Lloyd Suh’s Pulitzer-nominated play explores the emotional toll of institutional racism takes on its victims.
Tess Lina and Tommy Bo perform in Lloyd Suh’s powerful immigration-themed play “The far Country” at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.When Han Sang Gee lands at Angel Island in 1909 in Lloyd Suh’s haunting “The Far Country,” he knows he will have to sacrifice much of who he is as an immigrant. But he’s unprepared for just how identity must be lost, how much bravery must be mustered to forge a new life in a foreign land, then and now.
In its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Rep, Jennifer Chang’s lyrical production distills both the terror and the mystery of the Angel Island detention center, framed by Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh’s ethereal projections, standing sentinel at the gateway to the Bay Area for decades. Sometimes referred to as the “Ellis Island of the West,” the Angel Island station detained hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants desperate to emigrate to “the Gold Mountain” over decades. The production’s evocation of the brutality of the barracks juxtaposed against the aching beauty of the poems on its walls is particularly memorable. If you have never visited the detention center, this play will compel you to do so.
Perhaps the most stimulating aspect of the piece is Suh’s deep sense of complexity. Gee may be humiliated and mistreated by immigration officials who are casual in their bigotry, but that doesn’t mean he is telling the truth. When he persuades the half-starved Low to borrow from loan sharks to send her son Moon Gyet to America to slave away in a laundry, he knows the debt will crush her and that her son may rot for years on Angel Island, but seals the deal anyway.
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