In Hwang's 'Golden Child,' A Cultural Collision Course

The faults in David Henry Hwang's "Golden Child," which opened Saturday at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater, are right there on the surface -- but then so are its virtues. Director James Lapine has emphasized austere beauty in the sets, costumes and lights while encouraging a certain engaging hamminess in the acting, and that suits the play's divided soul perfectly.

Set in the China of 1912, Hwang's drama focuses on Eng Tieng-Bin (Stan Egi), a young Chinese businessman eager to embrace Western ways, and his three wives: the sardonic First Wife, Eng Siu-Yong (Tsai Chin); the scheming Second Wife, Eng Luan (Midori Nakamura); and the beautiful Third Wife, Eng Eling (Liana Pai), the youngest of the three and his true love. After three years in the capitalistic Philippines, and under the influence of a Welsh missionary (John Christopher Jones), the impetuous and idealistic Eng decides to remake his life -- and those of his wives.

For the husband, Christianity and the West represent a frank, straightforward way of approaching life, as opposed to the secrecy, manipulation and rigid adherence to duty that he feels characterize his marriages -- and by extension his country. For the wives, however, it's a different matter. In this China where women are socially powerless, the wives have been forced to learn Realpolitik. Where Eng sees a new, free life, they see only that if he converts to Christianity, two of them must go.

The story is told in flashback by the ghost of Eng Ahn (Julyana Soelistyo), the "golden child" of the title, who as a 10-year-old observes the power struggle going on in the household. Second Wife, a born opportunist, seizes the chance to advance her cause and that of her children by embracing her husband's new ideas. But First Wife, proud and old-fashioned, is not so flexible. She despises Eng's faddishness and deplores a social system in which one does not flatter -- she would be frank only with someone she despised and wished to hurt. Third Wife, madly in love with Eng, is romantic and amenable. But East doesn't so much meet West here as smash into it, and the resulting wreckage destroys a number of the characters.

Hwang's writing can be clever to the point of glibness: He's not a man to resist an aphoristic one-liner. The characters spend as much time being amusing as they do being convincing human beings -- fine for comedy and satire, but destabilizing to a highly emotional story such as the one Hwang is telling. The power struggle among the wives becomes shallowly entertaining. The near-tragic ending seems to drop in from another, serious play -- one in which the characters have earned the right to have their sufferings taken seriously by the audience.

Still, Hwang has gotten hold of a great subject, and he's a vigorous writer. "Golden Child" has some of the crude storytelling energy of a potboiler or miniseries -- a coarse narrative vitality that's pretty much been banished from "serious" American drama. And the play has something that sets it above the potboiler and redeems its shallow elements: a refusal to pass easy judgment.

Hwang's most famous play, "M. Butterfly," about the affair of a deluded Western diplomat with an Asian man he somehow mistook for a woman, was one long scolding lecture to the audience about how the West has always misunderstood and stereotyped the East. (For Hwang, it followed that a Western man would mistake an Asian man for a woman. Naturally.) But "Golden Child" is curiously nonjudgmental. The modernization that came inexorably to Asia brought fulfillment and misfortune alike, and so it happens to Hwang's characters. With the exception of Second Wife, none of these people is depicted as foolish or spiteful. They're all well-meaning; no one "deserves" anything bad that happens. Eng's idealistic passion for what he sees as a good life is one of the theater's rare portraits of destructive virtue; if he were drawn more deeply, he'd rank with some of Ibsen's heroes.

The actors are charming and fun to watch, and the production is far from a trial to sit through. But it ends up being awfully slight, considering its ambitions. Some of the scenes among the wives play like Cinderella and the Ugly Stepsisters. And in spite of Hwang's raising themes of cultural clash and identity, his China is like some mythical kingdom insulated from the grittier elements of change. (A subplot about a water pump that saves the village goes nowhere.) The play has a fairy-tale thinness without any of a fairy tale's mystery.

Golden Child, by David Henry Hwang. Directed by James Lapine.
Sets, Tony Straiges; costumes, Martin Pakledinaz; lights, David J. Lander; sound, Dan Moses Schreier.
At the Kennedy Center through March 30. Call 202-467-4600.