Jessica Hagedorn Drama Analysis
Jessica Hagedorn’s entire body of work focuses on Filipino Americans’ struggle to discover a place in a new culture without having to relinquish every element of the home culture. In her plays—as in her novels, essays, and poetry—Hagedorn explores a number of significant issues, among them the search for or formation of identity, the clash of cultures, and the problems inherent in an immigrant’s attempts to fit into a new community. Although she is much better known as a novelist than as a dramatist, she has produced an interesting body of mixed-media and multimedia work for the stage, pieces that are closer to performance art than to the traditional play format.
Hagedorn’s work defies simple categorization, instead straddling the boundaries between high and low culture, and crossing between and among genres. In theater circles and to theatergoing audiences, Hagedorn is best known in as a performance artist, and her plays are infused with distinctively performative elements drawn from music, dance, poetry slams, storytelling, and role playing. Except for the themes on which Hagedorn focuses—themes that surface in many American plays—her work has little in common with conventional American drama, even with contemporary ethnic drama. Instead, her pieces belong with the work of theater artists and innovators such as Karen Finley, John Leguizamo, Ping Chong, and Ntozake Shange.
Tenement Lover
A multimedia theater piece, Tenement Lover incorporates film, dance, poetry, music, and narration with slides projected on a wall, a radio newscaster providing updates on a current political crisis, and a television that broadcasts throughout the piece. Focusing on the experiences of two immigrants, Bongbong, who never appears onstage, and Ludivinda, who watches television obsessively, the play uses dream visions, poems, letters, reflections, mime, dialogue, and monologue to dramatize the clash between a culture of origin and American culture (represented by New York), chronicling an immigrant’s gradual assimilation into an alien environment that he initially finds to be impossibly confusing. Two actors playing several characters mime several tense encounters while a Narrator and a band provide commentary.
The subtitle, no palm trees/in new york city , immediately signals the play’s focus on bifurcations, on the distance between cultures, on the difference between reality and dreams, on the divide between powerful nations and developing countries. A series of slides featuring scenes from the Philippines functions as a backdrop to the opening narration telling the story of Bongbong, twenty-nine years old and marooned in New York, homesick, jobless, taking comfort in letters to his artist friend, Frisquito. Bongbong’s story is followed by that of Ludivinda, whose rambling monologue tells her tale of marriage to a marine who brought her from her home in the Philippines to a roach-infested New York tenement. Like Bongbong, she is homesick and unhappy, taking refuge in television. As the Narrator and the band members recount and enact the immigrants’ stories, a blonde Sunbather in dark glasses appears and unrolls a length of barbed wire across the stage, neatly delineating her space from that of the rest of the world, emphasizing the distance between her and those who cannot afford leisurely vacations. As the Sunbather, on her side of the wire barrier, lolls languidly in her lounge chair beneath a beach umbrella, sipping a drink brought by an obsequious waiter, and clearly unconcerned with the rest of world on the other side of the barbed wire, Ludivinda watches television in her dreary apartment, a guerrilla fighter creeps out of the underbrush, slides of mountain tribes are projected on a backdrop, and a newscaster announces that Pope John Paul has publicly scolded Philippine president Marcos at a reception in the...
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The band performs songs that mirror the stage action. Singing “Sleazy Desire/New York Reggae” and “Tenement Lover,” the band members paint a harsh picture of immigrant life, underscoring the displacement and alienation that characterize Bongbong’s and Ludivinda’s daily existence and commenting on the disparity between their fantasies of life in the United States and the realities they face daily. Ultimately, Bongbong does come to terms with his situation, but only after he has a dream in which he learns to fly but is still unable to catch Frisquito who flies still higher. Meanwhile, the Sunbather becomes aware of the guerrilla, who has entered her space and begins to stalk her, and she backs away from him in terror and disappears offstage. The play ends with the band singing about “Ming the Merciless,” described as “the asian nightmare/ the yellow peril.” In a culture that identifies Asians with cartoon villains, Bongbong and Ludivinda will never fully assimilate; they will always be outsiders, forever on the wrong side of any power relationship.
