The Silver River (review)

The Silver River. By David Henry Hwang. Victoria Theatre, Singapore. 10 May 2001.

The Asian premiere of The Silver River opened in Singapore en route to New York's Lincoln Center in 2002. Three rising stars--composer Bright Sheng, playwright David Henry Hwang, and director Ong Keng Sen--collaborated to create this new piece of music theatre based on a Chinese legend.

The plot follows the romance between a mortal Cowherd and the goddess Weaver, but with several twists. The celestial Buffalo (Karen Kandel), a character not in the legend, now plays the lead, functioning as the lovers' matchmaker. In this new version of the story, the Jade Emperor (Jamie Guan) also has a prominent stage presence. However, the lovers, taking little initiative in their own romance, are reduced to caricatures. The Weaver is virtually forced into a relationship when the Cowherd takes away her flying-gown as she is bathing. His courting method--presumably acceptable in legends--borders on kidnap, but the Buffalo teaches even this trick. The love scene, marked by stiffness in acting and poverty in body language, communicates the lack of passion between the two.

The production is notable for its aesthetic staging. The show opens with an eye-catching set (designer Christine Jones) representing the Silver River (Milky Way). Real water upstage plummets into a canal that flows downstage, dividing the stage in half. When lit, the Silver River is soothing for a modern audience tired of special effects. The set, unchanged throughout the show, serves a thematic function as well. It becomes the physical embodiment and constant reminder of the temporal, spatial, and ideological boundaries between the East and West. The director, imaginative and sensitive with color, shape, and texture, creates one appealing image after another along the Silver River. Although these stage pictures do not always serve particular purposes of dramatization, they produce a poetic quality for the production. The transparent waterway, however, rather than representing the heavens, evokes the image of a swimming pool or aquarium with its greenish content, especially when the heroine in her swimming suit dips into it.

Interestingly, the Cowherd and Weaver are double cast; the former by a baritone (Brace Negron) and a flautist (David Fedele), the latter by a dancer (Muna Tseng) and a pipa-player (Li Hui). The fact that the Cowherd is played by Caucasian males, the Weaver by Asian females, and the Buffalo by an African American may indicate an innocent and politically correct attempt at blind casting. However, the stage images speak for themselves, sometimes with quite unexpected messages. For instance, when the script invokes "eternal love," the audience cannot help but see the voiceless feminine Oriental conquered by the operatic (and thus vocally powerful) masculine Occidental. Also, the Weaver's means of expression--dance and pipa music--fail to empower her, as the non-conventional dance vocabulary communicates dubious meanings at best, and the music relates only abstract emotions. At the operational level, the Cowherd's libretto and the Buffalo's narrative interpret the choreography and musical sentiments, and thus speak for the Weaver. Therefore, images of Oriental women remain mute throughout the show.

The Buffalo, as the narrator, has the most authoritative voice, yet speaks for some higher cosmic/moral order through her actions: she falls in love with the Cowherd only to reserve him for the Weaver, giving up her love without a struggle. Her voice thus effects a self-denial that points to an inferiority complex, or her domestication by the Cowherd. Casting an African American as the Buffalo and Caucasians as the Cowherd certainly will not discourage such interpretations.

Two problems are inherent in blind casting: first, the audience is not blind while the director only pretends to be blind, and second, the images discredit the words. As a result, blind casting is inevitably meaning-loaded, whether intended or not on the director's part. This was true when Peter Brook cast an international group of actors to play Indian gods and demigods in his...