In chain reactions, thousand-firecracker strands climbed poles to the microphones and blasted out the loudspeakers. Blow it all up. Set the theater on fire. The playwright goes down with his play like the historians who were killed at the ends of their eras, their books burning at their feet. No asbestos-and-metal guillotine curtain here. The Globe and the Garrick had many fires, then holocaust. It’s a theater tradition. Chinese hold all the Guinness records—1,670 audience members and actors killed in Canton in 1845 at the Theater, which was enclosed by a high wall. The fire at the Theater in Kamli killed two thousand in 1893. The Fu Chow playhouse burned down in 1884 under bombardment by the French fleet. Every theater you’ve ever been to or heard of has had its fire. The Bowery Theatre in Vauxhall Gardens, New York—burned and rebuilt six times. Eleven hundred theater fires all over the world during the last hundred years. In London and Paris and Budapest and Silver City, Eureka, Virginia City, Leadville (three times), Marysville, Placerville, Meadville, and in San Francisco alone, not counting earthquake fires—the Adelphi Theatre, the Jenny Lind Theatre, Ronison & Evrad’s Theatre, the Olympic Circus, the New Jenny Lind, the Lyceum (twice), the Music Hall, Pickwick Hall, the Russian Gardens, the Grand American Theatre I, the Grand American Theatre II, the Winter Garden, and the Chinese Theatre of San Francisco. Floors caught fire when winter stoves under the stage heated up the boards too hot. The candles in the luster pooled and became a bowl of sheet-flame. The gasman at the Baltimore Front Street Theater held his pole-torch up to a jet, and a gust of fire shot out through the stage, which is a wind tunnel. The hay bales for dragging the floors clean caught sparks and smoldered. For the sake of verisimilitude, the actor-soldiers at the court theater in Oldenburg set fire to a stage fortress, midnight, 1891, and the rest of the building went with it. On Bastille Day, 1873, cannons were shot off indoors, which destroyed the Grand Opéra House and the bibliothèque. The last act of Faust, the masked ball, caused many theaters to burn, including the holocausts of the Leghorn and the Teatro degli Acquidotti. There was a cinematographe fire in Paris in 1897; and in 1908, at the Rhoades Opera House, Boyerton, Pennsylvania, a motion-picture machine exploded and killed a hundred people. And just this past spring in Saigon, three hundred children were killed at a waterfront theater. We’ll do anything for lighting, die for it, kill for it.
In the tradition of theater fires, in remembrance of the burnings of Chinatowns, and of the Great Earthquake and Fire, and of the Honolulu plague fire at the New Year and the new century, and in protest of the school fact that Chinese invented gunpowder but were too dumb to use it in warfare, and in honor of artists who were arrested for incendiarism, Wittman Ah Sing—“Gotta match?” he asked. “Not since Superman died,” answered a chorus of kids in the audience.—lit every last explosive. Go up in flames and down in history. Fireworks whiz-banged over and into the neighborhood. Percussion caps, powders, and instruments banged and boomed. A genie of the theater ran around with torches—Antonin Artaud torches the grass-hut theater of Bali, and the actors gesture through the flames.
The neighbors turned in four alarums. Fire engines were coming, wailing louder than Chinese opera. On cue—the S.F.F.D. was bringing the redness and the wailing. Sirens. Bells. A hook-and-ladder truck. The audience ran out into the street. More audience came. And the actors were out from backstage and the green room, breaking rules of reality-and-illusion. Their armor and swords were mirrored in fenders, bumpers, and the long sides of the fire trucks. The clear clean red metal with the silver chrome glorified all that was shining. The emergency lights reddened faces and buildings. “Fire!” “Fire!” The Chron’s banner tomorrow: Chinese Fire!
“Where’s the fire?”
“No fire. Chinese custom.”
“Do you have a fireworks permit?”
“Permit?” Only three flashpowder technicians in the State of California had a Class C license for setting off theatrical explosives. Wittman Ah Sing wasn’t one of them.
“You don’t plan to keep this racket up all night, do you?”
“The noisy part of our ritual is done. Would you like some tickets to the quiet part? You’re invited to come in and see it.” And to the crowd of neighbors, “We invite you too,” papering the house. “I promise to be quiet.”
The next part of Wittman’s night could have had him caged and taken through the City in a paddywagon. He might have seen the streets through grillwork and between the heads of a pair of cops.
