(left to right) KK Moggie, Sarah Marshall, and Joseph Anthony Foronda in The Golden Dragon. Photo: Scott Suchman
When I was ten, I used to hang out with my friend Linda after school. She lived in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in a cramped one-bedroom apartment that seemed just large enough to house a gold fish. The ceilings were as high as those in an attic and the walls were paper thin. And at night, we could hear the Chinese news station from her neighbor’s television next door—it wasn’t on terribly loud, it was just on.
I never needed to wonder what was happening around us when I was there, because I heard everything. I heard the number 30 bus motoring by, late as usual; the chatter of women bargaining down the price of fish; and the clanging of pots and metal from the Chinese restaurant below us where Linda’s parents worked. These sounds—seemingly white noise—played out like individual stories for me that were held together by… life.
Life—it was sometimes repetitious, occasionally random, and at times, unfair.
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KK Moggie and Amir Darvish in The Golden Dragon. Photo: Scott Suchman |
This is the premise of The Golden Dragon, a play about 15 characters whose lives circulate around the microcosm of a “Thai-Vietnamese-Chinese” restaurant. The play threads together several unique stories, and is played by five actors who do a pretty good job at jumping in and out of characters.
The play opens in the kitchen of “The Golden Dragon,” where we see a Chinese man (KK Moggie) with a horrible toothache. His co-workers are trying to pry out his tooth because he is an illegal immigrant, and cannot go to a dentist. The story then jumps between a young couple; an eccentric shopkeeper (Sarah Marshall); two flight attendants (Joseph Anthony Foronda and Amir Darvish); a grandfather and granddaughter; a neglectful husband and his distressed wife; and a starving cricket (Chris Myers) and cruel ant.
One of the more interesting and strange stories revolve around the cricket and ant. The cricket is hungry and begs the ant for food. The ant tells the cricket that he would feed the cricket if she prostituted herself to the other ants. The cricket agrees because she is desperate.
In many ways, the cricket and ant story can be viewed as analogous to those of immigrants that arrive in the U.S. and are exploited. Playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig never dives into this issue, but rather, offers subtle commentary shown through some of the characters’ stories.
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KK Moggie and Amir Darvish in The Golden Dragon. Photo: Scott Suchman |
Schimmelpfennig also displays a dry sense of humor when he has the boys being girls, and girls being boys, as they rotate between characters; and the play’s rapid changes between story lines, as well as the witty exchanges from the actors keep it from getting stale.
However, The Golden Dragon suffered from being just a bit too gimmicky. The actors, in changing characters, would begin the scene with a narration before getting into character. And while this served some purpose in staging the story, the characters would weave in and out of this narrative so frequently that at points it distracted from the rhythm of the play.
There are good components to The Golden Dragon, and Schimmelpfennig, in developing his narrative shows that he has something interesting to say as a storyteller and a playwright.
However, the play had, perhaps, too many elements and stories that were distracting to the plot. In the end, I was left wondering what the play was really about—and that was something I never had to think about when I was hanging out in Linda’s apartment.
The Golden Dragon, written by Roland Schimmelpfennig and directed by Serge Seiden, is playing from November 9th – 26th at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C.
