durango
THEATER REVIEW: 'DURANGO'
A family drives to find itself
BY LINDA WINER
Newsday Staff Writer
November 23, 2006
When "BFE" opened 18 months ago at Playwrights Horizons, the daring and haunting mystery put Julia Cho on the list of young playwrights who make us hopeful about the future of serious theater.
"Durango," which opened Monday at the Public Theater, has comparably complex characters: Korean-Americans whose American dream got somehow stuck in a dusty nowhere of Southwestern towns. The works share a core of melancholy and quiet dislocation. Both have been co-productions with the Long Wharf Theatre and sensitively performed. Unfortunately, the new one has more mundane secrets and unfolds them in more self-conscious, predictable ways.
The focus of the earlier work was a teenage girl with an erratic hermit of a mother and a sweet nobody of an uncle. This time, the family is all-male - two teen brothers and their father, a distant first-generation immigrant whose wife died of cancer before their younger son, Jimmy, could know her.
Of course, nobody really knows anybody in this sad little family, until the man suddenly decides to pile his boys into the car and drive from Arizona to Colorado to see the Durango Mountains.
Director Chay Yew moves the almost cinematic number of scenes with simplicity, smoothly integrating kitchen-sink drama with enchanted maternal flashbacks and fantasies for Jimmy's comic-book superhero. Modest sets, designed by Dan Ostling, use just enough realistic detail to clarify without burdening the lean and shifting styles.
James Saito, so touching as the uncle in "BFE," allows the father to unravel with bursts of shame, pride and fury. We see in the first scene that, after 20 years in a tedious white-collar job, he has been laid off and escorted out by a security guard. Eventually, his boys must be told, but not before the stoic man almost kills himself in the small pool of a dreary roadside motel.
James Yaegashi has just the right swagger and vulnerability as elder son Isaac, a screw-up who wants to be a musician but is forced by his father into medical school. Jon Norman Schneider brings a hopeful anguish to Jimmy, a golden boy driven to cheer everyone else up.
Secrets are spilled, but only the first one draws promising parallels with "Death of a Salesman." Isaac sings and strums his guitar for a couple of moody songs (written by Cho) that suggest he will definitely need a day job.
Even the several minor characters (played by Jay Sullivan and Ross Bickell) have layers under their skin. When a retired teacher asks the father how to say "take it easy" in Korean, the father says, "I don't think there is an expression like that."
Despite its shortcomings, "Durango" confirms Cho as an original voice of unassuming grace.
DURANGO. By Julia Cho, directed by Chay Yew. Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., Manhattan, in a coproduction with the Long Wharf Theatre. Tickets $50; $10 Thursdays. Call 212-967-7555. Seen Monday.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
An American dream derails in 'Durango'
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
BY MICHAEL SOMMERS
Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK STAGE
NEW YORK -- A troubling journey a man shares with his sons in "Durango" parallels his disappointed existence. "Funny, you know?" he wonders. "You look back at your life -- at all the things you chose -- and you don't know how you got here."
Opening yesterday at the Public Theater, "Durango" is Julia Cho's bleak yet compassionately written consideration of the American dream. The contemporary story centers on Boo-Seng Lee (James Saito), a middle-aged Korean émigré abruptly downsized from his paper-shuffling job after 20 years.
Thrown for a loss, Boo-Seng decides to drive from his Arizona home for a first-time visit to Durango, Colo., where a historic railway transports tourists through old silver-mining communities.
His wife died some years ago. His oldest son Isaac (James Yaegashi) -- an aimless guy in his early 20s -- is none too thrilled by the prospect of such a trek. His younger boy Jimmy (Jon Norman Schneider), still in high school, eagerly sees the trip as an opportunity to connect with their uncommunicative dad.
And so they go.
Along the not terribly exciting way to their destination -- characteristically, Boo-Seng takes a shortcut, only to get lost -- tensions between the brothers and their father begin to boil over.
In the past, both sons have tried to please their rigid, withdrawn father's ambitions for them to get ahead. Isaac indifferently applies to medical schools. Jimmy miserably has become a swimming champion. Eventually they reveal their unwillingness to follow his directions any longer.
The distant memory of Boo-Seng's wife haunts all three in different ways.
Finally arriving in Durango, they learn the sightseeing train already has left the station. Because Boo-Seng never thought of making reservations, there's no chance they can get on another train for months.
This dead-end outcome of their excursion underscores the futility of Boo-Seng's well-intended but clueless life in America.
A disconsolate story, the play benefits from the subtly sympathetic tone of Cho's writing, which depicts these men as desperately wanting to make each other happy but temperamentally unable to do so. The solid acting and understated design of director Chay Yew's production complements the spare nature of Cho's text.