Instead, he was given a chance; Chinese are allowed more fireworks than other people. He went back inside, and continued the play. We’ll let him tell you about himself by himself.
9
ONE-MAN SHOW
It came to you to be yourself. Your fellow-actors’ courage failed; as if they had been caged with a pantheress, they crept along the wings and spoke what they had to, only not to irritate you. But you drew them forward, and you posed them and dealt with them as if they were real. Those limp doors, those simulated curtains, those objects that had no reverse side, drove you to protest. You felt how your heart intensified unceasingly toward an immense reality and, frightened, you tried once more to take people’s gaze off you like long gossamer threads—: but now, in their fear of the worst, they were already breaking into applause: as though at the last moment to ward off something that would compel them to change their life.
—Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
I. I. I.
I. I. I.
I. I. I.
—Monkey’s aria, The Journey to the West
OF COURSE, Wittman Ah Sing didn’t really burn down the Association house and the theater. It was an illusion of fire. Good monkey. He kept control of the explosives, and of his arsonist’s delight in flames. He wasn’t crazy; he was a monkey. What’s crazy is the idea that revolutionaries must shoot and bomb and kill, that revolution is the same as war. We keep losing our way on the short cut—killing for freedom and liberty and community and a better economy. Wittman could have torched the curtains and the dry flowers; he could have downpoured the oil lamps onto the chairs and fruit crates. He’d been envying that Japanese-American guy that got shot allegedly helping to set the Watts fires, yelling, “Burn, baby, burn.” But, no, Wittman would not have tried to burn the City. It’s all too beautiful to burn.
The world was splitting up. Tolstoy had noted the surprising gaiety of war. During his time, picnickers and fighters took to the same field. We’d gotten more schizzy. The dying was on the Asian side of the planet while the playing—the love-ins and the be-ins—were on the other, American side. Whatever there is when there isn’t war has to be invented. What do people do in peace? Peace has barely been thought.
Our monkey, master of change, staged a fake war, which might very well be displacing some real war. Wittman was learning that one big bang-up show has to be followed up with a second show, a third show, shows until something takes hold. He was defining a community, which will meet every night for a season. Community is not built once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice, and re-create it. His community surrounding him, then, we’re going to reward and bless Wittman with our listening while he talks to his heart’s content. Let him get it all out, and we hear what he has to say direct. Blasting and blazing are too wordless.
On the third night, the one hundred and eight bandits climbed the stairs to become stars in the sky, except for some of the Juan brothers. They escape westward, that is, to Southeast Asia. They shunt their skiffs through the tule fog and shoot out in Viet Nam. Juan II, Juan V, and Juan VII (pronounced the Hispanic way, not like Don Quick-set and Don Jew-On the way we learned at Berkeley), played by Chicanos, become the One Hundred Children who are the ancestors of the Vietnamese. Though Vietnamese will deny that. Everybody would rather be the indigenous people of a place than be its immigrants. Another Indian punchline: “Are they going back where they came from yet?” A door like two golden trays opens up for a moment in the sky, which tears like blue silk, and a hundred and five bandit
s go to Heaven and three start a new country. The audience clapped loud, bone-proud of our boys and our girls, just like graduation, where we take the hardest awards, math and science. The End.
Except: A Chinese-minded audience likes the moral of the story told in so many words. And the American theater was rejoicing in scoldings; Blacks were breaking through the fourth wall. Whites were going to the theater and paying good money to be yelled at by Blacks, and loving them for it. Wittman Ah Sing waited for the audience to stop applauding, whistling, calling out names—“Kamiyama!” “Shaw!” “Nanci!”—a kabuki tradition. The actors had taken solo bows after arias and scenes and acts. He held up his hands—enough, enough already—turned his chair around, lit a cigarette, smoked, straddled the chair. He wanted to address the world as the shouting Daruma, fists upthrust pulling force up from lotus butt base, his body a triangle of power, and hairy mouth wide open and roaring. Not the Daruma doll that you knock around but Daruma the Shouter.
“I want to talk to you,” said Wittman. “I’m Wittman Ah Sing, the playwright.” The audience clapped for the playwright. He further introduced himself by giving them the mele of his name. “I’m one of the American Ah Sings. Probably there are no Ah Sings in China. You may laugh behind my family’s back, that we keep the Ah and think it means something. I know it’s just a sound. A vocative that goes in front of everyone’s names. Ah Smith. Ah Jones. Everyone has an ah, only our family writes ours down. In that Ah, you can hear we had an ancestor who left a country where the language has sounds that don’t mean anything—la and ma and wa—like music. Alone and illiterate, he went where not one other Chinese was. Nobody to set him straight. When his new friends asked him his name, he remembered that those who wanted him had called, ‘Ah Sing.’ So he told the school-marm, ‘Ah Sing, ma’am,’ and she wrote down for him the two syllables of a new American name.”
