Durango Silk Road Theatre Project
There are no whole families in the plays of Julia Cho. In fact, what binds their members to one another is a shared loss, a sudden amputation. A father takes off, a mother dies, a child vanishes. Missing persons haunt Cho’s families like phantom limbs, palpable in their absence. But they’re vulnerable to subtler forms of loss as well: sacrifice, attrition, diminishing returns. In her 2004 play The Architecture of Loss, a character grimly compares people to gloves that start to bag over time, as the wearer’s hands age and shrivel: “Little by little, life takes away the things inside you. Till at the very end of your life, you’re nothing but an empty glove.”
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Underpinning this personal loss is a broader sense of cultural incompleteness. Most of the people Cho writes about are, like the playwright, Korean-American, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants. Hyphen-straddlers, they struggle to keep hold of a frayed connection to the old country and fit in in the new one. Consequently they’re estranged from the past yet not entirely at home in the present. Perhaps this is why Cho’s work feels so distinctly American. Set in the arid expanses of the southwest, her plays are pioneer dramas, populated by isolated families piecing together new lives for themselves based on uncertain hopes and scraps of memory.
Like most of Cho’s work, Durango is quietly devastating, and Carlos Murillo’s staging is fittingly both stark and tender. Marianna Csaszar’s austere, boxlike set is painted with a desert landscape, suggesting at once confinement and wide-open spaces. The cast’s understated but detailed performances let the play’s series of small, tense moments build to an emotionally shattering climax. As the brothers, Dawen Wang and Erik Kaiko establish an appealing familial rapport and evoke the right mix of confusion and longing.
