The comparison of playwright Philip Kan Gotanda to Samuel Beckett is apt. In his new play, Angry Red Drum, now in its world premiere by the Asian American Theater Company, Gotanda creates a post-apocalyptic sense of imprisonment that can only be reminiscent of the existentialist master. As with Waiting for Godot and Endgame, the playwright establishes the terms of his world (where there are terms) almost exclusively through the half-absurd, half-charged fragmentary exchanges of a pair of prisoners. Overall, this appropriation of Beckett feels right, but Gotanda’s esoteric language often obscures the nuances of his political, social and racial messages, and even imaginative acting, directing and design cannot fully elucidate the text - which, I am loath to say, is perhaps the point.
Goram (Anthony Julius Williams) dreams not of escape from his sandy imprisonment, though the movement of other characters suggests its barriers are somewhat permeable. Resigned to his fate, he occupies himself primarily with keeping out of sight of “them” until Pick (Will Dao) comes along.
Alternately cooperating and competing, communicating and concealing, each character struggles for status and survival, punctuated by the beating of an all-powerful red drum. Goram and Pick’s occasionally peaceful coexistence speaks to a variety of relationships among socially marginalized groups. But one cannot believe the racial casting is in any way accidental, with Pick played by a Chinese man and Goram played by a Black man sporting an afro and a red pick.
Our narrator, a Cigarette Girl / the Little Red Drummer Boy (Thomas Pang) sheds some light on the issue by endowing the characters with mythological significance: The characters, it seems, are brothers and, what’s more, the sons of god. Conjoined at the hip, they embarrassed their father, and he forced one to kill the other. As the narrator tells it, the murder has already occurred, so it’s unclear whether time in this play is simply as fluid as the walls of the sandbox or the brothers are doomed to repeat their betrayal ad infinitum, with Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence as their true prison. At any rate, the brothers have all but forgotten their kinship; only glimpses and glimmers, too hazy to decipher, remain. According to the narrator, only an “act of true humanity” will allow them to remember again.
While the main roles might be too big for their performers, the supporting cast is expert. As the Backward Soldier, always retreating from the task at hand, Michael Uy Kelly makes bold physical choices. Pang, clad in grotesque Americana, menacingly manipulates the brothers’ fate even as he complains about his decidedly first-world problems.
Set designer Bruce Thierry Cheung suggests animal captivity with his desolate sandbox, which also evokes the Iraq desert fittingly, as Kotanda writes, that “much of the original inspiration” for Angry Red Drum “grew out of [his] acute frustration and borderline despair with the latter Bush-Cheney years.” Yet this is not a play about a single political issue or era. Like Beckett, Kotanda comments on a world of problems, a history of relations between races: The one white character’s name is Truman (the compelling Rich Bianco), and all prerecorded music is Bob Dylan. If only Kotanda had more clearly defined this world, perhaps limiting the scope of his commentary, audiences could position themselves to appreciate his text.
Angry Red Drum continues through Oct. 17 at the Thick House Theater, 1695 18th Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($25) are available by phone at (415) 401-8081 or online at www.thickhouse.org.