Wittman waved the newspapers in his hand, and whacked them against his knee. “The reviews have come out. You’ve seen the reviews, haven’t you?” The audience, which now included the actors, gave the reviews a round of applause. “I want to talk,” he said. They gave him another hand, welcoming him to go ahead, talk. “So. You were entertained. You liked the show, huh? I myself have some complaints and notes but. Let me discuss with you what the Chron and the Examiner said, and the Oakland Tribune, and The Daily Cal and the Berkeley Gazette, and the Shopping News, and the Barb. They’ve reviewed us already, thinking that opening night is no different from the second night and tonight. You like the reviews? I am sore and disappointed. Come on, you can’t like these reviews. Don’t be too easily made happy. Look. Look. ‘East meets West.’ ‘Exotic’ ‘Sino-American theater.’ ‘Snaps, crackles and pops like singing rice.’ ‘Sweet and sour.’ Quit clapping. Stop it. What’s to cheer about? You like being compared to Rice Krispies? Cut it out. Let me show you, you’ve been insulted. They sent their food critics. They wrote us up like they were tasting Chinese food. Rice, get it? ‘Savor beauteous Nanci Lee,’ it says here. That’s like saying that LeRoi Jones is as good as a watermelon. ‘Yum yum, authentic watermelon.’ They wouldn’t write a headline for Raisin in the Sun: ‘America Meets Africa.’ They want us to go back to China where we belong. They think that Americans are either white or Black. I can’t wear that civil-rights button with the Black hand and the white hand shaking each other. I have a nightmare—after duking it out, someday Blacks and whites will shake hands over my head. I’m the little yellow man beneath the bridge of their hands and overlooked. Have you been at a demonstration where they sing:
Black and white together.
Black and white together.
Black and white together
someda-a-a-ay.
Deep in my heart, I do believe we have to be of further outrage to stop this chanting about us, that ‘East is east and west is west.’ Here’s one that keeps quoting longer, like more learned. I won’t read it to you. My mouth doesn’t want to say any more wog-hater non-American Kipling. ‘Twain shall.’ Shit. Nobody says ‘twain shall,’ except in reference to us. We’ve failed with our magnificence of explosions to bust through their Kipling. I’m having to give instruction. There is no East here. West is meeting West. This was all West. All you saw was West. This is The Journey In the West. I am so fucking offended. Why aren’t you offended? Let me help you get offended. Always be careful to take offense. These sinophiles dig us so much, they’re drooling over us. That kind of favorableness we can do without. They think they know us—the wide range of us from sweet to sour—because they eat in Chinese restaurants. They’re the ones who order the sweet-and-sour pork and the sweet-and-sour spare ribs and the sweet-and-sour shrimp. I’ve read my Aristotle and Agee, I’ve been to college; they have ways to criticize theater besides for sweetness and sourness. They could do laundry reviews, clean or dirty. Come on. What’s so ‘exotic’? We’re about as exotic as shit. Nobody soo-pecial here. No sweet-and-sour shit. No exotic chop suey shit. So this variety show had too much motley; they didn’t have to call it ‘chop-suey vaudeville.’ I am so pissed off. But. This other piece says that we are not exotic. ‘Easily understood and not too exotic for the American audience.’ Do I have to explain why ‘exotic’ pisses me off, and ‘not exotic’ pisses me off? They’ve got us in a bag, which we aren’t punching our way out of. To be exotic or to be not-exotic is not a question about Americans or about humans. Okay, okay. Take me, for example. I’m common ordinary. Plain black sweater. Blue jeans. Tennis shoes ordinaire. Clean soo mun shaven. What’s so exotic? My hair’s too long, huh? Is that it? It’s the hair? Does anybody have a pair of scissors? Here, help me spread these newspapers on the floor. I’m cutting my hair. If I bend over like this, I can see it, and cut it fairly straight. What’s so funny? It ought to be the same around each ear? No need for symmetrical, huh? I don’t want to snip off my ears. Earless Oichi. I’ll lean over this way, and off comes this side. And this side too. And the top. The do-it-yourself haircut. Can be done without mirrors or friends. Whatever you get, you wear. Natural. Fast. Cheap. Just cut until you yourself can’t see any more hair. Go by feel. I like the feel of sharp blades sandily closing through hairs. Sure, it’s my real hair. I’m not wearing a wig, I’m honest. Wow, I didn’t know I was carrying so much hair on my head.”