Teenytown
Teenytown is a performance piece that incorporates poetry, songs, and dialogue written singly by Hagedorn, Laurie Carlos, and Robbie McCauley, as well as material cowritten by the three collaborators. Written specifically for performance by the three authors, Teenytown relies heavily on the specific talents and performance styles of those individuals. Through an episodic structure that borrows heavily from several forms of popular entertainment, the piece explores the pervasiveness of racism in popular entertainment and the media. Five actors (including the three authors) play several different characters, acting, singing, and dancing in front of television monitors showing vintage racist cartoons and films, as well as historic film footage of lynchings, police officers with dogs, and protest marches.
The first—and longer—portion of the piece, designed in the traditional format of the old-time minstrel show, explores the history of racism through a form of performance that is identified strongly with a racist past. Opening with the traditional song and dance, the three main performers—Hagedorn, Carlos, and McCauley—wielding makeshift “instruments” including a washboard, spoons, and cooking pots, transform themselves into a variety of characters: Dorothy Dandridge, Hazel Scott, standup comedians, Oprah Winfrey, a church choir, Stepin Fetchit clones, Shakespearean actors with strong ethnic accents, and torch singers. Their performances are punctuated by cameo appearances by a man and a woman who act the roles of black militant, janitor, rap artist, preacher, and tango dancer. After a scripted intermission, the second part opens with a radio play, moving into a send-up of the television talk show format to comment on contemporary manifestations of more globalized racism. Parodying the Tonight Show, the three major performers take on the personas of “Johnny,” “Ed,” and “Doc” in their white dinner jackets, black tuxedo pants, and wingtip shoes. Racist cartoons and films substitute for the commercials that interrupt jokes by Hagedorn, Carlos, and McCauley and guest performances by the man and woman. The piece ends with “Buck and Wing” described as “an original Aboriginal tap dance.”
Hagedorn’s contribution to Teenytown consists of two original pieces, “All Shook Up” and the title piece “Teenytown,” as well as two collaboratively created segments, “Dog Eat Dog” and “Sex and Death.” Like most of Hagedorn’s other work, “All Shook Up” incorporates a staggering array of popular culture and geographical references, from Josephine Baker to Elvis and Otis Redding, Paris to Manila, and rednecks to gendarmes. Created for performances by a female trio, the piece’s lyrics move in and out of four languages—English, French, Spanish, and Tagalog—evoking images of exile, difference, and exclusion and employing racial stereotypes to highlight the existence of racist attitudes in all cultures, even those in developing countries. Unlike “All Shook Up,” “Teenytown” is not a song; rather, it is a parable spoken by the three major performers who underscore, with appropriate hand gestures, the narrative of a tiny place populated by tiny people who have tiny minds and even tinier aspirations and horizons.
Teenytown is autobiographical, very much in the tradition of performance art that is inextricably tied to specific writers/performers. Hagedorn and her two cowriters/performers deliberately chose to work in a format that allowed them to transcend time, genre, playwriting tradition, and theatrical expectations to create a piece that examines the impact of race on identity and memory, the tensions between a minority culture and the dominant culture in which the former is embedded, and the pervasiveness of power inequities in cultural structures.
Dogeaters
Adapted from Hagedorn’s award-winning novel by the same title, Dogeaters was first produced at the La Jolla Playhouse in California and later at the Public Theatre in New York City. The play, which has thirty-three characters played by fifteen actors, is set in the Philippines and presents events from the perspective of Rio Gonzaga, a Filipina American woman in Manila during the crucial year 1982, in the midst of the corrupt regime of President Ferdinand Marcos, although flashbacks take Rio to her thirteen-year-old self in the late 1950’s. Dramatizing events in a country on the edge of revolution, Dogeaters explores the ways in which a single event affects the lives of seemingly unconnected people in different parts of the country. Hagedorn points out that although the play has parallels with actual historical events such as the 1983 assassination of former senator Benigno Aquino, her aim is not to provide a history lesson but to re-create the atmosphere of corruption and tension that pervaded the Philippines during a crucial period in its recent history.
