Critical reception for Hwang's Golden Child mixed

David Henry Hwang's latest play, Golden Child, hit Broadway early this April. The resulting reviews from the critics have been a mixed bag, with some very favorable ones mixed with not so favorable ones. Of course, it shouldn't be forgotten that M. Butterfly also got a mix of unfavorable reviews, as well...

"We're so used to having experience explained to us as it occurs that the thing itself, offered without explanation, may come as an off-putting surprise. That, anyway, is my explanation for the strange sniffiness with which the uptown press has received the Broadway production, in a slightly revised text, of David Henry Hwang's Golden Child, a play I like very much, and that others liked well enough for it to win an Obie Award, without any prompting from me when it was seen at the Public Theater last year.

"Hwang's work is powerful, rich, and at points also very funny. Without being laboriously explanatory, it does offer explicit clues to what's going on in its dense texture, but the density itself is very much the point: This is a play about family life and family tradition, full of interactions so tangled they produce a sort of emotional gridlock in the characters, highly disquieting to experience--another aspect of the work that probably makes reviewers jumpy. There are no easy solutions and no one onstage whose side one can easily take in every situation....

"James Lapine's revised production has an assurance that matches Hwang's articulate script in both clarity and richness. The relatively bland work of the actresses now playing the second and third wives--I particularly miss Jodi Long's spicy coyness as wife number two--is more than compensated for by the new male lead, Randall Duk Kim, who fills this central role with a fierce, insistent energy from the first moment, when he sits bolt upright in bed, to his last heartsick look at the wife he doesn't love. He has a worthy opponent in Tsai Chin, who's added new shades to her sardonic sweet-and-sourness as the wily, obstinate first wife since the Public Theater run. John Horton, stern and weighty where John Christopher Jones was an endearing bumbler, and Julyana Soelistyo, appealingly fresh as both child and maternal ghost, add bright contrasts to the deep, somber colors brought by Kim and Chin. With actors this good living Hwang's play at its highest pitch, no explanations are necessary."

Michael Feingold, Village Voice

"The great theme of family-we owe them everything and yet new life can demand that we grow away from their ways-is at the heart of David Henry Hwang's "GoIden Child," at the Longacre. Mr. Hwang, the author of "M. Butterfly," here investigates his own familyJames story...Lapine's elegantly powerful direction perfectly realizes the story's potential for spectacle and ritual...Produced two years ago downtown in a weaker, less focused version, this is now a vivid, moving play in perfect command of its eternal theme of family and change....

Donald Lyons, Wall Street Journal

"When I first reviewed Golden Child when it premiered at the Public Theatre early last season, I wrote that it was "neither as good nor as compelling a play as the author's previous M. Butterfly, but [had] compensations in the fact that it [was] nonetheless absorbing, and that the issues [were], arguably, hotter, [those issues concerning] cultural cross-pollination, the introduction of Christianity to Southeast China" just after the turn of the century.

"Now that the play has returned to New York, this time on Broadway, after a developmental odyssey that has taken it across the country and back, I am happy to report that the issues remain hot...and that Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang, in league with director James Lapine, has so drastically improved the play that it stands easily next to M. Butterfly as an important, signature work in his cannon....

"Golden Child does not have the hard edge and anger of the musical Pacific Overtures (possibly the most famous stage piece to explore similar "westernization" issues, specifically the changing of Japan following Commadore Perry's invasion in 1853); it is a gentler thing, more of a tone poem. There are characters in it who are angry, certainly, and there are momentous events--death plays a part--but its style is more sinuous, and it presents its story without proselytizing. In a surprising way I won't spoil, it even flirts with "magic realism," allowing for a touch of the supernatural--which is as close as it comes to making an editorial statement...

"When I closed my earlier review of Golden Child, I wrote that while I admired it greatly..."it never quite travels the full distance between the head and the heart." But that was then. This time out, it does go the distance, and when Hwang "brings it on home"--literally, returning to the framework and the altered consciousness of the expectant father--it lands as a thought provoking and quite moving fable about the responsibility--and inevitability--of each new generation to decide for itself what traditions it will cling to...and which ones it will create..."