Scarcely a barn-burning drama, "Durango" derives its effective sense of poignancy through quiet means.
Michael Sommers writes about New York theater for The Star-Ledger. He may be reached at msommers@starledger.com or (212) 286-4297.
November 21, 2006 THEATER REVIEW | 'DURANGO'
An Immigrant Family’s Three Survivors, Traveling Together, Alone
Father in a funk? Brother grappling with a shameful secret? Barren silences casting a pall over the dinner table?
Forget family therapy. Gather the troops, hop in the S.U.V., fill the tank and head for the open highway. There’s nothing like a road trip to knit back together those fraying family bonds. As indie movies like “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Pieces of April” affirm, tight quarters, fast-food pit stops and kitschy motels form the postcard-perfect backdrop for the regeneration of domestic fellow feeling, always laced with a little bit of distancing attitude, of course.
This increasingly familiar genre — call it the dysfunctional family road-trip comedy-drama — is transposed to the stage in Julia Cho’s tender-hearted “Durango,” a new play about a Korean immigrant and his two sons squabbling, soul-baring and eventually healing, just a little, as they tool around the Southwest.
The play, which opened last night at the Public Theater in a sensitive production directed by Chay Yew, is cooked with mostly familiar ingredients. The generation gap that can yawn particularly wide in immigrant families is by no means fresh theatrical ground. The subterranean racism that confronts minorities in the heartland also strikes familiar chords, as does the mournful lament for the American dream shimmering feebly at the vanishing point on the horizon. Even the fantastic sequences in which the troubled high-schooler, Jimmy (Jon Norman Schneider), takes refuge in fantasies of fictional superheroes have a been-there feeling.
And yet Ms. Cho, a young playwright of clear promise, develops even the potentially hackneyed themes with a laconic, natural ease that earns respect and admiration. Nothing in “Durango” feels particularly new, but nothing in it feels contrived or dishonest, either. (Which is more than you can say for some of those indie movies.)
After a twangy musical prelude that sets a lonesome tone, the play opens with a particularly affecting, unadorned scene set in a bland-looking office. A man stands rigidly behind a desk, his eyes locked on its empty surface. In thickly accented English, he trades small talk about the family — one son, Isaac (James Yaegashi), is heading to med school; the other, Jimmy, is a star of the high school swim team — with the fellow awkwardly shifting in a chair beside him.
Only when Boo-Seng Lee (James Saito) stoops to retrieve a box of personal effects from the floor, an exhausted houseplant peeking over the cardboard rim, do we find a source for the sad tension quietly oozing from him. He’s just been laid off and is being ushered out of the office building immediately by Jerry (Ross Bickell), the friendly security guard, who’s almost as embarrassed as he is.
As Boo-Seng stands rigid, unable to face the next moment, Jerry gently prods him: “Mr. Lee? I have to be at another office by 4. Let’s go.”
Pulled from his reverie, Boo-Seng mechanically replies: “Yes. Let’s go.”
That everyday phrase is used with resourceful cunning by Ms. Cho throughout “Durango,” accruing new resonance with each repetition. She has a gift for imbuing homely details with a just perceptible varnish of poetic feeling. Someone in the play is always impatiently saying “let’s go” to someone else, but all three of the Lee men are revealed to be painfully aware of their own tendency to stand stock still, emotionally speaking. The road trip that provides the dramatic impetus of “Durango” may be a near-cliché, but it is nevertheless an apt metaphor for a drama that gently contemplates how hard it can be to move forward in life, even when you can see the right road stretching out before you.
Returning home, Boo-Seng interrupts the silence over dinner to announce gruffly that it’s time for a family vacation. “I have some time off,” he explains. This excites Jimmy, who has experienced little family togetherness since the death of his mother some years ago. But Isaac, broody and uncomfortable, would rather stay at home. He has to be blackmailed into going by Jimmy, who wins him over by giving him a peek at his secret notebook, where he defeats his anxieties by proxy through the exploits of comic strip superheroes.
Although he bores the boys with an enthusiastic pep talk about Korean history, Boo-Seng has never learned the language of real communication. When the family stops at a motel for the night, he must unload his grief on a stranger by the pool. (In one of the play’s rare false notes, Boo-Seng moves a little too smoothly into a glib moment of self-reflection, wondering: “Why did I want so little? Where did I learn to want so little for myself?”)
All three of the Lee men are struggling with a secret, and the play ultimately settles into predictable emotional and dramatic grooves. Both boys’ lives have been shaped by their father’s unspoken disappointment in his own, and his determination that they stick to the standard formula for achievement in America. Isaac confesses to his brother that he never really showed up for his med-school interview in Hawaii. Jimmy confides that he actually hates swimming. Looming ahead like an Applebee’s on the roadside, familiar to the point of banality, is another dark secret, the big H: homosexuality.
