Theater Reviews—

A Well-Acted Comedy With A Dark Underside

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — The world premiere of BFE by Julia Cho is the concluding work in this year’s Long Wharf series of New American Voices. In the playbill, Ms Cho notes that she “sifts through mental odds and ends – a phrase heard on the street, a sign I see in a shop, a kid I knew when I was twelve – and some strange alchemy turns it into a moment, a character detail, or a piece of dialogue, and if it’s good, the alchemy makes the end result almost unrecognizable from the initial inspiration.”

In the case of BFE, the trigger was the image of a woman giving her daughter the gift of plastic surgery. This becomes the germ of a play about a bright, funny teenager who suffers from feelings of being different, unattractive, and unable to fit in.

Of course most teens feel this way but Ms Cho gives Panny, her 14-year-old heroine, plenty of reason to feel isolated: Hers is a dysfunctional family consisting of Isabel, her agoraphobic mother (who spends her days sitting on the couch in her bathrobe watching television and fantasizing about General MacArthur); and Lefty, a socially inept uncle who supports the three of them by working as a security guard at the mall.

As Chinese-Americans, they are a racial minority in their community, a sterile desert suburb of Phoenix that Panny refers to mockingly as “BFE” (too vulgar to print here).

Above all, there is the thoughtless cruelty of Isabel’s “gift.” Having forgotten that it is her daughter’s birthday until Lefty produces a cake, Isabel snatches up the yellow pages and tells her daughter to pick a plastic surgeon. The message communicated from the supposed sanctuary of her home is that “you are so ugly with your Asian features – no bridge to your nose, no creases to your eyelids…”

Having generated this starting situation, Ms Cho then throws in reports of a mysterious serial killer who murders pretty blondes, and then sets about getting her characters into interesting dramatic situations and giving them some snappy dialogue. Desperately lonely when her one friend abandons her for a guy, Panny embarks on a telephone relationship with Hugo, a likeable young Mormon college student. The more interested Hugo becomes, the more Panny is afraid to meet him because she has lied about her age.

Lefty strikes up a tentative friendship with Evvie, an African-American divorcee who works at the mall, in a store that gets no customers, and who fills the empty hours with a compulsive addiction to self-help books. When this promises the possibility of romance – Lefty actually accepts an invitation to Evvie’s for dinner – Isabel reacts by pulling a Blanche Dubois routine with the pizza delivery boy.

Finally there is the contrapuntal commentary expressed by Hae Yoon, Panny’s pen-pal from South Korea, who acts as a kind of alter-ego. Hae Yoon (who prefers to be called Elizabeth, because it sounds more American) is supremely cheerful, confident and comfortable with herself. In a society where every girl is Asian, Hae Yoon thinks it would be a kick to be American.

Across the board the acting is wonderful, and Gordon Edelstein’s direction keeps things moving at a crackling pace. BFE is billed as a comedy, because the lines are frequently very funny, but it is a comedy with a deeply dark underside. This is not just because of the serial killer (who turns out to play a central role), but because in the end, the pressures and prejudices of the modern pop culture which dominate our society prove to be too great for Panny and Lefty to withstand.

(Performances conclude this weekend. Call 203-787-4282 for final production details.)