Maya Lin (Angel Lin, left) consults with Hideo Sasaki (Glenn Kubota) in Memorial by Livian Yeh.
Now a standard stop on tourist itineraries, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was highly controversial at the time of its creation in the early 1980s. The dispute over architect Maya Lin’s design has been dramatized in Livian Yeh’s Memorial, directed by Jeff Liu for Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.
Much of the opposition to Lin’s design had to do with the artist herself. Born and raised in Ohio to immigrant parents who had left China more than a decade before her birth, Lin was a 21-year-old Yale undergraduate when her submission was unanimously chosen out of 1,400-plus entries in a blind competition. The competition jury (all men) did not know her age, gender or ethnicity.
Maya’s mother, Julia Lin (Rachel Lu, right) is wary of Colonel Becker’s (James Patrick Nelson) behavior toward her daughter.
That discovery is not depicted in Memorial, though Lin at one point says, “They loved my memorial until they saw me.” The play begins—after a brief, wordless scene of Lin gazing around the Mall, then sketching in inspiration—with her being notified of her selection by two members of the jury: Wolf von Eckardt, architecture critic for The Washington Post, and Col. James Becker of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.
In real life, neither von Eckardt nor any veteran was on the memorial committee. Yeh explains in a program note that while most of Memorial’s characters were real people, she has fictionalized their biographies and activities. Landscape architect Hideo Sasaki was on the jury, but in Memorial he’s an architect who becomes Lin’s mentor. Becker is “an amalgamation of real-life veterans,” according to Yeh’s note. Von Eckardt did champion Lin’s vision in his Post columns.
Yeh, who was born after the events portrayed in the play, is making her New York debut with Memorial. Some elements of her well-intentioned but stilted dramatization show the hand of a relatively inexperienced playwright, but her exhumation of this contentious episode from the past offers clear parallels with the present. “You unleashed things—things I didn’t know people were capable of doing,” Maya says to Becker after her critics make racist remarks. “I needed a target,” he replies. “Your race, the way you look, it was easy to get people riled up.”
The real Lin has said she was “clueless” about how politics and bigotry would disrupt the project. In Memorial, she can seem not so much naive as immature—and even petulant when she repeatedly calls it “my memorial.” Due either to the way the role is written (when Maya articulates her plans for the memorial, she sounds like she’s reciting details) or to actor Angel Lin’s loosey-goosey performance, it’s a bit hard to get a handle on the young architect’s personality and aspirations.
Robert Meksin (right, with Nelson in background) portrays Wolf von Eckardt, the real-life architecture critic for The Washington Post. Photographs by Russ Rowland.
Other roles in Memorial might also have benefited from more emphatic definition. In compositing characters, Yeh has given varying, sometimes conflicting opinions to one person, and that can make them sound more like mouthpieces than people speaking naturally. Maya’s mother, Julia (Rachel Lu), is both disapproving and supportive; she warns her daughter not to challenge the government but then says not to go along with what they want. Becker (James Patrick Nelson) at first merely repeats criticism that others may have of Lin’s design in order to prepare her for hostility, but before long he himself is smearing her before Congress: “Do not let the Communists win again, do not let them build an Asian memorial for an Asian war.” Stronger performances come from Robert Meksin as von Eckardt and Glenn Kubota as Sasaki.
Set designer Sheryl Liu has created an effective backdrop for Memorial: multiple adjacent tall panels that instantly evoke the actual memorial. To maintain the illusion, it would be preferable if one panel didn’t contain a small cabinet for props or get moved late in the play. Other monuments on the Mall, as well as rain and cherry blossoms falling, are represented by Gregory Casparian’s projections, Da Xu’s sound design and Victor En Yu Tan’s lighting effects.
Despite its occasionally wobbly dramaturgy, Memorial tells a story that should not be forgotten, both for its contemporary relevance (take note of the disdain for Boston’s new Martin Luther King Jr. monument) and as a corrective to the preponderant whiteness of based-on-fact stories that usually make it to the stage (Wolf Hall, Frost/Nixon, The Diary of Anne Frank, to name a few). And for the message it sends to reactionaries in current debates, art-related or not: Lin’s design was criticized as disrespectful, too abstract, too bleak, but the memorial turned out to be a place of reconciliation and solace for many Vietnam veterans and the general public.
Memorial runs through Feb. 19 at ART New York Theatres (502 W. 53rd St.). Nancy Ma assumes the role of Maya Lin as of Feb. 10. Evening performances are 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit panasianrep.org.
