The Lady Becomes the Tiger

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

There can be few more inherently untheatrical topics than a writer's struggle to find his or her individual voice. The journey is internal, the judgment that it is over is purely subjective, and the quest is not of obvious relevance to any onlooker. From Look Homeward, Angel to Brighton Beach Memoirs, plays on this topic have been talk, talk, talk. So it is startling and satisfying to see a 68-ft.-wide stage crowded with white tigers, monkey kings, acrobats, sword fighters and 18-ft.-tall spirits of wisdom gliding by % serenely as California's Berkeley Repertory Theatre unfolds The Woman Warrior, a version of two visionary coming-of-age novels by Maxine Hong Kingston.

The artistic search Kingston describes is more complex than most: she is an ethnic Chinese in "white ghost" America, a protofeminist woman caught between two male-dominated cultures, a natural writer in English whose parents are literate only in Chinese. In addition to being captivated by folk mythology, she is, like most writers, in the grip of intense family mythology -- about an aunt shamed to suicide by giving birth to a bastard, about uncles murdered by communists who then arrogantly urge her father, safely in America, to "donate" the dead men's lands. These stories clearly indicated to young Kingston that America was better than China. Yet in the everyday dealings of her parents with a world that they did not understand and that accorded them little dignity, the family found ample evidence that America was far worse. This contradiction, among all the others, drove the pubescent Kingston into mute inertia, symbolized on stage by the heroine's spending most of an act strapped into a bed dangling from the ceiling.

Kingston has complained that critics, while generous, misread her work as being about China rather than America. Berkeley Rep artistic director Sharon Ott, the latest in a mob of adapters who have spent nearly two decades trying to find a dramatic idiom for Kingston's work, calls the central character "a troubled, gifted, 12-year-old American girl trapped in a petite Chinese body."

Ott's version, created with writer Deborah Rogin, plays on the Berkeley campus until July 10, then opens the fall season at Boston's Huntington Theatre before being rethought for a new Los Angeles staging next spring. The spectacle is impressive but often slow and emotionally remote. In veering away from the kitchen-sink realism of most immigrant dramas, Rogin and Ott have made too much oblique. Despite program notes, many allusions to Chinese heritage will elude even spectators acquainted with Peking Opera, the crucial inspiration. To Ott, femaleness, not ethnicity, is at the heart of the story. "The relationships this girl has with her parents," she says, "are very specifically a daughter's relationships, in ways that transcend culture but are deeply linked to gender." Yet the show seems far more a piece of Orientalia than an exploration of a young girl's mind and dreams. What it needs is fewer warriors and more women.