Playwright: Peter Mellencamp
At: Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston Ave
Phone: (773) 486-7767; $20-$22
Runs through: March 28
Struggling Truths tells three stories: The first traces the journey of a youth aspiring to become a Buddhist monk, who falls in with Sansang, a guru of jolly (but no less devout) temperament. The second follows the missteps of a brother and sister whose fortunes land them on opposite sides of China's Cultural Revolution. And the third recounts how the Dalai Lama was smuggled out of Lhasa to sanctuary in India.
Peter Mellencamp's Epic Theatre-styled exploration of civil strife between the Communist government and Tibetan resistance fighters, true to its Brechtian ethos, takes no sides in its sprawling depiction of pre-revolutionary injustice and post-revolutionary imperialism. This didactic approach to controversial issues is meant to promote an intellectually objective view toward past events, free of emotional bias. But whether an atmosphere of such academic purity is possible in 2004 is debatable. As with discussions of the Holocaust, nonpartisan attitudes can hardly be expected of audiences in part comprised of survivors with still-vivid memories of Maoist atrocities.
Besides, this is a PLAY and if we are to pay attention for nearly three hours, we need to cheer for SOMEBODY. The absurdity (to our Western sensibilities, anyway) of koanic logic was the stuff of a thousand jokes during America's craze for esoteric religions in the 1960s, its potential for humor or insight long since exhausted. And while the tragedy of families split asunder by Turbulent Times is a reliable premise for melodrama, the naive siblings' dogged faith in the righteousness of their respective ideologies ultimately alienates us, but not in the manner prescribed by the verfremdungseffekt principle on which this dramatic genre is based.
This leaves us the Dalai Lama's struggle with HIS truth. Gordon Chow portrays the Holy Leader with a quiet dignity that makes us LIKE him, even as we acknowledge his ineffectuality in the face of temporal peril. And Jonathan Lavan delivers a likewise poised performance as Sansang, later killed and reincarnated as a Red Army officer. The play's final image of the former being carried to freedom, literally, on the back of the latter achieves the blend of heroism and irony that so eludes the tone of bemused gravity Mellencamp strives to impose on his text—a small reward for our patience.