The Korean Wave 2006 - Korean Cultural Service

The New York Times, tuesday, november 21, 2006
e5
An Immigrant Family’s
Three Survivors,
Traveling
Together, Alone
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
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.
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