Jon Lawrence Rivera Joins ‘The Joy Luck Club’
October 31, 2008
Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club might be the most iconic work of fiction in the Asian American literary canon. The story of four Chinese American women and their mothers, it quickly became a bestseller and led to the hit 1993 film.
Unbeknownst to many, there is also a stage adaptation of the novel written by Korean American playwright Susan Kim, which premiered in the late 1990s. It is being revived at Los Angeles’ East West Players, the nation’s oldest and best-known Asian American theater.
At the helm of this production is noted Filipino American director Jon Lawrence Rivera, best known as the founder of Playwrights Arena, a theater devoted solely to the work of Los Angeles-based playwrights.
While Rivera is an accomplished director with a long list of credits, he acknowledges the special challenges of this particular play. Not only is he tackling a play that has a passionate base of both supporters and detractors, but the piece has an epic scope that jumps back and forth in time and presents over 30 characters. Rivera has whittled the cast down to 11 by having the daughters and mothers playing the characters they are telling stories about, an idea that came from his own family.
“When someone tells a story, another family member will jump in,” Rivera says. “Then someone else jumps in, ‘Oh, remember when we came to America and so-and-so happened next?’ Soon, you have six people adding to and enhancing the story. That’s what I wanted to bring to the play.”
New York-based playwright Kim thinks Rivera’s feat of bringing the cast size down was impressive and may enhance the staging. “With strong performances, I think it could bring an exciting theatricality you wouldn’t necessarily get with eighteen or nineteen actors,” she says.
Although the play is about Chinese American culture, Rivera feels a personal connection to the work. A Filipino immigrant, he found himself drawn to the play’s exploration of the passing of stories from one generation to another.
“I find myself telling my nieces stories about what it was like back in the Philippines when we didn’t have things like cell phones and iPods,” Rivera explains. “I’m seeing the importance of passing on these stories the way my mother did to me.”
Rivera toured as a singer in the 1980s before taking theater classes at a local community college in the hopes of becoming an actor. He soon found himself directing scenes for his fellow classmates, and before he knew it, he started producing one-act plays. From there, his directing career snowballed.
And how does being Filipino influence his work? There were times when he would answer that it didn’t, but increasingly he realizes that’s not the case.
“For example, I feel there’s a certain musicality about our language and the way we talk,” Rivera says. “Because of this, I feel my work has a certain musicality to it. That’s something I look for and bring into my work.”
This is Rivera’s sophomore effort for East West Players after directing Cherylene Lee’s 2004 production of Mixed Messages. The theater’s artistic director Tim Dang has already hired Rivera to direct a second show this season, next spring’s musical The Last Five Years.
But for now, Rivera’s focus is on Joy Luck Club.
“I hope audiences will come out of the show with a better understanding of their relationships with their parents or children,” he says. “I hope it opens up their own histories and starts a dialogue, so none of these stories will be lost.”
The Joy Luck Club runs Nov. 6 -Dec. 7 at East West Players’ David Henry Hwang Theater, Union Center for the Arts, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles. For more info or tickets, call (213) 625-7000 or visit EastWestPlayers.org.
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2 Responses to “Jon Lawrence Rivera Joins ‘The Joy Luck Club’”
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Phil:
What happened to your “ten-best” piece on the Asian “horror” flick genre?
I was going to peg my query to that, but this one will serve as well. I think.
As someone who found the film version episodic and spotty, but whose niece found same more than effective, I’ll pass as either friend or foe here.
That “Joy Luck Club” is the bellwether and standard bearer for the theme and the period is the bad? news, but that it is out there is the good.
No bad ‘cess on Amy here, but there ARE predecessors like “China Man”? And, of course, I have not clue-one as to her opus-turned-opera.
Still, I think there is still room to roam and grow and investigate to a deeper and rangier extent.
Wanna try?
But the real reason I am at this post, harrying and chivvying away at non-sequiturs is that I want to know if you can answer something I couldn’t suss out of Amazon, to wit:
I recall, or seem to, that Bing Bum Crosby was a stellar cameo in a remake of “Stagecoach”? Am I right or am I wrong? Again, at that.
And this has to do with my personal lack of total respect for John Ford, whose original I found, at the time. less than “true” and more than “corny.”Aside from Claire Trevor, that is.
And I diss’d then his Wayne Irish epic with Maureen O’Hara, you know, the “romantic comedy” of brawling mayhem that was su0posed to titillate and induce belly laughs? A black-Irish Petrucchio and Kiss-me-Kate.
This, along with Ford’s “Red River,” in which Wayne at least looked the part whilst poor Monty Clift was, again, sadly miscast, like James Dean in “Giant.”
When ever did Gollywood giants properly cast their talent in the face of boxoffice considerations?
But, I ramble.
Any answers?
Frank
Damnit!:
Forgot to ask.
As a late, again, Johnny in re the David Simon teleseries, “The Wire,” what is your bottom-line assessment?
My initi9al, purely from the first few episodes of Season 5, the finale, is that Simon has one-upped “The Sopranos,” even if his work recalls “Hill Street Blues,” with balls AND seeming virtualness of “reality.”
Also, the obvious fact that herein, the oppressed have managed to “game” the “system,” even as they are “victimized.”
Makes me wonder, was Francois Villon’s Paris the prototype for Simon’s Baltimore? Or HBO’s “Rome” for today’s D.C.?