Review and Preview for PASSAGE

A quote you see going around lately is, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Passage, a 2020 play by Christopher Chen will be on stage in September at 12th Ave Arts, produced by Yun Theatre and directed by Christie Zhao, with that exact idea at its heart. 


In June, the show had a three-day run as part of Strawberry Theatre Workshop’s Directors Festival, also at 12th Ave Arts and also directed by Zhao. I saw the earlier one and I look forward to the next.


Waiting for the show to start, some friends and I made what turned out to be a discovery. Upstage, there was a platform that would have been circular but for an irregularly shaped slice cut out of the round pie. The missing portion was downstage. 


We guessed it was likely that at some point those sections would come together to complete the circle. Then we joked that maybe the platforms never come together, even though they so obviously fit and that would be a physical manifestation of the tragedy of the show. 


The joke came true, in a way. The sections did come together, apart, and together again several times. But the message nonetheless of Passage is there are forces that can break things in such a way that no one can put them back together. 


Passage is a reimagining of A Passage to India, a novel by E. M. Forster. Like the book, it is a story of colonialism. The word is never used, though, as I recall. The characters speak only about people from Country Y having come to live in Country X. We learn that people from Country Y are running things and are in charge of everything important, from the hospital where one of the characters works as a doctor, to the leader of Country X, who is called a puppet of Country Y. Describing first, without labeling makes the reality hit harder. 


The plot follows several relationships. (The characters all have one-letter names.) 


Q comes from Country Y to join her fiance, R and befriends Doctor B. 


F comes to Country X to take a teaching job. 


Another Xer is eager to form a business relationship with a person from country Y. 


In an early scene several Xers at a party debate whether a person from Country X and a person from County Y could be friends. People answer in various ways. But as the story moves along, there’s never any melting in the pot, in fact it boils over when Q and F make a day trip to some local caves with B. 


In local myth, the caves are a place perhaps to find enlightenment, or transformation. But something bad happens there. A gun is involved. (This is not a spoiler, you will know it’s coming.) Afterward, things do change, abruptly in the relationships between the characters. 


As at the party, people respond in various ways. The incident tears relationships apart. Some feel devastated, others vindicated. None can escape the unjust context. Their struggles over the particulars only keep it in place. 


The New York Times said the play “sometimes feels more like a therapeutic workshop than a narrative drama.” But that misses the point. I think Passage is telling us that no amount of personal or interpersonal work can heal our relationships, perhaps not until we become aware of the forces that keep us divided.


A question, maybe, for a theatergoer might be, why see a play without a happy ending. Maybe the answer is, it’s relevant. The novel was published exactly 100 years ago. The topics and themes weren’t really new then, and similar things are still happening today. So the right question maybe, is how do we live in a broken world. 


Info: https://yun-theatre.com/

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