Strong acting gives melody to 'Jook Songs'

"Hey Nelson!" shouts Thuyen Nguyen, TC '02, in the last scene of Jook Songs. "What are we doing tonight?"

"The same thing we do every night," replies Nelson Wong, SY '02. "Go to Ivy Noodle."

Nguyen and Wong are soon joined by Soowhan Lah, TC '04, and Cindy Im, SY '02. Rowdy play-fighting proceeds before everyone sits down for that familiar late-night snack. Suddenly, a racist slur from a customer turns a typical night on its head.

The last piece is striking not just because it brings a real-life incident to the stage. Wong, Nguyen, Lah, and Im are not just playing themselves, reading from scripts that imitate their actual thoughts and words. They are themselves, devoid of theatrical gimmicks or self-conscious posturing. Their candidness and their familiarity with each other is poignant, comforting, and rare to see on a stage.

STEVE YBARRA/YH Standing before the group, Roger froze. Someone had stapled his lips together.

But in many ways this scene is an exception in the show, both in terms of its structure and its effect on the audience. The production is almost entirely a roughly cobbled-together string of monologues—all exploring relationships between lovers, friends, and family members. All the writing is original, and most of it is autobiographical, making Jook Songs not just another theater, writing, or performance group piece.

The name "Jook Songs" derives from a Cantonese phrase that literally translates as "empty bamboo." The expression has been used as a metaphor to describe how Chinese-Americans are neither completely Chinese nor American. The performance group did indeed start out as mainly Chinese-American. It now has Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Taiwanese members, to name a few, and is hoping to recruit members from the South Asian community.

Originally, the basic premise of Jook Songs was to have a writing and performance group for Asian-American men. This idea originated in Los Angeles in the early '90s, when Dan Kwong and Gary Sang-Angel began a group now known as "Everything You Wanted to Know About Asian-American Men But Didn't Give a Fuck to Ask."

The idea spread to the East Coast when Sang-Angel moved to Philadelphia and started "Something to Say." From there, Dave Lin took it to New York in 1995—where it was reincarnated as "Peeling"—and finally to New Haven, when he began teaching at the Yale School of Medicine. Working both as a clinician at Bridgeport Hospital and as a professor, Lin began Jook Songs in 1998; the group remained all-male until 1999, when it went coed.

The set of this semester's show is sparse, and dramatic scenes between members are similarly occasional. The show attempts to tackle this problem in its first three monologues: Lah's speech about his ex-girlfriend, Emi Lesure's, TC '02, about her grandmother, and Im's about her deceased aunt. The speeches are personal, honest, and touching; the genuine feeling and struggle behind the words is obvious. You wish you were sitting at their feet and listening to their stories even though you are a mere 20 feet away—a distance that is sometimes difficult to overcome.

It is a relief when the first dramatic scene appears in Im's piece—Chang shuffles onstage in fuzzy blue slippers and a bathrobe as Im's aunt, with Wong as her son. While the scene is no feat of superb acting, it draws in the audience more quickly than an isolated monologue. The piece by Ju Yon Kim, SY '02, integrates monologue and dialogue even more successfully—Kim is flanked on each side by her mother (Victoria Lai, ES '04) and father (Lah), whose exchanges with their daughter are funny, open, and immediate. Kim's speeches to the audience weave the entire piece together.

These kinds of scenes not only dramatize the stories; they also tap into the group's most valuable resource: the connections between its members. It is likewise possible for a solo monologue to sustain itself—Wong's solo piece, for example, is particularly notable. The identity of the person he's addressing, as well as his exact location, is only slowly revealed to the audience, and the dramatic tension is compelling.

But, for the most part, the individual stories resonate most powerfully when they're supported by the strength of the group as a whole, as the last scene makes clear. Racism is not simply used as a didactic tool or an artistic metaphor. It is a reality firmly planted in a collective experience—a reality that shapes not only our individual relationships with the world, but also our relationships with each other, as when Im, the only female in the scene, speaks out while the males remain silent.

The emotional struggles we witness are particularly resonant because they remain unresolved. We get the sense that these issues have already continued on with this group of friends well beyond the dramatic scene that's represented. The production as a whole is poignant in its rough-edged honesty, but it also gives us just a small glimpse into the potential power of these voices.

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