David Spencer, Aisle Say

"Initially, Golden Child (***~/2) seemed a suicidal choice for Broadway...Now it's at Broadway's Longacre Theater, better written and clothed in such a sensuously colorful production that you could recommend it to the Miss Saigon crowd. It has also re-established Hwang as a major playwright...

"Some of the best stage magic, however, comes from Julyana Soelistyo, who switches from grandmother to small child with no visible effort, showing there's a flne line between the wisdom of old age and the precociousness of youth. She lives up to her claim of being a "golden child."

Daniel Stearns, USA Today

"David Henry Hwang's family drama, which opened last night, is a gentle, if rather stolid, tale...The Broadway version, directed, as was the earlier incarnation, by James Lapine, has been substantially rewritten...

"Still, Golden Child is unable to buff its dull finish successfully...Part of the problem may be that Golden Child has literary pretensions that give it a pacing closer to that of a boiled-down novel than a theater piece. Bookish themes, like the clash of Eastern and Western ideas of spirituality, are emphasized again and again, and characters sometimes are defined as much by what they symbolize for the playwright as who they are to one another...

"A result of this novelistic formality is that Golden Child plays at times like one of those ponderous costume dramas that "Masterpiece Theater" has resorted to showingBut contrary to so many depictions of the encroachments of the West on Asia, Golden Child does not present Westernization as a moral contamination, a de-purification. Through characters like Tieng-Bin and Ahn, Mr. Hwang suggests that the exchange of ideas creates opportunities for personal growth, for new ways of thinking...

" Still, despite its intriguing discussion points, Golden Child rarely seems anything that would not be just as compelling in manuscript form...

"It is the seemingly ageless Ms. Soelistyo who provides the most enjoyment. She's a find in the double-duty role of young and old Ahn, a performer who can magically add and subtract years with the mere brandishing of a scarf.

"The actress envelops herself in Ahn's indomitable life force, a spirit symbolically unleashed in the instant the golden child's feet are freed from those terrible bindings. For Golden Child itself, that moment of catharsis, unfortunately, does not come. The play never escapes its own, ultimately more constricting tether, to the page."

Peter Marks, NY Times

"A loud clash of cultures was resonating last night in the Longacre Theater, where David Henry Hwang's Golden Child, a most intriguing play telling of a Chinese businessman living in southeast China in 1918 and his attempt to embrace Western philosophy, arrived on Broadway....

"Hwang, in his most sophisticated play so far, manages very cleverly to dramatize this new spirit, borrowing largely, it seems, from the story - as told to him by his grandmother, the true-life "golden child" in the play - of his own family (a modern variant on ancestor worship, perhaps)....

"In both the interesting first version at the Public Theater and in this more polished and truly rewarding revised production, the playwright introduces us, in a prologue and epilogue, to Andrew, the grandson of the play's protagonist, and to the ghost of his dead mother. In the original version, Andrew experienced this vision on the way to an airport; this time, it's in a dream. Neither version really works.

"This is a flaw - and it remains a wonderfully provocative play without a real resolution - yet Hwang's domestic details of the backbiting wives and their hierarchical henpecking order, his comments on Chinese manners and customs (particularly when faced by the "white devils" of the West) and his concept of the Chinese "web of obligations dating back 5,000 years" is all powerful stuff. ....

"And, finally - yet very importantly - the acting is a joy. That fine actor Duk Kim is handsomely conscience-torn as the businessman caught between two worlds, while his three wives, Chin, Miyori and Wen, strike to the heart with their various concerns and fears. If this transition to the modern world was hard for men, how much harder it was for their women, and how brilliantly these three show the ways! "

Clive Barnes, NY Post

"The burden of ancestry may be one of many provocative concerns in David Henry Hwang's Golden Child, but such issues ultimately pale next to a more immediate obligation --- to be dramatic --- that the play just does not meet....While one applauds its producers' ambitions to widen the commercial theater's spectrum of plays, "Golden Child" looks an unlikely bet to be a Broadway favorite....

