Welcome to our review blog for Consumed. Read our patron reviews, click on the Comments button to read the comments of others and post your own thoughts.

Two years ago this weekend, toward the end of Mark Haim’s “The Goldberg Variations,” Tonya Lockyer sat in a cone of light on the Mainstage at On the Boards and seemed to channel the very soul of the darkest, most spiritual variation in Bach’s sublime work. I still treasure the beauty and power of Lockyer’s performances that weekend. I knew then that I’d want to see anything she created.

This weekend, in the Studio Theater at On the Boards, Lockyer showed us glimpses of the ways she has been “consumed” by her art: Possessed and enraptured by it, certainly; but also drained and nearly destroyed by it. She showed us the child who loved to dance and who seemingly had to dance. She showed us the gifted professional, proficient in every style, who could find inspiration in the videotaped movements of unsuspecting strangers. And she showed us the despairing mature artist who believed that she had nothing to lose and who was sometimes tempted to jump to her death, like the heroine of “The Red Shoes.” Lockyer’s performance was again beautiful and powerful, and the images she created were resonant and multilayered. I so wanted to love this work! I wanted to watch its well-crafted parts merge into a satisfying whole. I especially wanted the entrance of the children—young Tonya reborn—to create some profound resolution. But those things didn’t quite happen for me this weekend. Not quite. Not yet.

I suspect that Lockyer is not close to being finished with this material. Perhaps some of the emotions it elicits are still too painful for her to endure. Perhaps a unifying structure for these autobiographical meditations has not yet become clear. The Studio Theater is often a showplace for works in progress, and that is what “Consumed” ultimately seemed to be: an exceptional work in progress, by an artist of remarkable courage and skill. Lockyer is consumed by her art, but I believe that she has not yet consummated this work of art. I’m eager to see what she will do next.

- Anne

It’s been eighteen hours since Tonya’s Lockyer’s solo performance in “Consumed.” Images and messages are still sifting…my initial thought after the show: Tonya is an INCREDIBLE performer. PERIOD. The dancing: gutsy, nuanced, articulate and dynamically rich – she is a master of qualitative specificity, from sassy T&A jazz (hilarious and awful) to luscious carving and arcing to the most amazing full-bodied trembling (after sharing the horrific story about Monika…). She is one of my favorite people to watch moving. Unfortunately thoughts about Arlene Croce and how she might have written a “non-review” of this performance (à la her 1995 New Yorker response to Bill T. Jones’ “Still/Here”), deeming it “victim art” and “beyond criticism” also crept in.

I admit to feeling confused by my responses to this show. “Consumed” has elicited a battle between my hemispheres! Right brain: swimming in Tonya’s potent images, reveling in a sense of union with her experiences. Left brain: attempting to analyze and logically explain. So, I considered Croce’s ideas about need for critical distance to discern a work of art (Joan Acocella, too, once wrote that artists and critics should never socialize), and how beckoning that stance could be… but then the nature of “Consumed” foils any attempt at “objectivity.” The subject is just too close to home. And I squirmed, uneasy while witnessing Tonya’s honesty and directness – in that close proximity of the OtB studio theater – recognizing how impossible it would be for me to “review” her work…We are colleagues (big conflict of interest and yes, I’m biased)…her performance touched deep nerves…and reviewing it would require that I step back and look at all the pieces – I’m reluctant to dissect the gestalt experience that is resonating still… “Intimate and funny” (as billed) doesn’t begin to describe the depth of this show.