Thankfully, the well-worn contours eventually give way to a few unexpected kinks and crannies. And the unadorned performances are pleasing, with Mr. Saito etching a quietly moving portrait of a man quietly coming to terms with the knowledge that his sacrifice may never yield the satisfactions he had hoped for. Mr. Yew, a playwright himself, has a graceful sense of pacing, and the production is uncommonly well designed. Daniel Ostling’s sets, gently lighted by Paul Whitaker, contrast the cramped spaces of the men’s lives with the freedom of the road.
And despite the schematic flaws of her plot, Ms. Cho wisely resists the kind of feel-good ending that would wrap up a movie on a heartwarming note. The voyage of the Lee men may take them through some unexpected emotional territory, but they end where they began, retreating into comfortable isolation, the fragile shoots of new feeling between them abandoned, at least for now.
AN AP ARTS REVIEW: Evocative revelations on the road to Julia Cho's 'Durango'
The Associated Press
It's amazing the things people can learn about each other while packed inside a car for hours, cruising along an interstate highway.
The proverbial road trip serves as a fitting vehicle for Julia Cho's evocative new play "Durango," which opened Monday at off-Broadway's Public Theater. Three men shift uncomfortably in their car seats as they roll toward mutual understanding in an understated but polished production that purrs like a well-tuned engine.
Cho's latest contains themes from her previous work. Like "BFE," which received a successful staging last year at Playwrights Horizons, "Durango" tells the story of an Asian-American family living somewhere in the Southwest.
Boo-Seng (James Saito) is a 56-year-old widower and father of two who's forced to take a painfully honest look at himself and his family when he's laid off. Still in shock from losing his job, he decides to take his sons on a road trip to Durango, Colorado, a town we later discover holds a special significance to Boo-Seng's past.
Isaac (James Yaegashi) is a prospective medical student struggling with his black-sheep image and apprehensions about the future. He would have nothing to do with his father's plan if not for the beseeching of his younger brother Jimmy (Jon Norman Schneider), a high school swimming phenom and family do-gooder.
Boo-Seng's sons are perpetually frustrated by the emotional distance that separates them from their stoic, demanding father. With external forces in each of their lives building tension, the buffer among them is eroded until it reaches a critical point at which the men must accept basic truths about each other, no matter how uncomfortable.
Saito, Yaegashi and Schneider turn in fine performances and display strong chemistry, which is key to the play's success.
With a story and characters that are refreshingly unpretentious and ordinary, Cho displays the ability to reveal inspiration and brilliance in everyday life. Her characters are revealed gradually with an ever-present feeling of movement toward a destination.
This engrossing momentum is maintained under the direction of Chay Yew, with an elegant, gliding set design by Dan Ostling. Dream sequences and flashbacks are signaled effectively by unobtrusive lighting by Paul Whitaker.
"Durango" — a co-production with Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, where it appeared earlier this fall — will runs through Dec. 10 at the Public's Martinson Hall.
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Three for the road
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006
In "Durango," the story of a Korean-born widower, Boo-Seng Lee, and his two sons, the younger boy, Jimmy, is mad about superheroes. He even draws his own, the Red Angel, but he loves Wolverine. That X-Man's appeal is obvious to big brother Isaac. Wolverine "was made to get hurt ... to suffer. That makes him the most human."
There's plenty of pain afflicting the Lee family in Julia Cho's moody drama, which opened last night and runs through Dec. 10 at the Public Theatre, 425 Lafayette St. Boo-Seng (James Saito) has just been fired from his job after 20 years. Isaac (James Yaegashi) has sabotaged a sure shot at med school. Jimmy (Jon Norman Schneider) is a teenaged swimming champ who has quit the team because of personal conflicts.
These secrets and others come out during a road trip from Arizona to Durango, Colo., a destination filled with ache for Boo-Seng, a man who confides to a stranger that he's been bored "since always." Dan Ostling's simple yet striking design uses sliding panels to create the Lee home, an office, the highway and a roadside motel.
Cho packs a lot into the car trip. She touches on assimilation, sibling rivalry, the burden of parental expectations and homosexuality (which comes up in two separate subplots - overkill, if you ask me).
Cho includes theatrical flourishes, nicely realized by director Chay Yew. The Red Angel appears onstage, as if echoing Jimmy's thoughts. Mrs. Lee also shows up. Her face is projected on the stage floor while her husband and sons recall tender and not-so-tender private conversations. The three leads are especially fine in these monologues.
Road trips are routes to typically big changes and transformations in dramas. Not here. Cho seems more interested in creating an atmosphere than in offering simple solutions. It's realistic, even if it leaves you wanting.