Reviewed
by Michael J. Opperman and Juliette
Cherbuliez
The blinding strobe pops
periodically in After a Hundred Years, as if the whole audience were photojournalists. These
repeated flashes sometimes mark the end of a scene, but they also suggest
moments when the audience tries to understand the scene before it. This is the
reigning conceit of "After A Hundred Years," which opened yesterday at
the Guthrie's Dowling Studio as part of the Guthrie's Bush Foundation-funded New Play
Program, and plays through the end of June. Naomi Iizuka's newest drama sets us as
witnesses to a highly complex story - that of the legacy of the Khmer Rouge in
today's Cambodia, and the broader political context of Western involvement in
the South Asian Peninsula.
The
play takes place in and around the capital city Phnom Penh. The time: Now. This
time - the present, but also back then, during the time of the Killing Fields and
perhaps also in the future. Thus the play's title, a quotation of an Emily
Dickinson poem: "After a hundred years /Nobody knows the place, -/ Agony,
that enacted there,/Motionless as peace." In the other two stanzas of the
poem, strangers stroll through graves, and only the wind has the means to
remember the past. Like Dickinson's evocation of a place steeped both in pain
and sorrow, and in the failure of memory, "After A Hundred Years"
brings together survivors of the Khmer Rouge, perpetrators, and American
witnesses to the suffering in the impoverishment of today's Cambodia. What is
the difference between the mass graves of the Killing Fields and the fate of a
city with - as the play tells us many times - a population where over 50% of
those tested for HIV are positive (according the NAPC)? This living out of
history's presence - its refusal to go away, but its unfortunate tendency to
return in new, more unsavory forms - is the driving force of the play.
When
Luke (Peter Christian Hansen) has the opportunity to interview one of the last
surviving members of the Khmer Rouge still refusing to disavow his political
past (James Saito), he meets up with a college friend, Tim (Robert O.
Berdahl) who is
a doctor treating AIDS patients. Add to the cast Tim's wife Sarah (Stacia
Rice) who has
her own past, a middle-aged business woman and fortune teller, a teenage
prostitute, and a blind musician, and the play succeeds, with a cast of only
six actors, in suggesting a complex, multi-generation and international portrait
of the problem of political guilt and survivor's memory.
Iizuka
is known for works that tackle big subjects and render them human and personal,
and this is the challenge of "After A Hundred Years." In many ways it
succeeds: Mia Katigbak, James Saito and especially Robert O. Berdahl offer
complex and nuanced performances of characters who straddle ethical and
historical lines in order to survive. Everyone in this play has secrets, some
vastly geo-political and some very personal. This might be the problem with
Iizuka's script, that it too quickly parallels a genocide with an innocent
accident, and asks the audience to parse the perpetrators' levels of
responsibility. There are times in this script when glibness takes hold and
platitudes abound, but perhaps for Iizuka we are full of cliches when it comes
to history repeating itself, or being written by the victors, or about being at
once political and personal. But when a character says, "Save your cliches
for someone else" the audience's laughter was maybe more empathetic than
it should have been. If director Lisa Portes doesn't always parse these clich_s
as the tired platitudes that they are, Iizuka's might explain far too much, as
if we might actually be able to solve the "mystery" of genocide and
the legacy of multinational involvement.
With
so many strong performances it is unfortunate that Peter Christian Hansen was
both perfect for his part and fell so far short. Brimming with energy as Luke,
a virile, single, American freelance journalist used to the war-torn
experiences of reporting from Afghanistan and the Sudan, he is the center of
our attention and the major source of our identification; his interloping in
this foreign land with its deep, absolutely unexotic mysteries mirrors the
audience's own position. But Hansen's performance lacked restraint and spiraled
too quickly toward indignation at the network of injustices around him, whether
past or present. In the end it was laughable that he would be a seasoned
journalist whose stories could make a difference or capture "the
truth," as characters kept saying. But Hansen's predicament - which may be
a failing of the script and not of this actor or his director - is also the
audience's: how do we make choices about our involvement in histories we hardly
know, let alone understand?
For
those who appreciate an attempt at rendering this kind of question both highly
personal and exceedingly complex, "After A Hundred Years" will prove
satisfying, if occasionally uneven. A beautiful set by Brian Sidney Bembridge with lighting by Marcus
Dilliard
highlighted the Dowling Theater's intimacy. When a stream of rice pours onto
the stage we cannot help but be reminded of how precious, and beautiful, mere
survival is. It is worth this reminder, in Minneapolis in a theater next to
former flour mills, when the price of half the world's staple food is causing
riots in South-East Asia and across the planet.
In
conjunction with "After A Hundred Years," the Guthrie is also
offering workshops on "Genocide and Justice" June 23 and June 28.