Phl's May-I Theater in NY successfully stages play

Jorge Ortoll, one of the prime movers and organizers of the Philippine May-I Theater Company in New York, was in town for the holidays. He arrived shortly after May-I Theater had successfully staged “The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness” in New York.

Herewith is a report I received on the play, the players and the director of “The Sugar House”.

In her excellent new work, The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness recently presented by the Ma-Yi Theater Company at the Connelly Theatre, playwright Carla Ching updates Hansel and Gretel by reinventing the Witch as Barbara (“Baba”) Yaga, a reform school director who seems to have lifted her methodology from the Nurse Ratched rulebook: Play nice, or suffer the consequences.

Into Baba’s orbit — played by Cindy Cheung with cold efficiency masquerading as professionalism — a defiant new enrollee awaits: the hoodie-shrouded and aggressively slumped 17-year-old Greta (Ali Ahn). She is in juvie for setting fire to her uncle’s East Village apartment, where she and her 16-year-old brother Han (Christopher Larkin) were sent after their adoptive father died and their adoptive mother succumbed to a crippling depression. In a way, the pair — who remember their own mother’s death in China — find themselves doubly orphaned.

Baba knows the girl’s tragic backstory, but her first order of business is to break Greta’s spirit — starting by confiscating her cellphone. (Greta has been tweeting to the audience, via surtitle, ruminations on the theme “what do you do when you lose something you can never get back?” So she calls in Miles (Bjorn Dupaty), a gold-star-decorated lackey, to demonstrate the kind of compliance she expects. The minute they have a moment alone, Miles tries to school the ever more combative Greta in how to go along to get along. She adapts — until she snaps.

Interestingly, in keeping with the dual nature of the folkloric Baba Yaga, Ching accords this Baba a measure of wisdom as well as menace. During conferences with Greta’s new family (David Spangler, credible as a veteran rock journalist, and April Matthis, luminous as his young wife, herself a survivor of foster care), Baba Yaga actually has some valid insights to impart.

Also telling is Ching’s choice to have the actress playing Baba also assume the guise of Greta’s two mothers during Greta’s hallucinatory flashbacks. In the end, Greta’s story is one of a long-overdue reintegration, however painfully accomplished.

Director Danielle Topol adds some ingenious visual touches, such as having Baba encircle her therapeutic milieu with a chalk stick, as if marking her territory. While honoring the occasionally fanciful nature of the script, Topol also elicits grounded performances from her uniformly excellent cast.

Greta and Han have the chokehold attachment of siblings joined against the world. Han — chafing at being pigeonholed as the “good” child — has chosen music (guitar) as his means of expression, and Larkin is a relaxed marvel when rendering the songs he composed for his role.

As Greta, a self-professed “poet,” Ahn summons a roiling mass of conflicting emotions. She’s adolescence personified. While this play should appeal to those still mired in that phase, it offers plenty of material worth pondering for adults who’ve presumably gotten over it.

Real life is rarely as simplistic as fairy tales make it out to be, and the road to reconciliation is never paved with breadcrumbs. Nonetheless, there’s hope and beauty in Carla Ching’s The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness, which keeps the Hansel and Gretel references to a minimum, and instead focuses on the ways in which people grieve, or as the show tweets to its audience, “What do you do when you lose something you can never get back?” For Han (Christopher Larkin), you can only make sense through songs, and for his sister Greta (Ali Ahn), communication happens through tweets, which allow her to defend herself with Sun Tzu-like precision. Some, like Greta’s housemate Miles (Bjorn Dupaty), channel their rage through dance, while others who are more advanced in the suffering of the world, like Han and Greta’s guardians, Opal (April Matthis) and Doc (David Spangler), understand how to listen. But after accidentally causing a fire, Greta finds that she must prove herself not to her family, but to her hermetic jailer/counselor, Barbara “Baba” Yaga (Cindy Cheung), who has her own prescriptions for swallowing sadness with as many spoonfuls of sugar as it takes. At the same time, Han must come to grips with his own tightly wound emotions, lest he wind up just as isolated and lost in the wilderness as his sister.

The Sugar House is impeccably directed by Daniella Topol, who neatly showcases the various ways we cope and communicate, splattering tweets across Clint Ramos’s two-dimensional, compressed house of a set, while wisely stepping back from interfering with the simple guitar songs written by Ching and Larkin. Topol also wisely elides over some of the more fanciful elements of the show, turning Baba from a villainous witch into a overconfident analyst, one who just happens to drug her patients, creepily stroke them (as if they were pets she were teaching to perform tricks), and occasionally lock up in isolation. It’s met by an able cast, too, particularly Ahn, who never gets lost in the complexities of time-skipping script, that presents her as a rebellious arsonist one moment and an overcompensating street tough, a lighthearted sister, a mourning daughter, a betrayed and wounded girl, or a smugly Stepfordian penitent the next. In a play that lightly addresses cultural identity, moderately examines familial identity, and stresses personal identity, this is a more impressive feat than words can do justice.

Speaking of words, Ching’s language is a delight, defying standard forms of expression in favor of finding words that are inexplicably right. For instance, in one of the group therapy sessions established by Baba, Greta explains that she’s feeling “puce” about the fire: “It’s a hot, ugly uncomfortable color.” Later, when Miles is helping Greta to survive Baba’s crushing rules of conformity, he explains that “Normal is a coat you can put on or take off”: in other words, we don’t have to be defined or constrained by any single brushstroke. At the same time, Ching balances her poetry with simply put phrases that just as effectively capture the mood: “It’s an awful thing to not have a place,” says Miles, helping Greta to find her angered brother. Best of all, her characters are far from the moral saints of fairy tales: Greta isn’t always deserving of sympathy, and Doc and Opal have their own moments of selfishness and resentment; the story, then, is in how they overcome themselves just to earn a shot at living happily ever after.