Theatre in Review: Kung Fu (Signature Theatre)

	Francis Jue and Cole Horibe. Photo: Joan Marcus

Early on in Kung Fu, David Henry Hwang's oddly truncated biography of film actor and martial arts phenomenon Bruce Lee, a young woman makes the point that there has never been a Chinese hero in American pop culture. It is the early 1960s, and the young Lee is determined to fill that gap. That, in two sentences, pretty much sums up the play: Hwang reiterates the same points while offering a sketchy history of Lee's career, ending just before Lee has his breakthrough moment in Chinese cinema. If Hwang has anything more to say about his leading character, it is not communicated in Kung Fu.

As depicted here, Lee has a belief in the power of positive thinking that would give Norman Vincent Peale pause. We see him growing up in Hong Kong, the unhappy son of a Beijing Opera performer and a film actor. Getting in trouble with local street gangs, he is sent to Seattle, where he builds a following by teaching martial arts. He hooks up with the television producer William Dozier, who is looking to follow up his surprise-hit series Batman with The Green Hornet, another campy comic-book crime caper. Lee signs on to be Kato, The Green Hornet's chauffeur and sidekick, but the series is a bust. Ensconced with his wife and children in a vast Hollywood house he can ill afford, he turns down stereotypical Chinese roles, instead teaching martial arts to a cadre of film celebrities while waiting for the phone to ring. Trying to take the reins of his career, he devises the concept for the television series Kung Fu but is iced out by ABC, who casts David Carradine in the lead. An attempt at producing an action film with his crony James Coburn is a total bust. He returns to China, where he opts to appear in local films.

So sketchily written that it resembles the libretto for a musical with all of the songs removed, Kung Fu relies on a series of martial arts sequences stunningly choreographed by Sonya Tayeh. At times, these seem to be the real raison d'être for Kung Fu, but, as beautiful as they are, they do little to advance the story of Lee's life. It's possible that Hwang realized that Lee wasn't all that interesting a character -- in a nutshell, he was young and determined -- and, without the movement sequences, he would be almost entirely lacking in interest. A remarkably charismatic young actor, Cole Horibe, has been engaged to play Lee; he moves like a two-fisted gazelle through a series of simulated battles and also manages to bring a fair amount of personality to an otherwise one-note role.

The director, Leigh Silverman, has also filled the cast with fine actors. Francis Jue is an imposing presence as Lee's unforgiving father, who knows something about moving gracefully on a stage. Peter Kim is sweetly affecting as an old friend who learns self-confidence from Lee's martial arts training and as Dozier, who doesn't suffer fools as he struggles to get The Green Hornet off the ground. Clifton Duncan makes a strong impression as a double-talking network executive and a self-regarding James Coburn. Phoebe Strole lends her considerable charm to the thankless role of Lee's staunch wife Linda, who mostly stands around, looking worried and professing her love.

Also providing distraction from the thinness of the script is the elaborate physical production. David Zinn's basic set, depicting a gymnasium, is transformed repeatedly by Ben Stanton's lighting, which makes use of sharply directional, highly saturated looks, and Darrel Maloney's projections, the most eye-grabbing of which is a psychedelic rendering of The Green Hornet's title sequence. (The set also becomes the interior of Lee's Hollywood home and a Western landscape for a fantasy spaghetti-western sequence.) Anita Yavich's costumes are heavy on Adidas tracksuits, although she does a good job of dressing characters from a variety of countries and walks of life. Darron L. West's sound design mixes plenty of effects -- including gunshots, phones, and traffic -- with many styles of pop music and Du Yun's original Asian-inflected music.

In some ways, Kung Fu is structured like one of Lee's films, with rudimentary plot and characters providing the connective tissue between action scenes. For all of its fancy theatrical devices, this account of Lee's career never rises about television-movie status, filled as it is with such clichés as the distant father, devoted wife, and goofy best friend. He never really probes Lee's character or his marriage, preferring simply to restate endlessly his importance as the first Chinese-American pop hero. Even odder is Hwang's decision to end the play just before Lee finds success; we never see him attain stardom. And Hwang has nothing to say about Lee's early death, having made only three feature films, the last being The Last Dragon, the American breakthrough he sought for so long.

For that matter, Hwang never really seems to wonder why, after Lee, Asian actors continued to struggle in American film and television. (Nearly 50 years after The Green Hornet was cancelled, it was back as a feature film, providing a rare action role for an Asian performer; apparently, the more things change, the more they stay the same.) This may be the subject for another play altogether. As it is, his treatment of the Bruce Lee story is a flashy, but largely empty, experience.--David Barbour