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REVIEW: THE SOUP COMES LAST
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Stock characters
"The Soup Comes Last" is best when it focuses less on the writer-choreographer's own culture shock and more on how her cast and crew reacted when she brought "West Side Story" to China.
By JEAN TANG
Offoffoff.com
"The Soup Comes Last" is the story of a cultural
translation gone awry. In the spirit of Sofia
Coppola's movie "Lost in Translation," "The Soup,"
enjoying a three-week run at the
intimate "C" space of 59e59, falls far from the deep
quirkiness and contemplation of Coppola's work. Still,
writer-actor Rachel Lampert has crafted a sincere
piece, achieving range in her one-woman performance,
touching moments, and a smattering of laughs.
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| THE SOUP COMES LAST |
Company: Kitchen Theatre Co..
Written and performed by: Rachel Lampert.
Directed by: Karen Azenberg.
Related links:
Official site
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| SCHEDULE |
59E59
59 East 59th St.
Oct. 4-24, 2004
Wed.-Sat. 8 p.m., Wed. and Sat. 2 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m.
(212) 279-4200
Tickets: $30
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In this true story, Lampert narrates and plays
herself — a down-to-earth Jewish dance instructor from
upstate New York, hired for six weeks as the resident
choreographer of China's first-ever production of
"West Side Story." The production takes place in a
pallid school auditorium 50 km from the center of
Beijing in the late 1990s. It is on this isolated
farmscape that Lampert encounters swampy bathrooms,
fuzzy translations, sexual mores which interfere with
the production at hand, and nightly banquets, which
occasionally culminate with eyeball soup.
Lampert brings to life a host of other characters. The
most vivid and annoying is her collaborator, a preeny
South African Jew from Los Angeles named Joann. Joann
is the quintessence of oblique tourist. Finding the
duo's first English translator lacking, she
exaggeratedly mimes everything in a sign language that
ridiculously presumes the recipient's knowledge of
Western cultural symbols, vernacular, and even
English: the mime-speak for "Professor Ding" is the
ringing of an imaginary bell. She sweet talks; she
cajoles; she bellows; she storms her way through
countless cultural barriers, an iron cleaver wrapped
in one of the silk nighties she's brought along.
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Lampert's material is limited: she chooses to inhabit
only the characters with whom she had spoken
communication — the insufficient translator, her
exceptional replacement (Lampert does an above-average
rendition of a Chinese person speaking fluent English,
but a touch of upstate New York occasionally flows
through), and tender moments spent with a young dancer
who has ambition, talent, and zero English. The play
pays homage to English colloquialism: in one thrilling
passage, the replacement translator wonders aloud that
"air," a theatrical term Joann uses to indicate long
pauses between lines, means the same as Lampert's more
down-home expression, "you can drive a truck through
it." A nice touch: mock Chinese proverbs appear in
fortune-cookie-like super-titles above the stage, such
as "Only if you climb the mountain can you view the
high plain."
But too often do the laughs rely on cultural
assumptions: on its face, for example, the idea of a
cold shower in a three-inch pool of stale water
registers bare amusement — after all, Lampert
willingly submitted herself to a Third World country.
The play is at its best when Lampert reaches for
themes that transcend personal comfort: cursory
references to political history, as when Lampert gives
Joann a hard time for pushing the students on sexual
liberation: "They just got over the Cultural
Revolution, and you're trying to launch them into the
Sexual Revolution?"
The play ends on a note of surprise: Lampert takes a
seat and shows the audience a treat which I won't give
away. But it is a touching finale to a sweet play that still
may not linger for much longer than the warmth of a
good, homecooked soup.
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OCTOBER 24, 2004
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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