Theatre in Review: The Dance and the Railroad (Signature Theatre)In The Dance and the Railroad, David Henry Hwang has seized on a fascinating aspect of American history, and it's a great pity that he doesn't make more of it. Using an extreme close-up lens, he focuses on a brief encounter between two men as a way of illuminating the experience of Chinese immigrants working on the transcontinental railroad. It's a fresh subject given a fresh approach, but this piece, running about 70 minutes, only really becomes interesting as it nears the hour mark. It is 1867, somewhere on the top of a mountain somewhere in the American desert. (As rendered by the set designer Mimi Lien, it is a forbidding, origami-like arrangement of jutting levels and unexpectedly sharp angles.) Progress on the railroad has been halted by a strike; the Chinese workers are demanding shorter hours and a $10-a-week raise. During this hiatus, one of the men, Lone, has wandered off to practice the Chinese opera dance steps in which he has been trained. Yuekun Wu, who plays Lone, impresses with the fluidity of his movements and his apparent command of the opera's dance vocabulary. Lone is joined by Ma, another worker, who is eager to learn the opera performance technique. Lone, whose dedication to his art is total, has no use for this green interloper at first, but he is gradually persuaded to share some of his skills. This neatly sets up a conflict based on two very different versions of the immigrant experience. Ma is the newcomer, having arrived in America with dreams of getting rich and returning home on a golden sedan chair accompanied by 20 wives. Lone was plucked from the academy where he studied opera performance and was sent against his will to work on the railroad. (His impoverished family's needs were too great to tolerate an artist in their ranks.) His face a stoic mask, he recalls being taken "from a room with 80 boys to a ship with 200 men," his life of devotion to art replaced by an existence as a menial laborer. Thus innocence is pitted against bitter experience, Ma's unquenched hope contrasted with Lone's cynical eye for the way things work in this burgeoning capitalist country. (Among other things, Ma dreams of an end-of-the-year bonus from his employers, a notion that makes Lone snort in derision.) In another writer's hands, such differences might be made into arresting drama, but, at this early date, Hwang hadn't found the knack. Lone and Ma are attitudes rather than characters; each takes a position and pretty much sticks to it for nearly an hour, repeating his ideas in dialogue that is surprisingly free of the details that would bring their stories to life. There's an interesting twist of sorts when the strike is settled, its mixed results ironically bringing hope to Lone and disappointment to Ma, but this isn't enough to make a compelling play. A development in which Lone forces Ma to spend the entire night squatting like a duck -- he is apparently teaching his young apostle something about discipline -- is awfully hard to credit, even in a play as stylized as this. The Dance and the Railroad becomes compelling when, late in the play, the two men put on their own mini-opera, derived from their own experiences. The two of them -- Ruy Iskandar is Ma -- combine beautifully fluid, carefully synchronized movements; terse, poetic language; and sound effects to describe their own epic journeys from China to an arid patch of the American West. (The director, May Adrales, does her best work here, presumably aided by Qian Yi, the Chinese opera consultant.) It is here, after pages of boilerplate dialogue, that Hwang finds a way of giving his story a unique voice, expressing it in distinctively theatrical terms. As lovely as this scene is, it's not enough on which to hang an entire play, and, as a result, the experience of seeing The Dance and the Railroad is oddly weightless and at times rather dull. This is despite Jiyoun Chang's often-gorgeous lighting, which transforms the set with chilly morning looks and crepuscular sunsets, and the sound design of Broken Chord, with its scene-setting ambient effects. (The percussive music is by Huang Ruo.) Jennifer Moeller's costumes look thoroughly authentic. The Dance and the Railroad was acclaimed when it first appeared in 1981, but this isn't the first time that the early work of a talented playwright paled before his later accomplishments. From the vantage point of today, it can now be seen as the appearance of a new voice in a minor -- interesting, even promising -- play, but not really a success.--David Barbour 
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