"Office Hour" at Berkeley Rep

Berkeley Rep photo by Kevin Berne

Julia Cho is a very talented playwright. Her play Aubergine a couple of years ago at Berkeley Rep was a real revelation, and The Language Archive remains a favorite that I could see over and over. So I had pretty high expectations going into the latest effort between Cho and Berkeley Rep, Office Hour.

The show is quite timely, both because of the general theme of young males who feel ostracized by society and respond with violence and threats and because of recent events involving school shootings. And to make it all hit home even more, I have a friend who teaches college in the bay area who has described a student remarkably like the one portrayed in this play. So I really want to see what's up here.

The Play

The play opens with three faculty members talking, somewhere on or near the college campus. Two have already had experiences with Dennis, a particularly difficult student, and the third, Gina, is about to embark on a semester with him. Dennis basically doesn't speak, just sits sullenly in the back of the classroom wearing a hooded coat and sunglasses. He does all the assigned work, but his writing is just foul-mouthed, violent, disturbing screeds. He intimidates his teachers, his classmates, and apparently, the school administration, since they refuse to take any action against him. Meanwhile, other students quit the classes he is in, but the faculty can't get out of it that easily.

Thus forearmed with the experiences of her colleagues and the somewhat inexplicable statement from them that perhaps she will do better with him "because, you know..." (meaning, both teacher and student are Asian Americans), Gina summons Dennis to her office hour under the ruse that it is required of all students.

The remainder of the play is essentially a tug of war between Gina and Dennis, her trying to draw him out and defuse the threat, and him trying to resist and sometimes fighting back.

Dramatically, it takes place in a series of spiraling escalations, all ending badly, only to kick us back a few minutes to learn that's not what really happened, and the actual scene went another way. We're left to decode whether we're just reading the characters' fears and expectations, or perhaps something else. But we see repeated attempts, sometimes making progress, but always somehow going astray.

Late in the play, David, one of the faculty who had warned Gina, and who had tried to take administrative action against Dennis, interrupts the office hour, and we get a rapid-fire view of a whole bunch of different scenarios where things can go wrong.

Parts of the dialogue are absolutely brilliantly written, and some manage to be amazingly funny. But much of the play is just head-scratchingly implausible, starting right from the opening scene. The trio of teachers, meeting somewhere outdoors, apparently, discussing matters that clearly are not appropriate for public consumption, is just weird. Especially when the whole stage is set up as...a teacher's office! And the notion that this student is in his third year in the department and that somehow he hasn't come to the attention of the entire faculty is similarly befuddling. I'm willing to suspend some disbelief, but there are some pretty tough stretches required here.

The Production

As befits a play with such a fluctuating attention to detail, the production is similarly kind of hit-and-miss. When they are really struggling with/against one another, Gina (Jackie Chung) and Dennis (Daniel Chung) are really good. But Gina's body language, in particular, is all over the map. She goes from stolid and persistent to all of a sudden being flustered and wandering all over the office. I guess she and director Lisa Peterson are shooting for some variety, but what they mostly do is break the tension and distract from the flow of the story in ways that make the characters less credible. It just felt sloppy.

I felt kind of sorry for the two "extra" faculty actors (Jeremy Kahn and Kerry Warren). Aside from the fact that they are off stage for nearly the entire show, their characters add almost nothing to the play. At least Kahn's David gets to come back at the end for the violent montage. Warren's Genevieve disappears completely, although Warren herself gets to come back, though in a non-speaking role.

That montage (I won't say too much, as I don't want to spoil anything) is extremely cleverly and intricately staged, and it's super well done. I wish as much attention had been paid to the rest of the production. This kind of play needs to be played very precisely, but Jackie Chung in particular keeps finding ways to undercut her character.

Bottom Line

I can't write this off as a lost cause--there are elements of the play that are, in fact, excellent, both in the writing and in the performance. But I can't help feeling that this is a case where someone wanted to write a play about a really important issue, but without having a coherent message to deliver. Yes, we get the terror and tension and fear. Yes, we get that this is super difficult to deal with. But we all knew that coming in.

By removing all the real dynamics of the situation (the support and assistance of any outside people, for example), Cho precludes any actual investigation of a real solution. Gina decides on her own, apparently without consulting any other faculty, administrators, or mental health professionals, to invite the problem student into her office with no support at all, then starts poking the lion with a stick in various ways. It's no wonder she and the audience are envisioning just about every possible bad outcome. But none of it feels terribly real or meaningful, either.

So that leaves us with a pretty clever piece of drama that doesn't actually do anything to advance the discussion of anomie among youth. There is some element of race injected (as noted above). And at least some of the actual dialogue between Gina and Dennis digs into that, including a hilarious (though I can't help but feel it was somewhat inappropriate as well as out-of-place) fake phone call from Mom that Dennis inexplicably plays along with. I don't pretend to be an expert on racial issues, but it wasn't clear to me that this actually had anything to offer to the bigger discussion.

Ultimately, I thought it was pretty good play, but not nearly as good as I would have expected from Julia Cho. We need to have discussion of these issues--they are near and dear to the hearts of everyone in education, at least. But just dramatizing a situation without offering real insight doesn't really serve the audience.

The show runs through March 25, so you still have time to see for yourself. But if you're looking for a brilliant insight, I don't think it's hiding here.