By Nick Miller
Playwright Christopher Chen wants audiences to feel uncomfortable. He doesn’t trust comfort, in his mind, or in others. He wants us all to be digging, questioning, poised on the line between belief and doubt.
“That is the best theatre,” he says, from his home on the west coast of the US. “Especially since theatre is just a whole bunch of people talking. That’s where the juice, and the energy is. Where the leaning forward in your seat comes from. From feeling uncomfortable.
“And in my deepest heart of hearts I feel like that’s the way you should live your life as well. Not to be uncomfortable, I guess, but to be alert.”
Louis Le, Jean Tong (director), Jessica Clarke and David Whiteley, from Red Stitch’s new production of Caught.Credit: Simon Schluter
Chen’s breakout play, 2014’s Caught, is about to have its Australian premiere at Red Stitch. It’s a moral maze that starts with an art gallery hosting a retrospective of a legendary Chinese dissident. But everything is not what it seems. From scene to scene the play peels away assumptions to reveal a deeper “truth” – which may again be confounded.
“I just love to create a very interesting structure and vessel [for a play] ... as opposed to something that’s more free-flowing or stream of consciousness,” Chen says. “I decided every scene in this play is going to negate the reality of this thing that came before, and I wanted to go in [to that] as far as I could. And that became fantastically fun and illuminating to me, the process of consciously going with this rule I made for myself.”
This play didn’t just make his name in American theatre – it helped him realise what he wanted to do with it.
“It hardened in me this impulse I’ve always had, and that’s to have plays that put forth this ideal of digging, that there are always more levels and layers beneath the surface that you can explore. And in doing so I end up discovering new things, even about myself. Like, if I challenge the assumptions of a character, what would my assumptions be? I’d actively try to do some deep self-examination, and put that into the play ... my own insecurities and questions, things I may not be sure about.
“And then there’s a kind of integrity and honesty with what [the characters] are wrestling with, because it syncs up with what I’m wrestling with myself.”
Chen is “half Chinese and half white, split right down the middle,” he says. In a sense, the play was these halves interrogating each other. He’d arm each side with as much intellect and empathy as he could, and set them to wrestling. He could call out racism, and simultaneously test himself for unseen, unexamined racism. He could get into “tricky, really tricky conversations”.
The play was written when Trumpism was a thundercloud on the horizon, rather than the defining climate of his country. Does he want to rethink this “question everything” approach? Does that leave the field wide open for fraudsters and conspiracy theorists? If you destablise “truth”, do you encourage apathy?
“There are a multiplicity of realities, and that is simply a truth,” Chen says. “That cannot be denied. The problem then becomes when people use that core reality, like Trump, or even Xi Jinping, quite frankly, and then weaponise it. They say ‘well, nothing is really real, nothing is really the truth, therefore you must believe me, therefore my truth is correct’.
“But I think [Caught] is an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of realities as something that we can never, never stop examining. It’s an advocacy for perpetual alertness. [The state of the world] is pretty scary, I never thought we’d be in this position right now. Fear and tribalism are a complicating factor. But [my] core value is digging, as opposed to the truth itself. The moral thing is the quest for the truth. And that’s the dividing line, the black and white – either you’re trying or you’re not trying.”
Jean Tong, who is directing Caught for Red Stitch, says the play “leapt off the page and made me feel a bunch of complicated feelings”.
“It made me uncomfortable, it confused me, it made me angry. And then the next scene, there was a massive twist, and that was just so enjoyable. I just felt very much in the hands of the playwright, and that wherever this play was going to take me felt super exciting. I felt completely thrown off-balance, and it was just fun.”
The hardest part of staging it, she says, is making sure the audience feels supported: that they don’t feel cheated or tricked each time the play pulls out the rug from under them.
“It’s about inviting them to enjoy that experience rather than making them feel silly for not having seen the twist coming,” she says. “You shouldn’t be confused when you’re surprised. When we arrive at the next thing, we’re arriving there together ... you can enjoy that feeling because the characters are going through that at the same time.
“It can be a pleasurable spiral of an experience: when you come to doubt yourself... it invites you to question things, and question yourself.”
Caught is at Red Stitch at Home in St Kilda, from August 16 to September 11.
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