BEYOND THE SILK ROAD: STAGING A QUEER ASIAN AMERICA IN CHAY YEW'S PORCELAIN

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2004 by Diehl, Heath A

What marks Porcelain as such a controversial work is its subject matter. The play centers on John "Eone" Eee, a nineteen-year-old Asian man who meets and eventually murders a Caucasian man, William Hope, in a Eondon public lavatory. In his introduction to the published version of the play, John M. Clum offers the following summary:

Born, appropriately, with the name Eone, which he anglicized to John, Eee feels he will never fit in. As a gay man, he is alienated from the culture and family into which he was born. As an Asian man in London, he feels ignored, rejected. In the gay bars and clubs he is invisible. Occasionally, for a moment, sex in the toilet gives him a sense of belonging, even love. For a few weeks William Hope offers Lee what he has always wanted, but for Hope the toilets are a place to get sex without having to admit to himself or to anyone else that he is gay. Yet, uncharacteristically, after their encounter, Hope invites John Lee out for a drink, to his home and bed, and briefly, into a relationship. When the relationship starts to become more than physical, to move toward the love John Lee seeks, Hope panics, tries brutally to move the relationship back to a merely physical one, and, when that isn't possible, leaves John and returns to furtive, safe encounters in the toilet. John's anger and desperation at Hope's rejection take him beyond rational behavior into the realm of operatic passion.... Like Don José [in Bizet's Carmen], Lee is discovered cradling the body of the lover he killed. (356)

In form, Porcelain can most accurately be classified as a chamber play. Patrice Pavis defines "chamber theatre" as "a form of performance and dramaturgy that restricts the stage means of expression, the number of actors and spectators and the scope of the themes" (46). Pavis explains that this form of theatre developed around the turn of the twentieth century as a response to the "heavy" dramaturgy of classical realism, a dramaturgy based on "multitudinous artistic and technical personnel, a wealth of scenery, the excessive importance of the audience conferred by the picture-frame or center stage or 'theatre for the masses,' the frequent interruptions of intermissions and the grandiose apparatus of the bourgeois theatre" (46). One of the earliest and most widely-known examples of chamber theatre is August Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata (1907). Stridently anti-realist, the play follows the pursuits of The Old Man, Hummel, who seeks to destroy the Colonel, a man who years prior seduced the woman Hummel loved. Whereas realist plays typically call for elaborately rendered box-sets, chamber plays often used selective realism (i.e., showing only part of the location in which the action takes place) and unorthodox staging techniques borrowed from Impressionist and Expressionist paintings. The opening stage directions for The Ghost Sonata, for example, indicate that scene one takes place "Outside the house.... The windows of the Round Room face the street in front of the house, and at the corner look on to the suggestion of a side-street running towards the back" (Strindberg 268, emphasis added). Moreover, whereas realist plays typically examine "ordinary people in their natural setting" in order to explicate "the physical and social influences that made them what they are"-for example, Ibsen's Nora Helmer in "a pleasant, tastefully but not expensively furnished, living room" or Chekhov's Madame Ranevskaya at her family estate (Styan 9)-chamber plays place generic characters (Strindberg's the Old Man, the Student, and the Aristocrat) in suggestive and/or symbolic locations (Strindberg's Round and Hyacinth Rooms). And whereas realist plays employ a complicated plot structure in which multiple minor narratives overlap and interweave with one another (e.g., consider all of the plot complications that arise from Captain Alving's past act of adultery in Ibsen's Ghosts'), chamber plays use a polyphony of voices to reconstruct a single event.