Theater: "Caught" toys with your mind
Its very hard to talk about "Caught", the intriguing play by west coast playwright Christopher Chen, without giving the whole thing away. So if you plan to see it soon, please read this introductory paragraph, then jump to my last Summary paragraph. This play is definite mindf***, manipulating your concepts of truth and morality in a very play-within-a-play-within-a play-within-a-play Russian dolls structure that both bewilders and provokes. Interviews with the young playwright suggest that some of this comes from his biracial identity (Irish-Chinese) and lack of fitting into any one cultural scheme, or "truth" system. His inspiration also came from several recent examples of journalists embellishing or fabricating material, while defending the action based on the need to give the reader a true sense of the injustice being written about. The play forces us to re-examine clearly divided rules regarding journalism, nonfiction vs. fiction. It does so by deceiving the audience time after time, in a wicked and exciting way.
Part 1 occurs before the play starts. You enter the space to see a performance art piece by dissident Chinese expatriate performance artist Lin Bo, recently arrived in New York after imprisonment in China. In the piece New Yorkers paid $1 on Air BandB to spend 4 hours in a reproduced jail cell. The exhibit shows films of several such participants, with their emotional responses to the experience. The only program provided gives a history of Lin Bo, and provides the sort of explanation one would get at an art gallery of a performance art piece, including its inspirations (e.g. noted artists Tehching Huang and Ai WeiWei, both of whom underwent repression in China in the past decades). You then take your seat in front of a jail cage--the emotional impact is strong.
In Part 2, the theater director awkwardly introduces Lin Bo, who tells his story in a rather direct, yet impassioned way, explaining how both the art installation and the play were developed. It is not yet clear what the play is. All this was very convincing, but odd, sort of like a play starting out with a lecture by the playwright (which of course is a common thing in music, with pre-concert talks).
In Part 3, "Lin Bo" and two actors portray his recent interview with the editors of the New Yorker, in which they have found evidence that parts of his published testimony about his China imprisonment were perhaps false. These are mostly details (was his food cabbage soup or potatoes?) and he grows increasingly angry about their doubts. They defend their questions with written critique by a (white) Stanford expert in Chinese detention systems, and as the questioning gets more heated, use the "Stanford" card repeatedly, and seem to trust academic opinion over his direct experience in prison, enlisting the audience's sympathy for Lin Bo. Lin Bo gradually admits to errors in detail (done to give the reader a better sense of his imprisonment), then to not being interrogated at all, then to not really being imprisoned, then to actually being from California and making up the whole thing. Its now clear that we have been part of a ruse within a ruse. Lin Bo is not a dissident author, but an actor, and he is portraying a ruse. I do not think I was the only audience member taken in by all of this... a good reason not to read too much about a play in advance!
In Part 4 we meet the "real" playwright, now interviewed by one of the actors from the prior scene. This interview gradually brings the interviewer to tears, as her efforts to discover the "message", "intent", and "interpretation" of the play are bluntly fended off by the "author" (yet another actor). The author rejects the western aversion to journalistic "lies", saying:
"A lie is not a bad thing. It is a natural occurrence and is totally understandable....Why did they lie? Because a lie is a new home. A place of return after long and lonely journeys in the dark....In our search for truth we move into something artificial once again."
She rejects the interviewer's attempts to frame the disagreement as stereotypical east-west differences or with politically correct phrases. The interviewer's and our frames of reference have been overturned as the concept of truth and the value of seeking it are attacked. Each time the interviewer things she finally "gets it", the author annoyingly rebuffs her with some condescending variant of "that is not at all what I meant". Hence the tears. The interviewer flees, her cognitive scheme unmoored, .
In the final part, the two actors who played Lin Bo and the author are now at home in their apartment after the play. A benign conversation about how the performance went that night amplifies into a conflict over their own misassumptions and self-conceptions of their worth. It turns out they were both sexual partners of the famed Chinese dissident modern art master that they both revere and derive artistic inspiration from, and that he had some negative things to say about both of them (revealed during pillow talk with the other). They now have to question the lies of their mentor, and how it does or does not affect their reverence for him. Was truth in their relationship a good thing?
Summary: Ultimately, this inventive play illustrates with its own structure the flexible notions of truth, facts, and their relative importance vs. artistic impact in changing society. An example given of such relativity is "798", a noted Beijing exhibit of subversive art that is, in fact sponsored by the Chinese government as an example of Chinese tolerance. Playwright Chen feels that this manipulation also occurs in the west by selective use of "facts" and by oversimplification in the goal of logical explanation. He says:
"Mao Zedong created his own reality by sheer force of will and by words. He created his own truth....It's such a simple narrative to say that the Chinese government is illegitimate, because its not democratic. Therefore, that perception is going to color everything you see about it. And so that allows someone like Trump to have a very simple narrative--that the Chinese are stealing our jobs..."
