My overall impression
RICHARD ADAMS, The World Socialist Website (review to be posted soon)
When the earlier version of this multi-character solo show, written and performed by Nancy Eng played at last year’s New York Fringe, solid reviews and sold-out houses must have created an atmosphere that justified listing it in the Hollywood Fringe as a comedy. While there are plenty of laughs, mainly provoked by tough talk by little ladies and searing cross-cultural, sometimes multilingual wit, at its heart, this is serious material. The title refers to the House’s misprinted sign: an inept painter dropped the “I” in Tui Na, a form of traditional Asian massage.
Ms. Eng plays all the masseuses who work in Tu-Na House, a brownstone on New York’s Upper East Side, specifically on toney Beekman Place, a short hop from UN Plaza. She also plays the House’s proprietor, a failed prostitute from a long line of Chinese courtesans, who prays equally to both Guanyin (the Chinese Mother goddess) and the Virgin Mary for good fortune and that all her girls might find their own “happy endings.” In addition, Ms. Eng brings deep poignancy to the story of the house’s old tea man, a former Peking Opera singer who castrated himself so he could continue to play female roles only to have traditional opera shut down after the Chinese Revolution, and then to become a target of the Cultural Revolution. A few of the women share this backstory of having been publicly mocked and scorned during the great struggles that convulsed China from 1966 to 1976. Especially tart is the story of the woman who was driven from her village and has, for years, been sending money back to support the villagers – who shun her when she returns for a visit, only to have their admiration bought back for the price of a 72” flat screen TV.
What stands out is the unapologetic grit of these working women, most of whom provide sexual services beyond what’s on the massage menu. They all work extremely hard, take pride in their skills, and, like over-worked service providers everywhere, complain bitterly about working conditions and their customers. Among the most memorable complaints is directed at repeat customers who ask, “Remember me? I was here last month.” To which she replies, “Yeah, sure. You’re the white guy who was after that white guy who was before that other white guy …” The women also let us in on some of the secrets of the trade and techniques for boosting tips. A tough-talking native-born American of Chinese ethnicity with the Bronx speech patterns of Nuevo-Ricans and the generic southern phrasing of older black women, finds that adopting a pidgin English and a demure demeanor yields better tips.
Not surprisingly, these women hold men in general in well-earned contempt. Yet the barbs are so deftly written and played, they reach beyond that subset of those who’d visit such a houses and speak to the patriarchal privilege that attaches to exploitative (even self-exploitative) enterprises.
The play’s most powerful scene is the lament of a sex-worker who’s just lost her loving, non-judgmental companion of nineteen years. Finally, a gentle understanding man – until we learn that she’s mourning her cat. The woman’s loss is profound. Her moving description of their final moments together are heartbreaking. She’s so shattered, she can’t work; and when she finally returns to Tu-Na house, she can’t stop crying. But then, she discovers that the johns keep shoving money into her hand out of guilt, pity, or sympathy. The play contains a wealth of such ironic reversals.
Sprinkled with phrases in Mandarin, Cantonese, and the Toishan dialect common among New York’s older Chinese immigrants, the absence (unless I missed it) of any Fukienese characters surprised me. The most recent wave of immigrants, currently at the lumpen end of the immigrant economic order, are from Fujian Province. This, in part, may explain why the play carries an air of the recent past rather than the present. Chinese or Vietnamese prostitutes with the backstories so accurately told here would, by my reckoning, all be in their late fifties. Perhaps there are younger masseuses in the house whose stories we haven’t heard.
Very well directed by Ernest Abuba, these visitors from New York are a highpoint of the Fringe.
