The Immigrant Song

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to see “Heading East” put on its not-in-Broadway-but-hoping-to-get-there production at the Asian Society. What I saw was a highly stripped down version; a cast of less than a dozen, a mere quartet rather than an orchestra, and collection of props that included nothing more than a cowboy hat and a stack of wooden boxes. When the name of the play is prefaced with “A Charity Event for the Asian Society” most would expect a stuffy professorial production with actors standing around discussing the Asian-American experience in halting voices. Thankfully, “Heading East” is rousing musical with humorous energetic songs that, if I were more comfortable in with my heterosexuality, I would describe as toe-tapping.

B.D. Wong, known to most as that Chinese guy from “Law and Order” though others may recall his work as that Chinese guy in “Jurassic Park”, stars as a turn of the century immigrant from rural China who follows the rumors of riches across the pacific to San Francisco. Like everyone else, however, he arrives to discover that the city is not the golden paradise it was said to be (although I believe now The Golden Paradise is the name of a club on Castro street) so like all good Americans he immediately re-writes his dreams and convinces himself that what he really wants is to open a shop in Chinatown. The musical spans ten decades and three generations. By the end Wong’s character is in his late nineties, finally an official citizen, and jaded with the American experience. But even after nearly a century of poverty, racism, war, and regret he’s still tap dancing like an amphetamine-fueled Gene Kelly. That, I believe, is going to be the secret to show’s success. While it easily could have been a ponderous guilt trip the play and its entire cast were enthusiastic and joyous.

History plays a big part in “Heading East” as well. We get to see the Chinese community’s reaction and involvement in the gold rush, the railroads, the great earthquake which destroyed the hall of records (this also happens to be the base for the best song in the show), World War Two, The Korean War, Vietnam, and others. We also get some interesting insight about the tensions these events created between the various Asian communities that I, as one of the white-skinned blue-eyed devils, was not even aware of.

It’s ironic that the thing that makes this musical unique, its look into history and American cultural microcosms, will probably be its most difficult selling point for Broadway. Going on merit alone the charm of “Heading East” is enough to give it a shot at the big stage but are people going to see a play with an all Chinese cast that puts a mirror up against the idea of American success? Perhaps a handful of enlightened New Yorkers will but this is the kind of material that scares tourists. They flew all the way in from Topeka and they want to see a blond girl in a big dress singing about love and dancing around in glitter. This play deserves a chance and it’s good enough to get there. I just hope that in the process of getting there it doesn’t get dumbed down in order to appeal to ma and pa mid-west whose idea of culture is ordering the Mandarin Chicken Salad at McDonalds.


© 2010 Dan Howard.
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Work cannot be reproduced for any reason without consent of Dan Howard.

The Young and The Listless

Genius is a burden. Few geniuses are going to be the life of the party or even get invited to the party. They find it hard to hold down jobs and make friends. Famous geniuses, it’s often said, have collapsed under the weight of their own brilliance. We tell ourselves that that’s what happened to people like Jack Kerouac and Emily Dickinson but the truth is that their burden was not from within. They fell apart because of us. Society is created and maintained to accommodate people at their most average. The more “normal” you are the better you fit in. It’s just not in our nature to nurture those with bizarre ideas and strange theories. They are told to cut their hair and get a job when the ironic thing is that they would do just that if someone could just give them a good reason. The geniuses ask too many questions and we don’t like people who poke holes in how we perceive things so we ignore them and relegate them to an existence on the edge of society.

The edge of society, in the case of The Rattlestick Theater’s production of “The Aliens”, takes place next to a dumpster in an alley behind a greasy diner in rural Vermont where Jasper and K.J., two self-described geniuses, languish away their lives. Jasper is a chain smoking would-be novelist and K.J. was, until his mental breakdown and subsequent departure from college, was studying theoretical calculus and now spends his days testing the effects psychedelic mushrooms have when combined with various food groups. The two strike up a friendship with a high school kid named Evan who is working in the diner for the summer. Evan is the physical embodiment of everyone’s most awkward teenage years and, until he meets these two, he’s on his way to growing up to be what everyone else wants him to be. He too is unique; maybe not a genius, but unlike Jasper and K.J. Evan has the backbone to keep the world from defeating him. Together they sit, they smoke, they talk, they quote Bukowski, they sing the occasional song, and that’s basically the extent of what happens over the course of two hours.

Though the themes in “The Aliens” are unique the play is far from perfect. It feels as though, with a little cutting of the fat, they could have gotten it down to a lean hour and fifteen minute production and not lost any of the impact. The dialogue is well written but there are pauses between words and sentences that you could drive a Mack truck through. At points the audience was left squirming during long silences between one person talking and another. Although I believe they were doing this to make a point, to try to make us feel as uncomfortable in out own skin as people like Jasper and K.J. must be, but you can get that point across with ten seconds of silence instead of sixty. There are a few other bothersome moments; on three separate occasions the actors express their anger by knocking something over which I always find to be a cheap and easy way to show emotion in any kind of acting. In a play about such emotional complexity it feels like someone banging on a trash can lid in the middle of a violin solo.

