Wes theater got off to a running start on Thursday with a performance of Charles Mee’s Chiang Kai-Chek. Lily Whitsitt ’06 and Jess Chayes ’07 both directed and acted in this Second Stage production, which went up in the ’92 Theater Thursday through Saturday.
This play is untraditional, to say the least. The dialogue is ambiguous. There is no character description or historical time. There may be two speakers, or a hundred. And the stage directions that open the show read: “Chiang Kai-Chek builds a house of cards throughout the entire piece so that the house of cards becomes a vast, elaborate structure.” Come again?
In fact, though the piece is titled “Chiang Kai-Chek,” anyone expecting a play about the Republic of China’s longtime President will be disappointed—or at least confused. However, most viewers will be confused by this play for one reason or another. There is no narrative per se, and it is only midway through the roughly 30-minute, two-woman adaptation that we get any clues as to why Mee titled his piece “Chiang Kai-Chek” at all. When asked about Mee’s choice of title a week before performance, Whitsitt said, “We’re still trying to figure [that] out.”
Don’t ask what this piece is about. Painted in broad strokes, though, it may be said to deal with nature and human’s violation of it, the search for truth, destruction and creation. This is a tall order for two performers, who set themselves the task of mounting this show in a scant three weeks—without having previously worked together. And because the abstract representation of these concepts can potentially come off as pretentious, part of Whitsitt and Chayes’ task was to make Mee’s text relatable and human. If Mee’s text is a web, the challenge is to draw in its viewers: to allow entrance without leaving the audience feeling trapped.
Whitsitt, Chayes, and Stage Manager Nick Benaceraff ’08 accomplish this almost immediately with their set design. The world they created is absolutely beautiful. The audience walks in to the ’92 to find that most of the theater has been closed off. Ushered onto three rows of bleachers, they face a long, narrow space filled with an intricate latticework of string. The few props on stage are the figurative spools around which the play is woven: a blackboard marked with a pattern of perpendicular lines, a tall ladder, some wooden stools and chairs. Ultimately, the strings become a central theme, and are used in innovative ways to visually bring the text to life. In one particularly haunting scene, for example, Whitsitt’s character uses them to suspend a chair at a tilt, visually underscoring her description of “desks and chairs…blown to one side,” a room in which, “[a]t the windows, there was no window glass and the window frames had been blown out.”
Chayes and Whitsitt masterfully use the spaces constructed—or rather, restricted—by the string, weaving their bodies over and under the maze they continue to create as they perform. Indeed, Whitsitt and Chayes’ physical work is one of the most impressive elements of this show. A veteran actor, Whitsitt once again revealed her powerful stage presence. One moment, in which Whitsitt tensely lifts her body half off the floor as her character notices the human casualties around her, sticks out in memory. Her self-command nicely contrasts the irreverance of Chayes’ character, and Chayes’ physical delicateness as an actor. This balance works especially well in Whitsitt and Chayes’ “love scene.”
“Chiang Kai-Chek” builds to a stunning climax as, per Mee’s stage directions “the house of cards goes up in flames.” In Whitsitt and Chayes’ production, this is the piece’s most visually powerful moment: the curtain that has constricted the playing area is pulled back to reveal the innards of an entire house suspended in the air. The ’92 is filled with rocking chairs, suitcases, and bikes, and we see that the latticework covering the stage in fact extends the entire length of the space. “I’ve done my job, it’s in her hands now,” says Chayes’ character, and the two pass through the string maze and out of the theater.
Whitsitt and Chayes have indeed done their job. They have produced a creative adaptation of a difficult show that defies theatrical conventions right and left. And the work of asking questions about the piece is now in our hands. Questions like, what do we think of Mee’s “Chiang Kai-Chek”? Do we like it? If not, why not? Does the text work as a “script?” If so, what are other ways it can be adapted to the stage? The abstract theatrical style of “Chiang Kai-Chek” might not be for everyone. But I urge everyone baffled by this show to go back and take another look at his beautiful, challenging text, and try to come up with their own answers.
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