While I am still not clear on what better system can replace our search for truth and facts, the play challenged me to think about how these are used, manipulated, and may not always be ideal. The brilliance of "Caught" was how its structure was itself a meta-revelation of its philosophic point. I look forward to seeing another play by Christopher Chen.
Part 1 occurs before the play starts. You enter the space to see a performance art piece by dissident Chinese expatriate performance artist Lin Bo, recently arrived in New York after imprisonment in China. In the piece New Yorkers paid $1 on Air BandB to spend 4 hours in a reproduced jail cell. The exhibit shows films of several such participants, with their emotional responses to the experience. The only program provided gives a history of Lin Bo, and provides the sort of explanation one would get at an art gallery of a performance art piece, including its inspirations (e.g. noted artists Tehching Huang and Ai WeiWei, both of whom underwent repression in China in the past decades). You then take your seat in front of a jail cage--the emotional impact is strong.
In Part 2, the theater director awkwardly introduces Lin Bo, who tells his story in a rather direct, yet impassioned way, explaining how both the art installation and the play were developed. It is not yet clear what the play is. All this was very convincing, but odd, sort of like a play starting out with a lecture by the playwright (which of course is a common thing in music, with pre-concert talks).
In Part 3, "Lin Bo" and two actors portray his recent interview with the editors of the New Yorker, in which they have found evidence that parts of his published testimony about his China imprisonment were perhaps false. These are mostly details (was his food cabbage soup or potatoes?) and he grows increasingly angry about their doubts. They defend their questions with written critique by a (white) Stanford expert in Chinese detention systems, and as the questioning gets more heated, use the "Stanford" card repeatedly, and seem to trust academic opinion over his direct experience in prison, enlisting the audience's sympathy for Lin Bo. Lin Bo gradually admits to errors in detail (done to give the reader a better sense of his imprisonment), then to not being interrogated at all, then to not really being imprisoned, then to actually being from California and making up the whole thing. Its now clear that we have been part of a ruse within a ruse. Lin Bo is not a dissident author, but an actor, and he is portraying a ruse. I do not think I was the only audience member taken in by all of this... a good reason not to read too much about a play in advance!
In Part 4 we meet the "real" playwright, now interviewed by one of the actors from the prior scene. This interview gradually brings the interviewer to tears, as her efforts to discover the "message", "intent", and "interpretation" of the play are bluntly fended off by the "author" (yet another actor). The author rejects the western aversion to journalistic "lies", saying:
"A lie is not a bad thing. It is a natural occurrence and is totally understandable....Why did they lie? Because a lie is a new home. A place of return after long and lonely journeys in the dark....In our search for truth we move into something artificial once again."
She rejects the interviewer's attempts to frame the disagreement as stereotypical east-west differences or with politically correct phrases. The interviewer's and our frames of reference have been overturned as the concept of truth and the value of seeking it are attacked. Each time the interviewer things she finally "gets it", the author annoyingly rebuffs her with some condescending variant of "that is not at all what I meant". Hence the tears. The interviewer flees, her cognitive scheme unmoored, .
In the final part, the two actors who played Lin Bo and the author are now at home in their apartment after the play. A benign conversation about how the performance went that night amplifies into a conflict over their own misassumptions and self-conceptions of their worth. It turns out they were both sexual partners of the famed Chinese dissident modern art master that they both revere and derive artistic inspiration from, and that he had some negative things to say about both of them (revealed during pillow talk with the other). They now have to question the lies of their mentor, and how it does or does not affect their reverence for him. Was truth in their relationship a good thing?
Summary: Ultimately, this inventive play illustrates with its own structure the flexible notions of truth, facts, and their relative importance vs. artistic impact in changing society. An example given of such relativity is "798", a noted Beijing exhibit of subversive art that is, in fact sponsored by the Chinese government as an example of Chinese tolerance. Playwright Chen feels that this manipulation also occurs in the west by selective use of "facts" and by oversimplification in the goal of logical explanation. He says:
"Mao Zedong created his own reality by sheer force of will and by words. He created his own truth....It's such a simple narrative to say that the Chinese government is illegitimate, because its not democratic. Therefore, that perception is going to color everything you see about it. And so that allows someone like Trump to have a very simple narrative--that the Chinese are stealing our jobs..."
While I am still not clear on what better system can replace our search for truth and facts, the play challenged me to think about how these are used, manipulated, and may not always be ideal. The brilliance of "Caught" was how its structure was itself a meta-revelation of its philosophic point. I look forward to seeing another play by Christopher Chen.
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