A great deal of the action of “The Golden Dragon,” at Studio Theatre, goes on in the cramped, super-busy kitchen of a takeout Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant in Central Europe. It appears to be the busiest place on Earth. Dishes are ordered with lightning speed and prepared noisily in hand-held woks. As soon as those dishes are ready, a bell rings and they are delivered to the restaurant’s hungry diners. Yet the impressive realism of “The Golden Dragon” is not achieved through conventional theatrical means. Instead, German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig strips away any suggestion of the real world and asks his audience to use its imagination, as five actors portray 15 characters. His actors speak their own stage directions. Women play men and vice versa. Older actors play young characters; young actors play older characters.
Among Schimmelpfennig’s characters are a kitchen worker who has a terrible toothache, a young woman who discovers she is pregnant and whose husband doesn’t want a baby, a convenience store clerk, two airline hostesses, a man whose wife has left him, and the wife who has left her husband. Their lives overlap and their individual stories intertwine, interspersed with the kitchen scenes.
| Onstage |
| ‘The Golden Dragon’ |
| Where: Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW |
| When: Through Dec. 11 |
| Info: $35 to $69; 202-332-3300; studiotheatre.org |
As directed by Serge Seiden, the result is a vigorous, hard-edged look into a specific place, where the kitchen is staffed with undocumented workers. Although not a political play, the issue of documentation becomes central when that young kitchen worker with the toothache cannot go to the dentist because he doesn’t have papers.
The focus of “The Golden Dragon” is extremely intimate. People meet each other, befriend each other, endure boredom with each other, destroy each other. It is also a curious tribute to anonymity. The people who live above the restaurant do not know one another. They share a locale, but not a community, a fact that is borne out in the play’s retelling of the fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” which in the play ends in violence.
The actors in this “Golden Dragon” are a superb ensemble, each one playing several roles extremely well: Amir Darvish, Joseph Anthony Foronda, Sarah Marshall, K.K. Moggie and Chris Myers. Although the end of “The Golden Dragon” loses some of the momentum it has at the beginning, Seiden ultimately makes the piece work, using pacing, language and sound to capture Schimmelpfennig’s curious amalgam of humor, social awareness and extraordinary theatricality.
