Kate Rigg: Press: San Francisco Bay Guardian

Straight talk Kate's Chink-O-Rama uses laughter to slice racial stereotypes.

By Brad Rosenstein

ARISTOPHANES MAY HAVE started it all, but in our own time it's usually Lenny Bruce who gets the credit for first insisting on comedy's power to speak the unspeakable. Bruce exploded the power of language to hurt and enslave by saying all the bad words, endlessly and hilariously. It's a path that has inspired generations of comedians since, including 28-year-old Kate Rigg. The daughter of an Australian father and an Indonesian mother ("I'm a rice cracker," she proudly declares) is out to blow away every hateful Asian stereotype with Kate's Chink-O-Rama. This wildly satirical revue, making its local bow at Brava Theater Center as part of the National Queer Arts Festival, features Rigg zooming from one archstereotype to another, from "me so horny" Asian love dolls to overassimilated martial arts experts.

Nothing is sacred or unmentionable for Rigg, who even confides what lurks inside her Hello Kitty panties. Slicing and dicing our culture's persistent racism, Rigg attacks with merciless monologues and pop-song parodies. There's a Miss Saigon-style jilted war bride who redefines resilience with her own version of "I Will Survive" and an enterprising "China Latina" who hatches a plan to start her own dojo

("Two cultures for the price of one!"). Throughout, Rigg's writing is razor sharp, pouncing on every uneasy multicultural detail and invariably getting it right. Rigg and costar David Jung (as MC Chink Daddy) are some of the most precise comic performers I've seen in years, never missing a nuance of gesture or inflection in sparking the evening's frequent laughs.

Rigg and Jung are matched by the hard-grinding Chink-O-Rama Dancers (Satomi Shikata and MiRi Park), two buff and shticky kinetic comedians. On opening night Rigg seemed a little overeager to explain her deconstructive cultural point, and the vignettes betray their roots as individual club routines, functioning more as sharp-eyed character sketches than as a cohesive dramatic unit. (The two best routines – she becomes a lesbian librarian and a Canadian slacker – seem to exist entirely outside the Chink-O-Rama frame.) Director David Mowers hasn't found a way to vary the show's predictable progression or pace, but it's still an exhilarating evening showcasing some major up-and-coming talents.

Nearly topflight

First produced in 1982 in the depths of Margaret Thatcher's Britain, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is a pointed critical look at the rarity of women in positions of power. But with her usual dramatic skill, Churchill isn't content to settle for pat prescriptions: instead, the play argues in rich and complex terms for the need to scrutinize, just as much as men's choices, both the paths women take to the top and the decisions they make when they've gotten there. The play, an enduring favorite from Churchill's canon, is renowned for its brilliant opening scene. Marlene, a contemporary executive, has just received a major promotion. To celebrate, she is joined at a posh restaurant by notable women from history, ranging from ninth-century pope Joan to Chaucer's Patient Griselda.

Celebrating their wins and losses, these unexpected guests exemplify a range of archetypal female choices that resonate throughout the rest of the evening. Unfortunately, although what follows is unfailingly intelligent, compassionate, and insightful, nothing else in the play quite lives up to that amazing opening sequence. Director Rebecca Novick and her fine cast in this Crowded Fire production seem to know that, and the first scene – with its intricately intercut cross talk, complicated tapestry of actions, and shimmering contrasts of discourse – is played as the tour de force it deserves to be. Then things pull back to a focused simplicity as we learn the story behind Marlene's "success," a tale that for all its smart writing and equally bright acting can't sidestep disappointing elements of cliché in Churchill's conception.

But who can fault a playwright for setting her own bar so high? Twenty years after Top Girls, Churchill still has few peers among dramatists, and once again she finds a happy home at Crowded Fire, whose production of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire helped establish the company. Novick traces the play's thorny obstacles subtly and honestly, drawing sharp performances from, among others, Michele Leavy, Katie Cronin, and Mary Saudargas in multiple roles. Linda Jones, as Marlene, emerges as the company's major player, an indispensable actor of exceptional power, nuance, and range. She wears her too-perfect executive look like increasingly heavy armor, acting a role Marlene was born to play but that she wins at perhaps too high a price.

'Kate's Chink-O-Rama' runs Wed/12-Sun/16, 8 p.m., Brava Theater Center, 2789 24th St., S.F. $22-$24. (415) 647-2822. 'Top Girls' runs through July 6. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy, S.F. $12-$25. (415) 675-5995, www.crowdedfire.org.