"Man of God" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players photo by Ben Krantz

 During the pandemic shutdown, as theaters were experimenting with various flavors of online presentation of plays, my usual reaction was to think that it was better than nothing, but in just about every case I thought the show would be much more effective live on stage. Last night I got my first chance to test that theory, as we went to Shotgun to see Man of God, which had been planned for 2020 and was presented as a Zoom play during the shutdown.

Unsurprisingly, the show is much more effective as a fully-staged production.

The Play

Four teenaged, Asian American girls from a church youth group are on a mission trip to Thailand. When one of the girls finds a camera hidden in the bathroom of their hotel room, the four face a lot of growing up, very quickly. First they turn on each other, but as the realization comes that the camera was placed by the pastor who is also their only chaperone, they quickly have to come to grips with their limited options. As denial gives way to anger, the play dramatizes the cinematic-inspired revenge fantasies they concoct. In the end, they have to confront the pastor in person, and reality has to take the place of the fantasies.

Written by Anna Ouyang Moench, the play explores both the reality of how young women learn to live in a world where they are constantly the subject of the male gaze (or worse), and how neither the reality nor the fantasies of how to deal with ongoing problems like this are satisfying in the end.

The Production

[My usual disclaimer here: I'm a member of the board at Shotgun, and my wife and I are season sponsors. I am friends with members of the cast and crew. Opinions here are solely my own.]

This play is so much richer as a fully-staged production than it could be online. For one thing, the interactions of the characters, both verbal and physical, are much clearer and more meaningful in person. It's one thing to tell something from one Zoom window to another, and quite another to physically move toward someone, raising your voice. Also, as the production photo above illustrates, there is much meaning in the contact of these characters, who are constantly ping-ponging between jousting amongst themselves and realizing that they are also their only support system.

Director Michelle Talgarow (with ample assistance from the lighting design of Gabe Rodriguez and Dave Ragaza) manages to move the girls between their reality and their revenge fantasies deftly and with humor, despite the seriousness of the scenario. This is one of the clear ways the live production is able to do things the online version could not possibly touch. And while none of the four actors playing the girls is an actual teenager, they do generally manage to capture enough of the behaviors and interactions of teen girls to enable one to suspend disbelief.

Another thing that is much clearer when seeing the show in person is that the pastor (Chuck Lacson) is not physically present through most of the action--only appearing onstage during the revenge fantasies and then finally at the end. That makes a big difference in the understanding of the play.

Bottom Line

The play works well, and it clearly speaks loudly to a segment of the audience. There is definitely a sense that young girls, and particularly Asian girls, don't feel seen or heard in society, and that their stories aren't told on stage. This production definitely addresses that, both in its content and in its staging. So that's a big step.

I definitely felt after seeing the show on Zoom that the script was a bit too blunt and the message not as universally appealing as I'd generally want to see in a play. Now having seen it in something more like its intended form, I can see that there is much more subtlety to the story-telling than I was able to get online, and the message is much more clearly directed at a broader audience. This is definitely not just a niche play that panders to those who can relate to the primary characters.

So I feel like the play is well worth seeing. It runs through October 2 at the Ashby Stage.

P.S.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Datebook (a.k.a., "the pink section") has an article by Bay Area journalist Joy Diamond (who is Chinese) about this play. I found her insight informative, as her viewpoint is notably different from my own. One small excerpt:

As much as I love theater, it’s a space in which I feel especially like an outsider, where my race feels particularly noticeable in contrast to the average theatergoer. It’s no secret that both artists and audiences of American theater are overwhelmingly white, and it’s not enough to retroactively fit people of color into the existing canon — we need to introduce new works that reflect and prioritize the diverse perspectives of our population.

“Man of God” does exactly that.

I thought the whole piece was well worth reading.