (Jeremy Kahn) gather to discuss a student who never talks but turns in horrifically violent writing assignments, the actors are so flat, so stripped of personality, so expository in their delivery that it’s like they’re performing a life skills skit for teens at a school assembly. When David ends the scene telling Gina, “And if you had any sense, he’d scare the f— out of you, too,” it’s as if Cho dropped an f-bomb to make the script seem edgy. High schoolers wouldn’t be fooled either.
Gina’s the one with Dennis (Daniel Chung) in class now, so it’s she whom the others task with reaching out to him, to divine if he might be a danger to himself or others and if something might be done to help him. (Also, Gina and Dennis are Asian American, so the two must have a psychic connection, the others imply.)
It’s here, during Gina’s office hours in an aggressively bland shared office (Matt Saunders did the scenic design), that the script embarks on trust-shattering loop-theloops and bridges to nowhere, imagining different ways the encounter between Gina and Dennis might unfold.
Initially, if it flounders, it’s because floundering is the only route available to Gina. Hulking silently in her doorway in all black, complete with sunglasses, hat and hoodie, Dennis takes a ridiculously long time just to accept an invitation to sit. Each query gets only a stony face, so a jittery Gina does what many would do, fill the embarrassing silence by any means necessary.
But as the coaxing and empathizing give way to scolding, raging, confessing and free-associating, scenes lose all grounding in the reality of character or situation; they’re pure what-ifs in the playwright’s head. The script makes the encounter go miraculously, like a feel-good movie, then horrifically, then absurdly: Picture Gina affecting broken English in a stereotyped accent, speaking into a pen as if she’s Dennis’ mom calling him on the phone, then Dennis magically taking the bait, as if a make-believe telephone game were all he needed to come to terms with his mommy issues. Except actually, don’t waste your time investing in it, because like every other scene here, Cho might wash her hands of it, rewind and take another tack with the next blackout.
If part of Cho’s very point is that these shootings unmoor us from reality, that in our attempts to reckon with mass shootings we’re stuck in our collective irrational subconscious, neither does she offer any insight about what drives Dennis that you couldn’t glean from so many real-life shooters’ self-important social media activity. If Gina ultimately writes off her meeting with Dennis — just as the play writes off so many of its own scenes — Cho might be being practical. Maybe, as our society is structured now, there’s not much we can do for students like Dennis. But do you really need a whole play to tell you that?
The actors are so flat, so stripped of personality, so expository in their delivery that it’s like they’re performing a life skills skit for teens at a school assembly.