An informal poll of my students in the house revealed that we all were in tears several times throughout the evening. For some reason the moments when Tonya stopped mid-sentence, her voice trailing off… was like suddenly finding myself teerering at the edge of an abyss. Tonya’s courage in sharing profoundly painful experiences and her willingness to show vulnerability disarmed and astounded me. I don’t recall ever seeing a performer become choked up by her own material during her performance, or feeling so conflicted over how to process what I was seeing/feeling. Tonya’s transparency left me disturbed, but also mesmerized and disoriented, like the way I experience my body differently after six hours of Feldenkrais. There were times I wanted to close my eyes, look away, or beg Tonya to please stop. The litany of depressing facts about how little a dancer is paid, or the list of sacrifices she makes for her art were overwhelming. But “Consumed” is so much more than negative autobiography…it is also an exposé, scathing commentary and plea. Funny, when the baskets were passed at the end of the show I fully expected to put money in (Catholic upbringing). Instead we ate cookies and watched children dancing. I haven’t figured out yet why this disturbed me…maybe I wanted agency. Still sifting, sifting, sifting….

- Lodi McClellan

Here are some FAQ’s about our upcoming karaoke party.

Q What songs are available?
A Check out the online songbook

Q Are slots being reserved for VIP’s?
A Nope! We’re working on a first-come, first-served basis. Everyone has equal opportunity to put in a song!

Q Do I have to come prepared with a song?
A Not at all. Feel free to rehearse if you want, but our hunch is most people will decide on the spot and let the mood, songbooks and fellow patrons inspire them.

Q Do I have to perform?
A Absolutely not – there’s no pressure. If you don’t want to perform, come just to support OtB, enjoy cheap drinks, hang out with OtB friends, staff and artists, and watch the excitement unfold.

Q Is it true that Sean Ryan will be wearing hotpants?
A That information is classified.

Q Why is there a cover?
A It’s a fundraiser with every dollar going to OtB programming.

experience

live music
gender complexity
heartfelt storytelling
atmospheric theater
exquisite vocals
humor
poignancy
skilled dancing
chance and improvisation
desolation
technological dilemmas
posturing
penis stories
magic

12 Minutes Max
March 16, 17

Welcome to our review blog for Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (A show about white people in love). Read our patron reviews, click on the Comments button to read the comments of others and post your own thoughts.

Young Jean Lee’s show is the most pleasurable thing I’ve seen at On the Boards all season. It was a hilarious treatise of love and self-hate as she looks at what it means for her to be an Asian woman. She toys with uncomfortably racist protrayals of traditional Korean women and scenes mocking white people’s relationships, juxtaposed with moments acknowledging that she wants to be white, followed by direct threats that minorities hate white people and will one day reign supreme.

-Rachel Hynes

The first thing I notice when I walked into the theater space was the stark contrast between the pacifying row of paper lanterns, murals and rock garden, and the barren and austere stage. The set seemed incomplete and I couldn’t help but think of ways Young Jean Lee could have made this more “Asian.” Design a Pagoda perhaps? Yet the juxtaposition of the entrance and set seemed to suit the similarly contrasting title of the show. I had anticipated little Korean girls coming on the set, but quickly I found myself uncomfortably sitting in the dark listening to the filming of someone being slapped. My eyes began to adjust as I imagined on stage the contact between bamboo and bare feet. In my mind, everything about this show had to be Asian. It was in the title and the lanterns after all. I then began to imagine the Korean parent slapping his children with the end of a belt again and again and again to enforce discipline the only way he knew how. When Lee’s face appears on the screen, I start to wish for all the slapping to stop. It was indeed hard to watch her escalating agony as her strength diminished with each slap.

The opening song moved me and reminded me of when my grandfather performed Pansori, traditional Korean singing. The singing was beautiful but the dancing that followed seemed intentionally awkward. The three Korean schoolgirls that came on stage represented to me the viciousness of Koreans who in a second can find solace in the simplest of pleasures–food straight out of one’s hanbok. It soon became apparent to me one of these Koreans was not actually Korean. She spoke in Japanese fluidly with her Korean counterparts who responded to her in Korean. I couldn’t help but think that 80% of the people in the audience probably didn’t even notice. Was the joke on them? For just a moment in the show, I felt I was in on it. The dancing became all the more interesting with the K-pop, which I have to admit, worked.