Winging it, the monkey was indeed cutting off his actual hair. Black hair covered the newspapers. Wittman was performing an unpremeditated on-the-spot happening, unrepeatable tomorrow night. His prickly pear head cracked the audience up. The hair down his collar kept him in aggravation.
Wittman turned the chair flush toward the audience, sat up straight facing them, classic talk-story pose, and said: “We should have done a soap opera that takes place in a kitchen about your average domestic love agonies and money agonies. The leading lady is in hair curlers and an apron, and her husband, who has a home haircut like mine, stomps in, home from work. He knocks the mud off his workboots. He lets down the bib of his farmer or mechanic overalls. He drinks his beer while kneading his toes. She empties his lunchbucket, and they argue about whether a napkin does or does not count as one lunch item. A radio is on, and it’s tuned to some popular station broadcasting whatever happens to be on, show tunes or a ball game or the news. No ching-chong music, no epic costumes, you understand? The highpoint will be the family eating and discussing around the table—where the dramatic confrontations of real life take place; that’s why meals are the hardest scenes to block. You know what the Tribune will say? ‘Exotic’ Or they’ll say, ‘Whaddya know? Not exotic. The inscrutables are explaining themselves at last. We are allowed into their mysterious oriental world.’ ” Pause for the thinkers to think. “Okay, let’s say in this soap opera, they hear bad news about their only son—killed in war. (Don’t you whites get confused; he’s killed fighting for our side. Nobody here but us Americans.) The mom is weeping big sobs with nose-blowing, and the dad howls, ‘Aiya! Aiya! Aaaaaaa! Say, la! Naygamagahai! Aaaargh! Say, la! Say, la! Aiyaaaah!’ and like in the funnies, ‘Aie
eeee!’ ”
Wittman stood and vocalesed a wail of pain that a dad might cry who’d given his only kid to his country. His eyebrows screwed toward each other, and his mouth was bent into the sign for infinity. Some audience members laughed.
“And guess how too many people will react? They’ll say, ‘Inscrutable.’ We do tears. We do ejaculations. We do laffs. And they call us inscrutable.
“I have an idea how to make them cut that inscrutable shit out. Our next task is to crack the heart of the soap opera.”
“I’ve gotten work on the soaps,” said Charley. “They’re starting to hire minorities now.”
“Me too,” said Nanci. “I played a nurse.”
“Did you play the lab tech again, Charley? Or the court stenographer? You guys are too grateful. The job of the characters they let you play gets upgraded from criminal or servant to semi-professional, and you’re fooled that we’re doing better. Just because you get to wear a nurse’s uniform rather than a Suzie Wong dress doesn’t mean you’re getting anywhere nearer to the heart of that soap. You’re not the ones they tune in every day to weep over. We need to be part of the daily love life of the country, to be shown and loved continuously until we’re not inscrutable anymore.
“Wait a minute. Let me try that again. We’re not inscrutable at all. We are not inherently unknowable. That’s a trip they’re laying on us. Because they are willfully innocent. Willful innocence is a perversion. It’s like that other perversion where people fly to Japan or Denmark to have their ex-hymen sewn shut. People who call us inscrutable get their brains sewn shut. Then they run around saying, ‘We don’t know you. And it’s your fault. You’re inscrutable.’ They willfully do not learn us, and blame that on us, that we have an essential unknowableness. I was reading in a book by a Black man who travels far from America to this snowy village in the Alps. No Black man had set foot on that part of the Earth before. The villagers are innocent of slavery and of standing in the schoolhouse door and even of having ever seen a Black person. Their innocence pisses him off. On his walks, the kids call to him, innocently, ‘Neger. Neger,’ which makes echoes of another word to his American ears. He doesn’t make a scary face and chase those kids, and he doesn’t lecture them. He is a very quiet guy, who thinks at them: ‘People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them … and hence all Black men have toward all white men an attitude which is designed, really, either to rob the white man of the jewel of his naïveté, or else to make it cost him dear.’ ”
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International) Page 41