The Studio Theatre 2nd Stage’s current production of “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven” opens with a long, close-up video of playwright Young Jean Lee being struck repeatedly in the face. The image cuts to black for the actual impacts, but we recoil from their sharp reports and we see the young woman’s face grow swollen and moist with tears. We also hear a soft voice, perhaps the director, advising the woman on how to react to the blows.
It’s a perfect, perhaps even intentional metaphor for the failing of a theatrical experiment that wants desperately to be perceived as subversive, but is merely brutal and lazy.
In the 85 minutes remaining, the production never becomes any more specific, never mind inviting, than those blunt slaps. Jiehae Park (in a role identified only as “Korean American”) gives us a monologue about how “most Asian-American women are brain-damaged from having grown up with Asian parents,” opining that white men find this alleged “retarded quality” attractive. She has time to share, movingly it must be said, an elaborate recipe involving mudfish and tofu before she’s beaten by three women (“Korean 1,” “Korean 2,” and “Korean 3,” played by Patricia Penn, Sue Jin Song and Youngsun Cho, respectively) dressed in traditional robes.
This sequence is even more vicious and repellent than the video. These women drag audience members onstage to assist with a played-for-laughs shadow-puppet monster-rape sequence, and then we’re introduced to a midrelationship-squabble couple (Rachel Holt and Brandon McCoy as, naturally, “White Person 1” and “White Person 2”) whose selfishness and banality presumably comprise a caricature of middle-class whiteness as hurtfully reductive as the Korean American stereotypes introduced earlier.
This production marks the first time one of Lee’s plays has been staged by a company other than her own New York-based troupe. Perhaps her work feels more lucid when she directs it herself using actors who’ve had a hand in the script, as is typically her method. But this version never decides on a tone and never, ever feels remotely as daring as its makers think it is. While the actors commit heroically to the material, this is a waste of their gifts. There’s nothing insightful here, unless you want to learn whether you’ll still laugh at jokes about how multilingual Asians pronounce “r” sounds in English, and whether you’ll then reflect upon your motives for doing so.
There is one clever sequence wherein the women mime their own increasingly over-the-top suicides while Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” blares. (Joyce Liao’s lighting offers a nifty illusion of bloodstains blooming across their gowns.) Otherwise, the show flails about, dispensing periodic shocks to reclaim the attention it’s never bothered to earn.