The lines in the show are raw, biting and unpredictable interspersed with the jocular lines like when Korean American (Becky Yamamoto) describes whites as “white slab of white English pudding.” At times, I felt validated in my beliefs in the Korean culture and race issues. Then the next line left me feeling vulnerable and confused. I then became angry at Lee for mocking the han, a sense of bitterness and lament that runs so deep for Koreans. How often Lee did this in the earlier scenes. But I actually found myself recalling moments when I too felt Koreans drown themselves in the melodramatic and wondered whether they needed to just lighten up. I then felt guilty.

The scene with the young Lee and her grandmother was most enjoyable to me as it exuded all that to me is Korean. This may have been the safest scene for the audience throughout the play as driving to fifteen stores for Young Jean’s cabbage patch kids and persuading her granddaughter to come to “Jesus” is indeed characteristic of Korean grandmothers.

I noticed the lighting was brighter for the scenes with the white couple and I wondered why Lee would do this since they were hard to miss in the show. These scenes also portrayed them to having problems that paled next to the Asian Americans, who Korean American says early in the show become slightly brain-damaged because of their retarded monkey parents. The whites in the show seemed to have dysfunctional personalities more than dysfunctional lives like the Koreans. They seemed to create problems and controversy for themselves versus having no choice but to deal with them like their Asian counterparts. But how were they related if at all? Perhaps it was when White Person 1 talked about wanting to go to Africa to join the monkeys and eat yellow bananas? I struggled with the significance of their relationship troubles, and then oddly began to relate to them. Towards the end of the show, I began to relate more to the whites commiserating over losing ten dollars than I could relate to the Koreans graphically and horrifically committing suicide. Just when I thought I could relate to any one person, race or Pan-Asian group, I found myself being shocked and disenchanted, and then connected again.

- Angelie Kim

I loved this show because it made me uncomfortable. And not in a “this guy is gonna come out and lap dance on my face” way, but in a way that makes me look inside…gulp.

The first scene put me immediately in the space and present at the show. Not only because it is scary and uncomfortable but because most of it happens as audio in the dark. My neighbors and I actually touched each other. That arm touch that says, “This is really good, but really hard, am I allowed to have these feelings? Or am I just supposed to be watching?” This scene sets the entire show up so well, partly because most of the show is a departure from the very heavy feeling it has and partly because it just makes sense.

As I was watching I kept thinking back to moments in Hey Girl. The similarity I saw between the shows is that they both put me inside an experience. Both took huge themes and ideas, shaped them, and showed them back to the audience beautifully illustrated through a simple gesture, visual, light cue, or as a dance to Mariah Carey’s Christmas song. (Seriously, hilarious and yikes.) Putting large or difficult concepts through this sort of subconscious or decidedly artistic lens doesn’t dilute them but makes you feel them in your body, experience them (theatrically, of course). You are being shown rather than told.
And that is where I’ll stop comparing the shows.

One of the most interesting things for me as a comedian/performer was listening to where the audience laughs, to hear where people are comfortable to laugh and where they aren’t. Honestly, I wasn’t sure where I stood as an audience member a lot of the time. Just when I thought I got the joke it turned around. At first that bothered me because I didn’t want to umm… look like a jerk by laughing at something I shouldn’t, but that discomfort, not knowing what exactly was going on, was actually great, I liked the confusion. I never really felt tricked, just constantly engaged.

I would like to state for the record my amazement at how Young Jean Lee nailed the tone of a certain type of current relationship with the white couple. It was like watching an American Apparel ad come to life and be as vapid, self-indulgent and relatable as you might think.

I don’t care much about linear storyline or structure so I didn’t miss a solid storyline but, my one wish for the arc of the show would be for the Asian characters to come back at the end of the piece. It didn’t feel wrapped up or something ending on the white couple, but maybe that was on purpose.

