“When you’re alone in your room and nobody’s watching you -- you just standing in front of the mirror combing your hair – the relaxation, the completeness with which you do it is poetic.” ---Sanford Meisner
During our training on the Meisner acting technique in the summer of 2021, I was introduced to the idea of ‘public solitude’ created by Stanislavsky to help actors to overcome stage fright. Learning that ‘public solitude’ is the relaxed behavior on stage and happens only when actors are fully involved in the activity that they are doing, I found it interesting that we always make efforts to set our room before we begin a chosen activity such as rushing through homework due in one hour or repairing a mother's vase that just broke.
Besides the actors’ active engagement, the rooms matter. Rooms are private spaces in which actors perceive, take in, and react, helping us to focus on the activities and get into relaxed behaviors. I realize that set designs are more than aesthetics and complicated symbolism. Sets tell characters’ stories; actors listen to those stories; then, actors assimilate themselves with characters, conduct activities, and project their stories to the audience.
This is how I begin to revise my project on Golden Child
GOLDEN CHILD
In Golden Child, David Henry Hwang portrays a 1920s Chinese family wrestling with unfamiliar Western ideals. Whether to be westernized or not is the question. I played the first wife, the matriarch of the family whose husband is constantly in a foreign country for business. In an extract in which the first wife is regulating the immodest second wife in the second wife’s room, I prepared myself by learning about the second wife’s motivation and seeing how her values contradicted with mine. I needed to know why I want to regulate her; and what specific belief of hers triggered me. The more I explored the second wife, the more I realized her complexity. She was a combination of East and West: thirsting for power and independence while following the traditional way of gaining power by capturing her husband’s attention and love. The contradictions within her make the second wife real. Hwang probably used the character to communicate the confusing state of Asian Americans who just learned Western values and how they struggle to assimilate. However, I found this might even be an epitome of the confusion and contradiction in 1920s China: What is Westernization? How should we incorporate Western ideas? What part of tradition should remain?
"Rigid flexibility”
Being sold by her father as a second wife to Tieng-Bin, Luan urges to be westernized in order to please Tieng-Bin and become the only wife after he converted to be a Christian. When Luan early expresses her preference of the western culture at the dinner table in the night of Tieng-Bin’s return, she is scorned by the first wife Sui-Yong as having a “rigid flexibility.” I find the contradiction in this description accurate to describe Luan. In terms of rigidity, Luan has an artificial mind with a root of conservative Chinese values, which can be confirmed by her frequent reference to “Chinese standard”and her forgiveness of being sold by her father, a representation of patriarch. Yet, it is exactly this experience of being oppressed by the rigid patriarchal society and the lack of autonomy at a young age that initiated Luan’s rigid goal——possessing “absolute power.” Therefore, through the set design of Luan’s room, I intend to show her “rigid flexibility”: her root in traditional Chinese values and her attempt to transform for obtaining the goal.
On her dressing table, instead of using the traditional painted wooden cases to collect all her jewelries, I place the waffle iron, the gift from her husband. Using this gift in an unconventional way, Luan urges to show her capability giving a cooking appliance a new usage --- to hold jewelries that give her beauty and confidence. Her capability and creativity coexists with her domestic virtues.
To further emphasize Luan’s possession of both Chinese traditional values and willingness to be westernized, I place a red rose into a cloisonné with the pattern of dragon on it. The red rose, a clearly exotic and western flower, parallels Luan’s openness towards westernization: being baptized to a Christian, unbinding Anh’s feet, and willingness to wear western clothing.
As a second wife, having a vase with the pattern of a dragon decorated on it not only highlights her ambition of gaining supremacy among all wives but also the ambition of becoming the head of family.
The rose with cuts on it also arouses a sense of danger and conflict, implying the unavoidable tension in Luan's path of being westernized and gaining power.
“Right now, feeling is the only thing our Husband desires.”
Sitting in this lounge, Luan is having a conversation with the first wife, Sui Yong. Luan gets jealous that Tien-Bing shows more affection towards the third wife, Eling, and is warned by Sui Yong that “the only thing that stands in the way of a woman’s power” is their “feelings”. Luan refutes by stating that “feeling is the only thing our husband desires.”
Her realization of the power of feeling rather than pure modesty and numbness is an indication of her understanding of western respect towards individuality and sentimentality.
I chose Chinese wooden furniture and a plate of waffles, which can be linked to the previous idea that Luan received a waffle iron from her husband as a gift. The plate of waffles shows her capability of manipulating both husband and the first wife’s feelings: for husband, she intends to show her appreciation and mastering of western culture while for the first wife showing off how she is one who really understand the husband’ feelings and this gives her power.
“Husband. Perhaps you would honor me later tonight?”
I found that Hwang’ depiction of the three wives reveals certain traits of the ‘male gaze’. The first wife’s humbleness, pretended modesty, the second wife’s tempting, sexually seeking behavior, and the third wife’s mildness, obedience, and being sexually appealing and available for the husband collectively confirm the power of Tieng-bin as the patriarch of the family.
For the bed, dark purple curtains and quilts are used to emphasize the idea of power and authority. The curtains will be tied up neatly instead of hanging down. This indicates Luan’s overt welcoming towards Tien-Bing’s visit and behaves to the ‘male gaze’.
However, a large hooked rug in rich burgundy with beige and purple floral patterns are over the mahogany floor in the downstage left and center left area.
The dark tone in burgundy reveals Luan’s sophistication and her internal rebellion against the confining tradition, which challenge the “male gaze.”
