Monster
Reviewed By Madeleine Shaner, Backstage West

Theater: David Henry Hwang Theatre, 120 Judge John Aiso St., L.A
Phone:(213) 625-7000
Starts:April 18, 2002
Ends: May 12, 2002
Evenings:Thurs.-Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 2 p.m. & 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m.

The American salad bowl needs a lot more tossing before it becomes the melting pot wished for by modern-day Utopians. While diversity is part of the country's greatness, the traumatic effects of the radical displacement of millions of tempest-tossed may be unquantifiable. Derek Nguyen has written an absorbing play that deals with some of the problems and effects of that displacement.

A young Vietnamese-American P.I., Detective Tran (Trieu Tran), is called in to look for a teenager who has been missing from his adoptive home since the vicious beating of a newly arrived Vietnamese teenager (Nghia Luu). Taking a noirish approach to his task, Tran interviews the principals in the case: the boy's waitress mother (a solid Diana Kay Cameron); his school counselor (Patricia Belcher, who switches from perpetually harassed, by-the-book authoritarianism to play a humorously slangy adoption-agency employee); the boy's best friend (Brian Kolodziej), a white-bread jock; the missing boy's girlfriend (an effective Nicole Porter, who doubles as Tran's estranged wife); the boy's adoptive father (Richard Ruyle), a victim of Agent Orange subject to the physical and psychological symptoms of having served in Vietnam, and a woman (Sharon Omi) who may or may not have given up her child for adoption by an American family.

Initially, Monster seems to be a pale clone of the detective stories that ruled the silver screen during the 1940s and '50s, with a seemingly ill-at-ease Tran not quite getting the right tone. But clues begin to mount, like the off-kilter abstract set (Victoria Petrovich), Tran's increasing subjectivity, which drives him to continue his investigation after he has been fired from the case, an emphasis on his personal problems--a dead child, an estranged wife--and the dissenting stories and misperceptions of all the concerned parties, tipping the realistic play into another, far more disturbing dimension.

Nguyen's second act, during which we get to the nub of the play, forcefully and visually directed by Tim Dang, is one of the most stunningly and viscerally disturbing pieces of theatre this reviewer has seen on any stage. Time, reality, objectivity, the fourth wall, and critical judgment are totally obliterated as pure emotion, onstage and off, takes over, leaving the audience breathless and wrung out. The issues veer from "Who did what to whom?" to the universality of experience and its consequences. Nguyen may not have the answers, but the questions reverberate long after the final curtain. East West Players' first mainstage production written by a Vietnamese playwright is a smash, a play for the ages.

Questions? Email