“The Aliens” teeters dangerously on the edge of pretentious and boring (truth be told it falls of the edge once or twice), but it succeeds in its most basic aim to make you feel sympathy for the weirdos and to question yourself as to why you find these characters weird at all. Is it because their ideas are absurd or is it because they show us that ours are more absurd?


© 2010 Dan Howard.
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Work cannot be reproduced for any reason without consent of Dan Howard.

But is it art?

“The human body is a work of art.” It’s a phrase that has been around for centuries and has now been said so often that most agree without even thinking. If you’ve ever had a hippy art teacher (yes, I am aware that adding the word “hippy” in front of art teacher is redundant) you’ve heard it a million times and nodded before going back to your pastel drawing of fruit which, for some reason, always seems to be arranged precariously on top of a Greek column. Honestly, who eats fruit like that?

But as a society, how committed are we to this premise? Once we’re dead, preserved, dissected, bisected and flayed is our form still something to be awed? For most people, I imagine, the answer would be no. Michelangelo’s David and his glorious marble abs or The Venus de Milo, whose armlessness only enhances her breast size; those are universally considered works of art. The Bodies Exhibition, under the guise of a scientific exposition, peels back the curtains (or, perhaps more accurately, skin) from our standard of the fig-leafed Adonis to show us a different side of splendor. True, those of a certain mindset will go and find themselves in a formaldehyde-soaked horror show, nevertheless I, and many others, were taken in by the fascinating displays of bone and sinew and veins. The bodies themselves are arranged in poses and with expressions they might have taken in life. Some are arranged, like the football and basketball playing bodies, to show the prowess of the muscle and ligament in action; however others are clearly put together with an almost Lovecraftian morbid sense of humor. One specimen is a man who has been severed in half vertically from head to pelvis in order to high-five himself. Another body lies in a glass display sliced up like deli meat to show every cross section of the viscera.



There is a need that is innate in people, even in those who don’t admit it, for grotesquery. Its what calls more to the freak show than to the art museum, what slows us down when driving by an accident with necks craned to the left while a garden passes by unnoticed on our right, and its why our ears prick up more to the whine of a passing siren than they do to a symphony. Our mortality is a wall that stands ahead of us. Behind that wall is a mystery and it will remain one and all we have to survive on is scraps of knowledge about death. We live for those tiny peaks through the cracks in the wall.

I am not suggesting that a violent car wreck should be considered art; I am suggesting that true art exposes something about us personally or about humanity in general even if it’s something we’d rather not see in ourselves.When you’re at The Bodies Exhibition, staring at the desiccated tissue and dead valves that was once a living human being, the question you should be asking yourself is, “Why can’t I stop staring?”


© 2010 Dan Howard.
All rights reserved.
Work cannot be reproduced for any reason without consent of Dan Howard.

Freddy Kreuger: World's Worst Gardener

I am not one of those anti-remake people. Some of my best friends are remakes and I took a class in college on Remake-American studies. But do we really need to be retold the story of the most famous haunted kid-touching gardener in history? Okay, to be fair the only two other movies about gardeners I can think of are “Being There” and “The Constant Gardener”; the former featuring a simple-minded but tender Peter Sellers who teaches people to love again and the latter featuring Ralph Fiennes, who simply didn’t have time for pedophilia what with his constant gardening.

Remaking “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is like remaking “Schindler’s List” (which, I believe, is slated for a 2012 release, directed by McG, starring Tyrese Gibson, and I think the phrase “Tokyo drift” is now somewhere in the title). Everyone knows about Freddy Krueger and there nothing all that new you can do with the story. Freddy did some kid diddling at a preschool, the parents of the aforementioned diddled kids burn Freddy alive, and Freddy sues the parents in order to pay for his skin-graft surgery. No wait…he seeks revenge for the loss of his precious subcutaneous tissue by killing the now sexy teen versions of his diddle victims with his Wolverine claws in their dreams. So overall a pretty standard plot…By the way, why is a child molester the only one who is granted the powers if a dream warrior? Him and Dennis Quaid. The only logical conclusion one can draw from that is that Dennis Quaid is also a disfigured sexual deviant ghost.


(Improper gardening equipment)

But aside from that I take no issue with the film’s plot. God knows I would do the same thing in Freddy’s position, though instead of claws I’d probably use a light saber or those shoulder-mounted rockets from “Predator”, or a shoulder-mounted light saber launcher. I mean, if it’s a dream I might as well go hog-wild. My issue is with the fact that zero effort went into this movie. When I go to see a remake of a movie made in the eighties I don’t want to see the same exact movie minus the feathered hair and synthesizer soundtrack. The director, Samuel Bayer, essentially did this, which I find very presumptuous or, as we say in the film business, Gus Van Sant-ian. If you’re not going to offer anything new at least throw in some old staples like boobs and gore.

You know what? I’m just going to go ahead and make a movie called “Boobs and Gore.” No, actually, that title doesn’t have enough zazz for today’s kids what with their Twitters and Mac computers and tiny cell phones in their ears that make me think the androids have finally taken over. I’ll need to spice it up and call it “Boobs and Gore: Return to the Isle of Brassiere.” Get Michael Bay on the phone!


© 2010 Dan Howard.
All rights reserved.
Work cannot be reproduced for any reason without consent of Dan Howard.