By My Thanh Mac
The play N*gger Wetb*ack Ch*nk has come a long way since originating at UCLA over four years ago. Currently wrapping up a two month run at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood, N*W*C entertains but doesn't seem to drive a clear point home.
"In the beginning, there was a nigger. Then God made a chink. And the three were completed with the wetback."
If a red light of alarm lights up in your head, take a breath and wait for it to turn green because, don't worry, this is not a racial rant. It's merely a line from the play N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk that has been showing at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood. A brave and ambitious production starring Rafael Agustin, Allan Axibal, and Miles Gregley, even the beginning of man makes its way into this thought provoking, shamelessly entertaining, yet (somewhat) stereotype-affirming performance.
In N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, the actors play themselves, and according to numerous interviews, all three contributed to the writing process in their attempt to "depower" the words that make up the title. The NWC trio must have not consulted a dictionary because if they had, they would have realized that "depower" is not technically a word. But I digress.
The play starts with the three actors coming on stage one after the other chanting the racial slur that they each would be associated with. Axibal appears with a rhythmic "chink, chink," followed by Agustin's "wetback," while both are interjected by Gregley's "nigger nigger." Together, the repetition of these words beat the message into the audience that in order to strip the power away, the slurs first have to be acknowledged.
As they entered the stage, I was taken aback for a second, as I had recalled in an interview with the three actors on the NWC website saying that this play had no costumes. It must be a coincidence that the Asian American is wearing a purposefully gaudy Chinese coat that looks like it came straight from Chinatown, the Latino is sporting a wife beater and bandana, and the African American is lost in a ridiculously large fur coat and fancy hat that has "confused" written all over it.
Watching them dressed up as explicitly stereotypical images of the three races, I couldn't help but not take them too seriously. Even as the play went on, there were profound moments and discussions that needed to be felt -- but more often than not when the emotional peak was reached, they barely gave any time to reflect and digest before they would quickly throw out the next racial joke. And when I say racial joke, the most overplayed joke had to be the standard one about Asians having small penises. (Laughter ensues.) Except they came back to it…over and over again. (Fake, awkward laughter.) We get it. Men are obsessed with their penises.
In joking about these racial stereotypes, the play treads a fine line between humor that includes the characters in the joke and humor that makes these minorities the butt of the joke. Interestingly, both are done concurrently. There is an excerpt featuring Axibal, Agustin, and Gregley listing favorable associations from each other's race that they would like to be a part of -- a big family that will be there through thick and thin, a natural talent to sing and dance -- which showcases a playful camaraderie that audiences can relate to. In another skit the three realize that in their sea of differences, there are many commonalities that span all races: for example, being hard-working and coming from a middle class family.
These heart-felt realities become compromised whenever the tone of the play switches to a mode comparable to a brash stand-up comedian cracking racial jokes about himself. At this point, we have moved from laughing about the silliness of stereotypes to actually laughing at stereotypes. These moments feel incongruent to their intentions, since these guys say they're doing it to bring racial awareness. But even in their re-mix of stereotypes that is supposed to be aimed at breaking the expectation, the Black pope has "bling" and the Latino basketball player has a gun.
Because the actors were portraying themselves, they also had the opportunity to share some personal stories. Agustin tells about his encounter with an immigration officer when he was young. He talks about another time when he exploited his own race in an acting competition. Gregley recalls the first time he realized the word "nigger" was referring to him: in an English class reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Meanwhile, Axibal, who offers the disclaimer that he is not Chinese but in fact Filipino, focused on more surface level endeavors such as wanting to look like Tom Cruise or be Superman -- strangely enough, offering little or no insight to his identity as a Filipino American. If the aim of the play was to point out that all Asians aren't the same (meaning they aren't all Chinese), then by sporting a Chinese coat and sticking to blanket Asian stereotypes, Axibal seemed to miss a chance to distinguish himself from the model minority.
By the time the three actors get to the only race that's important -- let's join hands and say it: the human race -- and offer the theory that we all migrated from Africa (which seemed to come from deep left field), I had had my laughs and was ready to leave. The play had wrapped up too easily, and the message simply had not made it home. I was left to wonder if the play really did give meaning to those three little words, when all I learned was a new politically-inappropriate song to chant out loud.
I was really excited to watch the play because I knew anything so in-your-face deserved a chance to be heard. While I was not disappointed, the message became slightly blurred in the middle. It had me thinking about whether or not their means had reached their intended ends. If this play was aimed to let audiences know that we should "depower" these stereotypes by not shying away from words like "nigger," "wetback," and "chink"-- why then were these ideas completely fleshed out and emphasized, while the most important race (being the human race) was only slightly elaborated on in the end? While I couldn't help but be entertained by the cast's song and charm, the continual return to racial jokes seemed to highlight the stereotypes rather than dismiss them. Hence, it was a play that was thought-provoking, shamelessly entertaining, and (unfortunately) stereotype affirming.
Published: Friday, July 27, 2007