- Becky Poole

So I get to OtB thinking I was running late, and there’s a huge pile up at the door of the mainstage. Okay. I see that the only entrance to the seats is to walk all the way around the set. I get it…it’s a journey. However, all the people in front of me were walking very slowly. The mood was contemplative. There were lanterns hung above, and paintings in an asian motif on the exterior of the set. I was bored. Everyone around me, in contrast, was seemingly fascinated and walking VERY SLOWLY. Am I being overly cynical? Am I not opening myself up to new experiences? Am I feeling like I should be feeling something I’m not? Should I just go home? Is someone watching me? I don’t know, but it took about 5 minutes to get from the door to my seat.

Now I see why everyone is so damn slow. Everyone was “invited” to walk on some rocks–no one actually told us to do so, but everyone else did, which meant, I guess, that I should–that I presume to be asian rocks. Is that how they do in Asia? So I “choose” to walk on the floor to the left of the rocks. I felt like a badass, an asian that breaks the rules. Fuck you rocks, I rule! And then I walked up the aisle on house right when I had originally intended to walk across the stage to sit on the other side. Even though I am sure no one was watching me, someone was. I could feel it. The whole pre-show thing was mildly uncomfortable and quite interesting. I was excited for what was next.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine told me, “Oh my god, you’ll love this show!” and then immediately recoiled because she assumed that I’d like it because I was asian-american. I admit, I enjoyed watching her squirm, but the other part of me felt bad, because, well I had hoped that I hadn’t given her the idea that I’d be offended. Do I really give a shit? Should I give a shit? Why don’t I give a SHIT?

I’m not going to try to analyze Songs here–you can do a googles search for that. I can’t really give you any insight on this show that will give you any reason to feel okay about seeing this show or okay about being non-asian-american. Being asian-american is kind of special and you’ll never really get it. I mean, we don’t really get it either. Have no fear, I am sure there will be many other Asian-American Identity Plays in the future (the asian-american experience is still quite young, and the writing is just not in existence yet) that will attempt to figure it all out. Just be glad this show isn’t about WWII Baseball teams or internment camps or overachievers who will never live up to their parent’s expectations. Wait, maybe these things are in Songs? Just don’t think too hard. I mean, why don’t you help ME feel okay about all this?

Songs was very engaging. I was impressed with the transitions between all the shifting scenes and genres – once I was getting into a scene, it would turn into something else and I would feel a bit let down, a little disappointed. And well, I kind of love that feeling. Especially when most of the audience feels annoyed and lost. That’s the best! Throughout the show there is a feeling that she’s not entirely letting you in on the joke, and if she does a little, she immediately brainwashes you. Very asian.

My favorite moment is a toss up between the white people “taming the Koreans” with folding chairs amidst the golden pipes of Mariah Carey fading in and out to hilarious effect, and the exaggeratedly hip, self-conscious white couple rambling on about their existential crises (I shamefully felt like I was watching a WET show–sorry guys!) which a lot of people really enjoy watching and performing-whether they admit it or not–and something they weren’t intending to see. They wanted Koreans, not white people! Zing! There was no climax, no denouement (Q. And what asshole, I ask you, doesn’t love a good denoement? A. Me.) and that alone was really nice to see. I liked that the first image of the show is Young Jean, and she appears no where else in the show. But you hear Young Jean in the writing, and you desire to see her again but she doesn’t let that happen. You have to watch someone/thing else instead.

And then I think, hey, should I really feel responsible for representing asian-americans as a whole and should I consider this in my future work and do I hold Young Jean accountable for representing asian-americans as a whole and would I feel this way if this show weren’t about asian-americans, and will I still hold Young Jean accountable for representing asian-americans in her future work, and I wonder if Young Jean feels the same way, and then I wonder how many times I need to type asian-americans in this post so that it will appear in a higher position in a googles search. Really, don’t think too hard.

In short, as I told some people after the show, I’m just glad that Young Jean Lee is creating strong roles for asian males in the American theatre. Thanks, Young Jean, thanks a lot!

- Mike P