Bahala Na (Let it Go) (review)

Mayano Ochi (Young Amah) and Alexander Galick (Takashi) in Bahala Na (Let It Go). Photo: Charissa Uemura.

One of the missions of Mu Performing Arts is to produce new works by up-and-coming Asian American playwrights, and while Clarence Coo has been writing for more than a decade, the world premiere of Bahala Na (Let It Go) marked his arrival as a significant voice in Asian American theatre. Although Coo’s play evokes a familiar story of an Asian American man seeking a connection to previous generations and their histories, it also expands the terrain of Asian American drama literally to the locale of the Philippines and metaphorically to the seldom-treated topic of the region’s strife among the Chinese, the Filipino, and the Japanese. Excavating history is at the heart of his play, but Coo also draws attention to the difficulty of this process due to passage of time, transportation of bodies, and subjective memory. This historical instability is reflected in several ways, but most importantly through the ambiguity surrounding access to the family history and the nonrealistic style of the play. While it appears that the matriarch of the family, Amah (Jeany Park), is the main source of the family history, there is no clear explanation that it actually comes from her, and the play’s dream-like quality through specific elements of production such as staging, choreography, and music adds to the sense that this history is not exact, but only an approximation. These unrealistic elements suggest that our relationship to the past is tenuous and that history does not exist in a concrete, knowable form, but at the same time the play places much value in locating the intersections of past and present lives.

The organization of the stage space was the most important means for differentiating the characters and their stories. The stage was comprised of sections, with multiple levels, which allowed several stories to unfold simultaneously or for one narrative to quickly move into another. The scene of Amah and her grandson Jason (Eric Sharp), for instance, which takes place in the present and anchors the entire play, occurred on the highest level, stage left. This was consistent throughout the play, so that the audience knew that present action would, for the most part, occur there. The use of space also signaled which role an actor was playing. Most actors played two thematically intertwined characters; when Sharp, playing Jason, went to the lower level, center stage, the audience was able to easily follow his transformation into Wei Wei, Jason’s father. Much happened onstage, but the set, in contrast, was bare. There were very few props—only Amah’s wheelchair had a significant physical presence—and the overall color scheme was light blue for both the stage and the curtains that created a back wall. This produced an ethereal effect, in line with the story’s dreamy landscape.

The production’s dreamy quality is related directly to the ambiguity of the play in regard to its narrative space. No logical explanation surfaces within the plot regarding the point of origin for the story. The play begins with the aforementioned scene of Amah and Jason in a hospital room, Amah in a coma and Jason in need of advice about fatherhood. He and his partner Dan (Alexander Galick) are soon to be adoptive parents, and he sits by Amah for days, desperate for her to speak. This is the starting point of the chronicle of Amah’s marriage to Ang Cho An and their subsequent move to the Philippines, their unhappy marriage due to Ang Cho An’s homosexuality, Amah’s affair with a Japanese soldier and the birth of their son Wei-Wei, and Amah’s move to the United States with her son’s family. This elaborate story, while connected to Jason and Amah, has no clear origin. The best explanation is that the story exists in...