Dogeaters (the title refers to a pejorative term used by American soldiers to refer to Filipinos) is driven by a double plot. Framing the political events in the play is the story of Rio Gonzaga, who has returned to the Philippines to attend her grandmother’s funeral. After an absence of many years, Rio is an outsider in the country of her birth, and her narrative is reminiscent, questioning, a coming to terms with her identity as a stranger.
A second plot, much broader and more complicated, revolves around Senator Domingo Avila, a vocal critic of the Marcos administration and a leader of the opposition party. Avila is gunned down in the lobby of a fashionable Manila hotel during Rio’s visit, and the sole witness, an Afro-Filipino hustler named Joey Sands, is caught up in the political complications surrounding the assassination. Meanwhile, the Avila plot also dramatizes the transformation of Daisy Avila, the senator’s daughter and a beauty queen, from a torture victim to a rebel with an outlaw gang in the mountains.
In addition to the already named characters above, Hagedorn has created a wildly varied and unconventional collection of characters: media personalities, military personnel, a corrupt general and his fanatically religious wife, Perlita the drag queen and night club owner, a gay hairdresser, a pimp, an American journalist, a wise grandmother, a nineteenth century French Jesuit, a cinema cashier and her boyfriend who wants to be a movie star, and political radicals turned rebels-on-the-run. Interacting with these flamboyant and sometimes cartoonish characters are two “real” persons: former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos and German filmmaker Rainer Fassbinder. The array of eccentric personalities, not uncommon in Manila, allows Hagedorn to explore the ways in which a single dramatic event—the assassination—reverberates throughout all segments and all levels of a society, transforming the lives of unrelated individuals.
Events in the play are initially narrated by a pair of radio and television stars, Barbara Villanueva and Nestor Noralez, who represent not only the glamorous personalities who are deified in celebrity-driven Filipino popular culture but also the theatricality of the play’s events. Principals in the longest-running Filipino soap opera, Barbara and Nestor function as the emcees for a series of complications that rival even the most far-fetched and convoluted soap-opera plot. Integral to the plot are such larger-than-life events as a showdown between two prominent and powerful men at a country club; the rape and torture of a beauty queen; a conversation between the narrators and a priest who has been dead for over a century; an interview between an American media representative and Imelda Marcos, who refuses to say anything that might be even remotely incriminating; and, of course, the assassination that connects both plots and the many subplots that make up the play. Settings are no less flamboyant: a trendy hotel, a gay disco, a club featuring live sex acts, and a talk show set. Rio Gonzaga functions as a secondary narrator, as a commentator on the events from the point of view of an outsider.
Dogeaters explores in some detail two themes that appear in Hagedorn’s other work: the Americanization of popular culture and power relations. The United States becomes a pervasive influence, even a presence, not only through Rio Gonzaga, the Filipina American who has returned for a visit, but also in the person of Joey Sands, the son of a prostitute and an African American soldier. Moreover, Manila, in the play, is a city engaged in a cultural dialogue with the United States: American-style talk shows proliferate on television, people wear American brands, American films are popular, and images of America form the landscape of most people’s dreams and fantasies. Hagedorn’s other plays show immigrants’ attempts not to lose their home cultures even as they are seduced by the charms of the American culture into which they try desperately to assimilate. Dogeaters makes it clear that Philippine culture has already partially succumbed to the force of a transplanted and very attractive American popular culture. Hagedorn also dramatizes the uses and abuses of power: political, social, cultural, and sexual power. Through the rape of Daisy Avila, several forms of power collide: the power of men over women, the military over civilians, and the political in-crowd over the dispossessed. Joey Sands also embodies a number of power collisions. As a prostitute, his mother has no power, while his father, an American, does; however, because his father is black, Joey lacks the cachet typically accorded to mestizos (individuals who are half Filipino and half Anglo American or European). In addition, Joey exists at the mercy of his only living kinsman, a ruffian pimp who controls Joey with drugs. Finally, because he witnesses the killing of Senator Avila, Joey inadvertently acquires the power of knowledge, thus coming to the attention of the even more powerful military who must destroy him.
