Slackers and Trackers
Fringe festivals attract solo pieces the way peaches draw fruit flies. The reasons for this are manifold: no dividing up of cash; rehearsal ceases to be a problem; and costuming is a cinch. There are artistic factors as well. Fringe shows, with their air of disposability and their brevity, make listening to a solo performer a more attractive exercise. Who wouldn't give up an hour to a worthy cause?
Which brings us to Paper Son, a solo work by San Franciscan Byron Yee, and Tired Clichés, a one-man melange from Vancouver-based TJ Dawe. Both shows are worthy of Fringe attention - not only because they offer engaging comedic performances, but because they represent two polar extremes in solo comedy work. Paper Son is a chronological search for identity, while Tired Clichés is a collage, hemmed in by neither time nor character, ridiculing the world of minimum wage and maximum disappointment.
Yee's show chronicles his life as a "banana," a term used to deride second and third generation Chinese Americans who are "yellow on the outside but white on the inside". Yee's life is a parable of middle-class Midwest America. Raised in Oklahoma, he is steeped in American culture. But once he enters the entertainment industry, he becomes aware of the stigmas and stereotypes dogging Asian Americans. The producers of Grumpier Old Men ask him to play a gibbering restaurant owner who butchers English and yammers stuff like: "If dey no like, I tell them: you win some and you dim sum." This embarrassing episode becomes the catalyst for Yee's search for a connection with his Chinese roots. Without some epiphany, he fears he will remain nothing more than "a white guy in ethnic drag."
The journey takes Yee to San Francisco's Angel Island, an early 20th century immigration centre where Chinese hoping to enter the US were held, often for years, pending their acceptance. Here, Yee learns that his father's immigration was a painful venture.
Yee's performance works best when he is in character - when he plays his father of a waiter whom he befriends. Elsewhere he occasionally falls into hand acting (gesturing with waves and shrugs rather than acting). Still, Paper Son is an emotional play whose success comes from Yee's personal investment and the power of the history on which that effort rests.
Tired Clichés is the flipside to this sentimentality. To TJ Dawe, life is not a steady path form beginning to end, but a chaotic splicing together of haphazard accidents. Dawe uses a stream of clichéd experiences to construct an alienating portrayal of the demise of a disenchanted young man - a spin on the chicken crossing the road or the difficulties of using a video box, for example. Dawe employs the second person as his narrative voice - referring to the audience as "you" to bring us into the bewildering world of a nameless lad who gets the obligatory university degree and moves to the clicheé basement apartment on the wrong side of town.
For Dawe, life is a series of humiliating concessions, which he softens by giving them an optimistic spin. Working the graveyard shift, for example, becomes a cool job in which you feel like "you're wearing sunglasses that never come off". Dawe is a more accomplished performer than Yee, at ease in a precise and well conceived performance. Tired Clichés employs a jazz percussion score, which Dawe complements with a delivery influenced both by the early beat poets and Lord Buckley, the man credited for breaking ground for the rap movement.
The result is a show that indulges the senses and emotions except for empathy. There the use of the second person removes the audience from the action, placing us in the narrator's shoes but reminding us that we are only breifly play-acting his life.
So, Paper Son for the heart, Tired Clichés for the head. Take two one-man shows and call me in the morning.
Andrew Clark
Eye Weekly
