Rosalind Chao, BD Wong in What Became of Us (Photo: Ahron R. Foster)
Shayan Lotfi’s frustrating new play about sibling dynamics across diasporic cultures strains under the weight of its ambitious remit. The play is staged with alternating casts–first Rosalind Chao and BD Wong then Tony Shalhoub and Shohreh Aghdashloo.
The actor pairs play siblings with immigrant parents from an unnamed country. It’s sets up an interesting writing challenge to allow for actors of varying ethnic identities to play the roles, but, in reality, the writing ends up trapped by the concept.
Q (Chao) was born in the “Old Country” and remembers the family’s life there. From childhood through adulthood, she has helped their parents navigate “this country.” She has often sublimated her own needs and tried not to cause her parents any stress or grief. While Z (Wong) was born in “this country.” Z comes out in adulthood as non-binary, but from childhood they have felt like the odd person out in the family as they have not shared the same immigration journey. As the siblings age, the tensions of their youth follow them, and they struggle to see the others’ perspective until things fracture.
Sibling plays feel all too rare. I enjoy getting a window into the complexities of growing up in proximity to someone else but having an entirely different point of view about what was happening with the same people.
In this play, those diverging perspectives are exacerbated by the fact that they have quite different points of origin. Q understands their parents in a way Z perhaps does not. But no one appreciates Z has had an entirely different experience of the world from day one. What rebellion, loyalty, support, and dreams look like vary wildly to the siblings.
Chao and Wong conveyed a palpable warmth with each other (though they both were struggling a bit with lines that hopefully will get ironed out as they settle into the play).
The pair are costumed in a contemporary middle-class look. Wong is dressed as a laidback skateboarder with Converse sneakers and rolled up burgundy khakis which flexibly works well for both child and adult Z. Z nicely ages into a sweater that is tied around them as a kid and worn as an adult. Chao is in a casual rust-colored camp shirt I coveted over beige khakis.
The effective lighting warms and cools large linen-like panels which are the walls of the set. The shifts in light indicate a scene of the past being narrated then one happening in real time. The fabric glows at times like a Rothko or Yun Hyeong-keun painting. That is contrasted with the dull gray set piece, a bench with handles, that was rotated by the cast. I’m not sure the moving bench achieved much but give them something to fiddle with on stage.
In his Off-Broadway debut, Lotfi has written the play in such a way that with either cast, the cultural identities of the actors are the only potential reference point we have to the immigration story being discussed. But everything else is left intentionally unnamed.
The result of that is the repeated use of the words “Old Country” and “this country” come across as a forced, false neutrality. Specificity can only be in details that are left vague and might work for either cast (the home in the Old Country had a burgundy door, the noise of the central market there is memorable, Q brings back spices from the Old Country, there is a civil war in a country near the Old Country).
While I understood that two different casts needed to use the same text, the obvious cultural avoidance in the text becomes this kind of Beetlejuice bogeyman in the play. The writing is forced to find ways around the characters’ identities (rather than embracing them) or opts for unnatural replacements. Rather than expanding the play’s interpretation it shrinks it.
Repetition of “Old Country” hangs heavier than I would expect was intended. I almost wished for a sound effect rather than the lumbering phrase. Some theatrical creative indicator of “there” and “here” would have been preferable to this overly present lumpish language.
The play’s chosen vernacular put me on high alert so when someone used the word “bedsit” I clung to it aggressively. Suddenly, I’m wondering who is British in this play. Is there an UNDERCOVER BRITISH PERSON? It was such a trigger because that is a word I have only heard in the UK and deeply associate it with the Brits. So now I am holding onto some maybe irrelevant cultural touchstone. Such is the power of language. Language can lead you places but this play opts for ambiguity instead.