Woking Phoenix is a play developed and performed by Silk Bath Collective.  It opened at Theatre Passe Muraille on Thursday night.  It deals with that perennial Canadian issue; the immigrant experience.  In this case it’s essentially a single Chinese mother with three children running a Chinese restaurant in small town Ontario.  So one has the usual dynamics of kids growing up coupled with being “different” in a very homogenous community.  It’s a co-creation of Aaron Jan and Gloria Mok , who also co-directed, and Besse Cheng who appears in the play as the elder daughter.

As theatre it feels a bit rough around the edges though it has some interesting and effective elements and some good acting.  It’s at its best when it blends drama and some highly kinetic choreography (created by the Hanna Kiel with the cast).  A good example of this is that the (gay) elder daughter’s retreat to the internet is shown by excerpts from video games acted out by other characters.  There might be a bit too much of it but it is an effective device.

Less effective is the characterisation of the son as the stereotypical kid who thinks he’s going to be a rock star and so doesn’t need to do anything else in life but mope, play his guitar badly and sing awful songs.  This makes sense dramatically but it gets tedious very quickly.  It’s one of a number of places in the show where some cuts would have helped.

The younger daughter is the ever optimistic dutiful one who is working her socks off to make the restaurant work plus various side hustles.  It’s kind of cute and it does add an edge when the mother’s death causes her to realise that they have never been and will never be fully accepted in that particular community, although to be honest that’s been painfully obvious for some time by that point.  There’s an interesting twist in that the two older kids both leave for Toronto (where else) but return.  The son has failed spectacularly as a musician.  The daughter has succeeded as an overtly gay artist but still feels the need to return.  It’s food for thought.

All of this plays out mostly in the family restaurant.  Phoebe Hu, playing Ma, does a great job of portraying the increasing strain of raising a family while running a less than spectacularly successful business.  There’s also a running joke about her learning English phrases from an increasingly temperamental boom box.  She also doubles very effectively as a video game character in Charlie’s on-line activity.

In this she’s joined by Richard Lam playing Vince.  They work very well together and I imagine if one knew more about RPGs than I do it would be even funnier.  The rest of the time Lam plays the thoroughly irritating Vince only too well.  His “band” is something to do with wolves and I can only take so much howling to badly played guitar.  “Cringe humour” can be funny but only up to a point.

Bessie Cheng’s Charlie is quietly effective.  She’s the artistic outsider; at odds with her mother and her contemporaries.  She finds herself when she goes to Toronto.  The mystery is why she comes back.  And we might ask why Iris, the character played by Madelaine Hodges, stays but she does and Hodges gives perhaps the most nuanced performance of the night.  There’s something very touching about her irrepressible (until the very end) optimism and she’s a great mover in a piece where movement plays a key role.

Overall Woking Phoenix feels like a sincere expression of some important aspects of the immigrant experience and it is very funny much of the time.  That said, it also feels like a collective piece where some ideas got hung onto when they might have benefited from compression or excision.  There’s probably a really good ninety minute play inside this two hour one.

Woking Phoenix continues at Theatre Passe Muraille until April 27th.

Photo credits: Jae Yang