Theater Review—

Searching For The American Dream, At Long Wharf Theatre

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — A Korean neighbor once confided to me that she felt imprisoned in the mind of a five-year-old. In Seoul she had been a respected school teacher; here she toiled at a menial job, imprisoned by her inability to master the intricacies of the language and pop culture of the country she and her husband had immigrated to. Like so many other immigrants before them, they stoically endured the sense of dislocation and anomie, focusing all their ambitions on the success of their children in this new world.

This is the subject of Durango, the third installment of playwright Julia Cho’s desert trilogy that explores the life of Asian-American immigrant families in the American Southwest, where she herself grew up.

The play, being performed at Long Wharf Theatre until October 15, opens as 56-year old widower Boo-Seng Lee is abruptly laid off from his desk job at an industrial plant (25 years of faithful service are not enough, when, as his manager explains, cutbacks have been ordered, and Boo-Seng does not fit smoothly into the “team structure” of his division). Clutching his belongings in a cardboard box he shuffles off in the humiliating company of a security guard.

Too devastated and ashamed to reveal this to his sons – Jimmy, a high school swimming champion, and Isaac, a college senior trying to get into medical school – Boo-Seng announces that the three of them are going on a vacation trip to Durango, a famous Colorado town that he has read about in a tourist brochure.

The rest of play takes place on the road: in the car, at various rest stops, and a seedy tourist motel, punctuated by flashbacks and memories.

This is not an easy trip. Boo-Seng is an angry man, both icily remote and tyrannical by turns. Incompletely assimilated in his adopted land, and now devastated by the loss of his job, he places all his hopes on the two boys and his idealized vision of what they can and should be.

Isaac, the guitar strumming slacker, and Jimmy, the studious high achiever who spends every spare minute working on drawings of an imaginary superhero he calls The Red Angel, look and sound completely American. But they carry with them a heavy cultural tradition of duty and obedience, the strict obligation to do what your parents expect, in recognition of the sacrifices they made for you in coming here. The weight of this burden, and the guilt that they feel from not meeting expectations, makes it difficult to recognize what they themselves really want.

Jimmy, the golden boy, is a sweet 16-year-old, the family peacemaker who cooks canned beef stew for their dinner every night, and dreams about the mother he doesn’t remember, while his fantasy-hero, the Angel, braves a burning building in order to save his trapped parents. Yet he is also haunted by a secret that he dares not tell.

Handsome and brooding, Isaac is weighed down by his reputation as the family disappointment, never good enough to live up to his father’s plans. Having been rejected by 15 medical schools, his last hope rests on an interview at the University of Hawaii, where his father’s boyhood best friend is on the admissions board.

Against all this looms the prospect of Durango: a metaphor for what you are supposed to want, even though you never knew enough about it to understand what it was. In a late night conversation with a friendly stranger at the motel, Boo-Seng confides that he never liked his job, or did anything else that made him happy. He simply made choices without understanding why, or how he ended up where he did.

Alienation, and its attendant bitterness, can be a contagious disease, and the boys are vulnerable to being pushed into lives that have no meaning for them, other than that their father has ordained that they follow the path he believes will make them more important and successful than he ever was. (Happiness is something that he has not thought about since he entered the arranged marriage that was chosen for him)

But Jimmy and Isaac are genuinely decent kids, who care deeply for one another. Whether or not they will be able to help their father transcend his despair and acquire some belated insight into himself, there is hope for them that they will survive and find out what they want. Certainly, watching this gripping, funny, and deeply compassionate play, you want the very best for them.

(Performances continue until October 15.

Call 203-787-4282 for performance and ticket details.)