No Foreigners Beyond This Point (review)

Based on his experiences in China in the early 1980s, Warren Leight's new play, No Foreigners beyond This Point is the story of two young American idealists and their six months together as teachers at the Da Lang Foreign Trade Institute in southern China. Though Andrew had a crush on Paula in high school, they barely knew each other when they traveled together to China. Andrew accompanied Paula chiefly as a pretext to get close to her. The play is in part about their burgeoning relationship. However, No Foreigners beyond This Point is a highly ambitious undertaking. In addition to tracing the relationship between Paula and Andrew, the play deals with, among other things, their negotiation of life in China in 1980, Chinese ideas about education and America, and the effects of China's Cultural Revolution. The play opens in the present with Andrew struggling to reconstruct what actually happened in China. Later we learn that he is addressing the Chinese daughter he will soon adopt. He is collecting letters, journal entries, and (he hopes) photographs in order to explain the profound impact China had on him.

The scenery consisted of a series of monolithic L-shaped wall units which rotated and re-formed to create various locations at the Da Lang Institute against a background of Chinese landscape painting, framed by a false proscenium of brick and ironwork. Sharp-edged rectangles of light illuminated a rectangular forestage and provided small, clearly defined acting spaces. Consequently Andrew and Paula were constantly confined as they became simultaneously surrounded and lost within the vast expanse of China. This metaphor of confinement resonates throughout the play. The movements of the two Americans are carefully restricted—both for comfort and convenience. The play is interspersed with reports on their activities by their students and colleagues to an unseen authority. Paula and Andrew break free of confinement and supervision when they secure bicycles from the black market and ride about the stage reveling in the freedom of expansiveness.

Regardless of Andrew's monologues to the audience, No Foreigners beyond This Point is Paula's play. It opens near the end of their time at the Institute when they were invited to remain for another semester. Vice-principal Huang convinces Paula to stay. Her decision to remain in China after Andrew's departure is the climax of the play. Up to this point, Paula and Andrew's relationship was marked not so much by mutual discoveries, growing passion or affection, or even the familiarity of cohabitation, but by brief glimpses of the gaps in their hastily formed relationship. Director Tim Vassen's staging highlighted the gaps in their relationship and heightened the poignancy of their isolation that led inexorably to Paula's climactic declaration to stay on in China.

Center Stage's production of No Foreigners beyond This Point fell into two categories. The actors playing Chinese characters (all played multiple roles) seemed to have worked in a different style than that of either Carrie Preston (Paula) or Ean Sheehy (Andrew), whose performances, especially Sheehy's, were less stylized. Nevertheless, the Chinese characters seemed no less real than the Americans. The direction emphasized a controlled and mannered acting style of speech and emotion for the Chinese characters. John Woo Taak Kwon was especially subtle as Vice-principal Huang. Even in rare moments when the Chinese characters were exuberant, as in the scene where they all waltz together at the Harvest Moon party, or during Free Conversation class, where the actors retained their mannered quality. Preston and Sheehy, by contrast, careened through the experience, matching the intensity of the other performers in spite of stylistic differences. Only when Sheehy soliloquized to the audience did the forward motion of the play lag.

Much of the humor in this play came from intricate negotiations of cultures. There were the malapropisms—(Ford "Exterminators" and "Flock-ner" for Faulkner). More interesting, however, were moments when communication...