Memory and legacy: 'The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin' comes to IRT after two-year pandemic delay

Harry Chin uses talismans of his heritage to learn from its ghosts.

We've all become used to documentation for the sake of safety and access. Since the pandemic, proof of vaccination has become the "open sesame" to let us into many places we could formerly enter for the price of admission or without charge. Ever more official credentials are required to allow us to vote. Only the arena of guns seems to have been cleared of most legal obstacles in recent years.

Imagine the attempt to live securely as an immigrant when your right to be in this country was subject to close interrogation, with wrong answers  speeding you toward deportation. This is the odd legacy that, in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act, complicated the already fraught adjustments  that immigrants from China had to make here between 1882 and 1943. Legal requirements to admit getting around the law prevailed until 1966. Family life was subjected to sanctioned disruption as it had not been since the days of slavery.

This kind of history (well outlined by Richard J Roberts in the program booklet)  frames the action around "The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin," which the Indiana Repertory Theatre opened last weekend in a production that the pandemic delayed for two years. Its full-fledged realization alone is a worthy sign of the mixed recovery American culture has enjoyed this year.

 Jessica Huang's moving, occasionally perplexing play makes a bold choice in telling the story in

Sheila and her father talk tensely about moving.

fragments and vignettes woven together in arrangements as graceful and significant as Chinese calligraphy. These potent strokes are dramatically wrenched out of chronological order so that the title character's struggle to forget what he has to and remember only what's unavoidable and well-practiced takes hold. 

Huang used a real man's story as the basis for a complex family drama. Her artistic method allowed her to dig deep into the effects of displacement on one man's life. One event and mental disturbance after another blocks access to an acceptable identity as a hyphenated American ready to find a balanced way forward. The playwright's manner of presentation reflects that, and Jaki Bradley's direction manages all the shifts of time and place seamlessly.

The theme of uprooting is steadily symbolized by the placement of suitcases and other portable items around three sides of the IRT's Upper Stage. A large globe in low relief dominates the backdrop, telling us that an influential but empty world awaits those who can't find their place in it. A section marked by latitudinal and longitudinal lines opens from time to time to provide another playing area for a ghostly visitor.

Shouldering the main character's burden with a gathering insight we come to share, David Shih plays a needy immigrant who works his way up from the kitchen of a Midwestern Chinese restaurant. He makes his peace with its Americanized specialty of "chow mein" and a dyspeptic boss from another

Yuet, the wife he left behind, confronts Harry.

Asian country. Marginalization, supported by racism, narrows Harry's freedom of action all along. His difficulty with language is portrayed with pained earnestness in Shih's portrayal. Continually disoriented, Harry Chin succumbs to the temptation of marriage to a white American woman when his former family life in China seems unrecoverable. With one year as a widower, he lives in a tense holding pattern in their daughter Sheila's crowded apartment.

Among the show's many technical and design wonders is the front end of an era-appropriate Buick that starts up mysteriously in the garage of their home. Its immediate discovery by Sheila functions like Chekhov's gun: Displayed or mentioned in the first act, it's used to fatal effect in the third. But again, the event and its meaning are lived and understood in both directions. As puzzling as its mere presence and the mysterious triggering of its ignition are, the auto introduces us to the play's theme of haunting.

Working through her own identity as a now-motherless half-Asian American, Sheila is given delicate grace and resolve by Allison Buck. Anne Bates pours both ingenuous passion and tortured zest into the high-strung second wife, Laura. Stephenie Soohyun Park masters both the gulf and the resemblance between first wife Yuet and the daughter from that marriage, Susan. Sam Encarnacion and Linden Tailor each fulfill a couple of crucial supporting roles, giving them impact and fully individualized stature.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote that "life can only be understood backwards, but it must  be lived forwards."

The climactic scene of "The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin"

When you're as haunted as Huang's hero is, life must be lived forwards and backwards at the same time, with the hope that understanding may eventually result. "Haunting is helping," the playwright reminds us in her program note, echoing one of the play's lines. The helping is accomplished with a visual confirmation at the end -- the crown of the tech and design team's adroitness.

 "The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin" carries fragility in its title, and also the impervious strength of documents in highly evolved societies. "Papers, Papers!" Gian-Carlo Menotti's Magda cries in despair in "The Consul."  But more important at length is the persistence of dreams and  — to evoke the master surrealist Salvador Dali — memory. Its acceptance is the key to the resolution promised at the end of Huang's surrealistic play, and delivered beautifully by IRT's resurrected production. 

[Photos by Zach Rosing]