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

Yew's use of the chamber play form is immediately apparent in the staging of Porcelain. In the note on staging that precedes the text, Yew explains:

On a bare stage are five chairs that face the audience; they are lined in a straight row.

There are many red origami paper cranes littered about the stage floor and around the chairs. Dressed in white, JOHN, an Asian male in his late teens, sits in the middle chair. Deep in concentration, he relentlessly folds paper cranes as the audience enters the house. When the play begins, the four characters VOICE ONE, VOICE TWO, VOICE THREE, and VOICE FOUR enter from the wings and sit on the remaining chairs. All VOICES are played by Caucasian men of various ages dressed uniformly in black.

It is important that all characters, particularly JOHN and VOICE ONE, do not look at one another throughout the play unless otherwise indicated.

No music or sound effects should be employed during the play. (6)

Yew makes no attempt at verisimilitude; Porcelain's set is minimalist in design and serves a functional, rather than ornamental, role. The five chairs that constitute the only stage properties in the play are used to provide seating for the actors rather than to re-create the interiors of the jail cell, the London streets, or the public lavatory. Other elements of the staging are laden with symbolic meanings. The contrasting black and white costumes-colors that, in the West, often are used to signify the clash between forces of good and evil-comment on the play's central tension: that is, how Asian cultures and peoples are isolated and "mythicized" in and by the West (33). Similarly, the red origami paper cranes-the only hand property used in the play-provide some insight into John Lee's characterization, particularly his emotional state-of-mind; as Dr. Worthing explains to a reporter later in the play, the cranes represent "a Japanese tradition that if you [fold] the paper cranes-a thousand of them-your wish [will] come true" (112).

The means of stage expression is also restricted by Yew's choice to employ only five actors to represent the many figures who appear throughout the play. That four of these actors are designated only by the generic moniker "VOICE" enables them to play multiple roles and signals a shift away from rounded, three-dimensional characters-standard fare in classic realist plays. This shift away from lifelike characters allows Yew and his spectators to focus on the action of the play and on the ways in which that action is rendered tangible in and through language rather than on the characters' interior psychological motivations, which classic realism emphasizes. That no music or sound effects are used to manipulate the audience's emotional response further demonstrates how Yew emphasizes language and action rather than characterization and technical or musical effects. Even in terms of acting, Yew manages to resist the pull toward a "heavy" dramaturgy by insisting that the characters "do not look at [or respond to] one another throughout the play."