"As might be expected from the writer of F.O.B., Hwang has a lovely time contrasting differences in culture, gender, generation and religion, so it's doubly disappointing that the second act barely ups the stakes established in the first. The volume level rises, as various showdowns, addictions and even deaths take their toll, but so does one's sense that Hwang hasn't released the inherent drama in tensions that --- as Ang Lee's beautiful film "The Wedding Banquet" reminds us --- are ongoing today. It's typical of the dramatic shortfall that Ahn is announced over and over as a "golden child" --- among other things, she's the first female in her family to be freed the indignity of foot-binding --- without in any way asserting herself beyond the cutesy, giggly persona that Soelistyo offloads on the part."

Matt Wolf, Daily Variety

BYLINE: By Linda Winer. STAFF WRITER

"WHEN Golden Child had a brief Obie-winning run at the Public Theater in 1996, David Henry Hwang's time-traveling culture-clash folk tale was enchanting in its middle section about 1918 China, but awkward in the opening and closing scenes about New York today....

"And, though the evening turns out to be considerably milder and more modest than the earlier one had promised, this look at what Hwang has called "the messiness of change" is odd and engrossing, brutal yet humane and - dare we say without driving everyone away? - even a little educational.

"Hwang, who hit the big time in 1988 with the flashy spectacle of M. Butterfly, has returned to the quieter magic of his earlier plays (FOB and The Dance and the Railroad), work that thoughtfully opened the theater to the tensions and lessons of East in the West. M. Butterfly, of course, won lots of awards and made him famous. But a few of us found the lavish conceit more showy than profound and worried wistfully about the Hwang left behind.

"Thus Golden Child, based on stories his grandmother told him as a child, finds him rediscovering his roots in more ways than one. We are relieved, not to mention charmed and mostly delighted.

"The revised play has been considerably recast, though the invaluable Tsai Chin still plays the scary-smart, opium-smoking First Wife, and a tiny but powerful talent package named Julyana Soelistyo plays both Ahn, First Wife's golden child of cultural transition, and her wisened ghost in New York...

Linda Winer, Newsday

"The survival of this difficult, beautifully produced play, revised and toured since its premiere, is open to question,-- in part because of its remoteness, in part because a too-actionless first act is followed by a second act with almost too much tragedy.

"In many ways, Golden Child surpasses Hwang's greatest hit, the extravagantly mounted but increasingly preposterous M. Butterfly. Like its crimson-accented predecessor, this saffron-hued tale of a man with three wives uses Italian opera as it examines the effects of East meeting West, of the coming of the "white demon" to China...

"As staged by James Lapine, Hwang's attempt to come to terms with his past proves graceful and elegant throughout. The writing abounds in witty statements, most delivered by Tsai Chin's low-voiced, sharply accented Siu-Yong: "Without money, what shall we use to measure love?" she asks cuttingly. Then, as she sees her power ebbing, Siu-Yong smokes more and more opium. "The pipe makes me stronger," she lies...

"In the end, Golden Child becomes a terribly sad play about cultures at war, though it offers a thin ray of sunshine through the hope for a new Golden Child."

MALCOLM JOHNSON, Hartford Courant

"Playwright David Henry Hwang has found a heartfelt and highly entertaining way to pay homage to his ancestors.

"He celebrates them in Golden Child, a fanciful retelling of his grandmother's conversion to Christianity some 80 years ago in China. Yet this personal play is more than one little girl's acceptance of a new religion. It is an emotional story of cultural upheaval, of transformation and reinvention with consequences that still haunt the woman's descendants today.

"Golden Child also happens to be a mighty good tale, a domestic drama filled with intrigue, sex and several sharply etched characters.

"Hwang has revised the play a bit since its off-Broadway premiere at the Public Theater in 1996. The writing in this latest version, which opened Thursday at Broadway's Longacre Theater, is tighter and more direct, particularly in its crucial opening and closing scenes....

"Director James Lapine has given the play a careful, almost delicate production. The action is never forced or rushed, yet it is rooted in an Asian theatricality that uses music, movement and a touch of other worldliness.

"The graceful, airy setting by designer Tony Straiges emphasizes the divisions within the household. The stage is divided by three curtained pavilions, separate living quarters for the three wives. They symbolize the conflict that will soon change the family forever. "

Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press

[A&E Program Guide] [Home] [ABC Info] [E-mail]