Maidens, Tigers, and Bears, Oh My!
Theater Review: When Tigers Smoked Long Pipes

By Fer Wang

Angela Kang's retelling of five traditional Korean folktales, "When Tigers Smoked Long Pipes," is like reading aloud from your wildest dreams. Dressed in bright costumes that are fanciful mixtures of Korean, Bohemian, and Hobbit, each character takes turns simultaneously narrating and acting the story that he or she is part of. Cute, frightened children hiding from a tiger in the first tale, "Sister Sun, Brother Moon" for example, chime together "the cute, frightened children tried hiding from the tiger" while they duck and cover on stage with shaking limbs. The method has the potential to create some truly awful camp, but aside from "Shim Chong: The Blind Man's Daughter," the overly sentimental fourth tale with several miscalculated jokes, the enthusiasm and playfulness of the actors makes the production a delight for audiences of all ages. Even adults will find it difficult to resist the magic as characters truly come to life.

The self-narration has an added benefit: it makes props unnecessary and engages the audience directly in the magic-making. When the deer says she went to the Crystal Lake the audience instantly recognizes the blue sheet being held aloft as the most beautiful, shining body of water ever seen. This is not to say, however, that the production is a bare, black-box theatrical exercise. On the contrary, set designer Cynthia Q. Ignacio produces prop after elaborate prop, with her wrought-metal masks especially noteworthy. Through the ingenious use of a hammock, when actor Jason Grimley hitches a ride on a passing dragon, the fantasy creature practically breathes fire. Ann Closs-Farley's costumes hold their own in this fantasyland, with her wigs artfully tangled with twigs or furry ears.

But in the end, it is the ensemble cast that truly brings out the magic of these Korean folktales. The multi-ethnic cast capably crosses lines of race (Caucasians play Koreans), gender (women play male characters and men play female characters, only occasionally for comic effect), and species (talking bears and pipe-smoking tigers). With strong performances all around, Kipp Shiotani and Laurel Devaney still manage to stand out. Devaney demonstrates a special versatility as she claims both the night's biggest laughs-playing a farting bear-and the night's most poignant moment-a tiger who dies of grief for his human mother.

And it is this predominant theme running through the stories, the deep bond between parent and child, that makes this superficially mishmash, category-defying production indisputably Asian. Each of the five stories involves children or parents who leave Heaven, give up wives and husbands, or sacrifice their lives for the other. In watching these stories they might or might not have heard before, astute young Asian-Americans should recognize the origins of the familial burdens of duty and piety they often consider so onerous and unfair, and maybe, just maybe, see their beauty.

July 2, 2003