East West Players Revives 'The Joy Luck Club,' a Universal Tale of Mothers and Daughters
by Julie Riggott
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - Before heading into their fourth week of rehearsals of The Joy Luck Club on a recent Tuesday evening, Karen Huie, Emily Kuroda and Elaine Kao sat in the lobby of the David Henry Hwang Theater in Little Tokyo, talking about how Amy Tan’s 1989 novel about mothers and daughters will translate on the stage. When the actresses suddenly realized the show would open for previews in a week, their faces betrayed a bit of disbelief or even anxiety. Then they all laughed joyously.
Tan’s book inspired a 1993 film (which she co-wrote with Ronald Bass) and then a theatrical adaptation by Susan Kim, first produced in 1998 and revived in New York in 2007. Now East West Players in Downtown Los Angeles is planning the L.A. premiere of the show that will run Nov. 12-Dec. 7, with previews Nov. 6-9.
The play, like the book and film, unfolds in vignettes that reveal the stories of four Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters living in San Francisco. The mothers have all overcome daunting circumstances in their native land, from arranged marriages and abusive relationships to lost children, but the daughters have not heard these stories before. They struggle to understand their mothers and deal with issues of self-worth cultivated in childhood.
“When I think, ‘Why do this play now?,’ the short answer is because everybody still has issues with their mothers,” said Huie, who plays Lindo Jong, the mother who, as a teen, cleverly escapes an arranged marriage in China.
Kao plays the daughter, Jing-mei “June” Woo, whose mother has died before the story begins - and before she has told her daughter the entire tragic tale of her life in China. Kuroda plays a mother named An-Mei Hsu whose own mother became a concubine and sacrificed her life for her.
Though Tan’s story, with its Chinese customs and superstitions shared by the mothers in the mahjong group called the Joy Luck Club, is a window on a specific culture, it’s also a universal story.
“Everybody has a Chinese mother,” Huie said, causing everyone to erupt in laughter.
Huie’s comment hit home with director Jon Lawrence Rivera, who was born and raised in the Philippines. “The more I work on this play, I feel like my mother is really Chinese American,” he said. “There’s so much I can translate into what my mother would do and what she would say to my sisters.”
Rivera said that passing on stories from one generation to the next is the most important message he hopes people take away from the play. He has nieces who have never been to the Philippines and recognizes the value of talking about the family’s history and experiences as a way of handing down life lessons, through stories of both sorrow and happiness.
“Whether you’re Chinese American or Filipino American or Japanese American or Irish American, there are stories in cultures and families that ultimately need to be shared,” he said.
In planning this production, Rivera thought about how his own family told stories. One person would start and others would chime in and correct details and add to the yarn. “All of a sudden, seven people were telling the story,” he said.
In the play, Rivera wanted the actresses never to be idle. If they aren’t in a scene, they’re changing costumes and wigs to play another role. During rehearsals, they were discovering the ways the production pulls them together as an ensemble and keeps them on their toes.
“Sometimes we’re standing offstage and all of a sudden somebody goes, ‘Damn,’” Huie said. “And they go running off because they’re in the wrong place. They realize they were supposed to enter from the other side or they were supposed to pick something up. So it’s that kind of energy offstage. That’s part of the adrenaline.”
The actors also play instruments offstage. Kao performs “a very small part” on piano, Huie shakes maracas, and Kuroda plays the woodblock, but plenty of other actors in the show are trained musicians, bringing Nathan Wang’s original score to life with the cello, recorder and piano.
In the film, music sets the tone from the beginning. The sound of a traditional Chinese stringed instrument creates a mood of sadness that continues throughout.
“There’s that erhu pulling that long string and you’re on the brink of crying, and it’s just the opening credits. And you go, ‘Oh my god, this is gonna torture me’,” said Huie. “There’s a lot of restraint in the way that film was directed.”
The actresses said that Rivera has given them freedom to explore the characters and make them as fully realized as possible given theater’s limitations of time and set design. This version takes on an entirely different tone than the film.
“It has a good balance,” Kao said of the play, leaving most of the talking to her older cast mates.
Kuroda agreed that the play will not require nearly as many tissues as the film did. “I don’t think of it as sad,” she said. “To me it’s about connection, because there’s a huge disconnect at the top of the play. It starts with that disconnect and ends with connection. It’s kind of a celebration.”
Kuroda can relate to Tan’s characters because, she said, there was a language barrier between her and her own mother, who’s from Japan. It was only as an adult that she appreciated her mother’s wisdom. To see that mother-daughter bonding happen so dramatically onstage is one of the joys of theater, Huie pointed out.
“How often does that happen in a real family, where you’re going to sit down with your mother and have this full conversation that makes an arc and by the end of it you’re crying and hugging your mother?” she asked.
“In the theater, like with reading a novel too, you have the luxury of interacting with the material… and you have the opportunity to feel your feelings, and I think that’s the magic of theater.”
Join the cast for a conversation on Nov. 15 at 5 p.m. and the director and EWP Artistic Director Tim Dang on Nov. 22 at 5 p.m. East West Players, 120 Judge John Aiso St., (213) 625-7000 or eastwestplayers.org.
Contact Julie Riggott at .