What does it mean to record your experiences even as you’re experiencing them? Are you living a life of pastiche, with the cultural influences and opinions of friends and strangers who are just a click away constantly defining and redefining your own perspectives? Or are you a “narrativist” who seeks to cut a path of orderly storytelling in the chaos of information?
Those are just a few of the questions raised by Christopher Chen’s “The Hundred Flowers Project,” now in its local premiere at Silk Road Rising under Joanie Schultz’s direction. Chen’s metatheater-about-metatheater-about-political-propaganda piece follows a small collaborative theater group working on a play about Mao Zedong that, like a virus, seemingly begins replicating the repressive philosophy of the chairman. The director, Mel (Mia Park), ends up as little more than a Big Brother-like off-stage video presence in the second act, whose encouraging mantras about “congealing” the story while keeping it “organic and supple” begin to feel like ominous dictates.
It’s heady stuff, to be sure. But neither Chen nor Schultz quite seems to have figured out how to combine the parallel (and in some cases, well-worn) tracks of the story of a fractious theater company with its own interpersonal tensions with the tragedy of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. The former pushed collectivized farming and rapid industrialization, and created a famine that killed millions, while the latter violently purged “revisionists” from the Maoist government and Chinese population alike. Chen’s title refers to Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign, which was sold as a way for the people to openly critique the regime but ended up with the criticizers executed or put in jail.
It was kind of like what would happen if restaurant owners who got negative reviews on Yelp had the power to summarily execute the commenters.
Yes, of course that’s trivializing what happened in China. But that’s one of the problems in Chen’s conception of propaganda and control in the age of Facebook and Twitter. It asks us from the outset to buy the idea of a play as a potential — and powerful — tool of cultural propaganda.
If only. Movies and television, sure — see Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd” or Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled.” Certainly the process of theatrical collaboration — like political revolution — is inherently messy, and it gets messier the further one gets from the usual hierarchical models. (Ask any member of Chicago’s long-running, directorless Theater Oobleck.)
And yes, the theater motif is a metaphor for more dangerous institutions. But in order for it to fully work, there has to be some level of basic believability. I never bought that the actors in the play-within-the-play here would continue working with Park’s Mel, who at least in the first act comes off as a puffed-up and clueless grad student. Schultz’s direction also feels a little schizophrenic, with the wry observational wit of the first act disappearing in the second, when the play-within-the-play starts devouring its own tail, “erasing” its history as it happens and taking on an increasingly ponderous mood. (Schultz did a much better job with the power-play-within-a-play “Venus in Fur” at the Goodman last spring.)
But despite these caveats, there are some undeniably smart and thoughtful insights here into how we craft our viewpoints in the age of instant media. We can “erase” our online presence, but that history is living on somewhere. The multimedia elements, designed by Michael Stanfill, integrate seamlessly with the onstage performances. The central love triangle between Mike (Karmann Bajuyo), his nonactor wife Julie (Melissa Canciller) and his former lover/castmate Lily (Hannah Toriumi) allows for some lovely grounded moments from all three, but particularly from Canciller, whose suggestions of adding a journalist to the “pastiche” script in order to clear up the timeline makes her the odd woman out.
At risk of outing myself as a narrativist, I identified with Julie. The beauty of “The Hundred Flowers Project” is that Chen leaves it open-ended enough for you to pluck your own blossoms of insight about messages and their mediums from its chaotic soil.
When: Through Nov. 23
Where: Silk Road Rising, Chicago Temple,
77 W. Washington St.
Running time: 1 hour,
50 minutes
Tickets: $35 at 312-857-1234, ext. 201 or silkroadrising.org
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