A dramaturgical reflection on the Red Stitch production of Christopher Chen’s Caught, directed by Jean Tong (2022)

BY KEVIN HOJERSLEV Red Stitch Graduate Dramaturg 2022

LIN BO (Wiping away tears) I’m really straight up American. I grew up near Venice Beach. I’m a performance artist. I just wanted to be a part of the cultural elite so badly. So I figured the only way I could sneak my way into the club was to use my Chinese-ness to my advantage. So I came up with this story.

This speech is the moment when the play, Caught, completes the first subversion of its own premise. The story we committed to in the first scene is totally false. Our storyteller is not the cultural authority he set himself up to be, and he is not, in fact, the highly regarded foreign artist we thought he was. Instead, he is one of our own; a neighbour using what he has to create something more for himself. Except…he’s not that either.

We aren’t in New York, but Melbourne. So, Lin Bo isn’t a highly regarded foreign artist, but he is a foreigner. This moment in our production subverts, not into ‘reality’ like an American production of the play might do, but into a different version of the fiction: It might be an American TV series, or any number of other American plays performed nightly in Melbourne theatres.

At the beginning of the development and rehearsal period it was clear to us that we would not be playing the same games as the American productions of Caught. Those productions occupied a middle ground between Chinese and American cultures, whereas we would be adding a third context.

Production photo of Jessica Clarke & Jing-Xuan Chan in *Caught* taken by Jodie Hutchinson.

Our supposed ‘true reality’ would be Australian – Australian accents, Australian references. So how did we go about working with, and mitigating the dissonance that the introduction of this new context caused?

One strategy we used was foregrounding the rules of the game. Our audiences know that Red Stitch is a theatre, and they arrive with theatre tickets expecting to see a performance. So, let’s have the front of house staff tell them to enjoy the exhibition in the hallway. Also, let’s get the character, Wang Min, to come on before the first scene to tell them the space is now a pop-up art gallery, as she reminds them to turn off their phones. For any other show, this might be too clunky, too upfront. But with Caught’s modes of direct address and metacommentary, it works.

Was it a success? It’s hard to say for sure, but I think it did. Consider the following line from near the beginning of the show.

LIN BO …I will have a memoir out next May for an even more complete story so anticipate that. Not that I am attempting to sell anything. But some of this I am taking from my book.

There’s no joke here – no set up, no punchline – but every night, like clockwork, there was laughter. It could be the laughter of recognition. The audience recognises this as a line they might hear at a book publicity talk, and now they know where they are and what the context is.

Nevertheless, this still puts scene three (the Q and A) in a strange spot. In the original production, this scene assumes the role of a break from the action of the play in which the author speaks about her intentions.

Except now it isn’t. It can’t be, because the host is still speaking in an American accent. They are, therefore, still apparently playing a character.

At this point it is important to acknowledge the ubiquity of American accents in the entertainment consumed by Australian audiences. Cinemas and streaming services are flooded with American-made work, and even a medium as hyper-local as theatre gets a fair share of American imports.

Australian audiences are used to hearing American accents in entertainment, so our production deviates slightly from the intention of the original script. The work is no longer just about our relationship to truth and the authorities that claim to guard it, but also our relationship to truth as it is filtered and warped through the entertainment we consume.

Production photo of Jing-Xuan Chan in *Caught* taken by Jodie Hutchinson.

After watching a dress rehearsal of the show, an experienced dramaturg, writer and former teacher asked me, “why is it called Caught?” My need to sound impressive suppressed my immediate response which would have been: “Didn’t you hear how many times the characters said ‘caught’? Maybe it’s like a song title”.

Instead, what I came up with was: “They are catching the audience in habitual patterns of thought.” That’s a little better. There’s definitely some legs to this thought, because the play does challenge the ways in which we typically ascertain truth. The first story we hear is a lie, a story that matches our preconceptions of a place that we don’t fully know is false. And, an authority figure that wears the ‘right’ clothes and speaks in the ‘right’ cadence is revealed as a liar.

This is why my first response may have been smarter than I gave credit. Every time I hear a character say the word ‘caught’ I feel my hands on a guardrail and my feet planted on the summit, only to find I’m looking down at the plateau I had foolishly thought was the summit. “Now I am in good hands,” I think. “Now I have been shown the truth”. Then a new guide leads me up a set of stairs where I push through the cloud cover and find myself standing on top of another summit with a new guardrail I had no idea existed. Though, as Wang Min would say, there is no guardrail at all, nothing that I can hold onto. The guardrail is a ‘Fox News paradigm’.

It is here that I have found the most power in the play, a power that effortlessly transcends cultural boundaries. I can’t talk about Caught without adopting one of its voices. “It’s not about cultural appropriation or capital ’T’ truth,” I tell my friends, “It’s about intentional awareness”.

I am aware of the humour in this, but I don’t do it to be funny. I truly can’t find better words than the ones that Christopher Chen has given me. I can’t seem to work my way out of the box that this play sits in without bumping into an outer box (there’s Wang Min again), an outer box that Chen has already planned for. And the more I invest myself into his play, the harder it is to disentangle myself from its linguistic acrobatics and pedantry.

This is what Christopher Chen’s play has provided me with; language. A thousand new ways to say ‘I don’t know’, a thousand new ways to rethink and recontextualise my confusion without being any less confused.

Perhaps this is what makes Caught such an urgent play. The importance of being able to properly articulate the thought ‘I don’t know’ in the face of countless perspectives that one cannot hope to fully understand.

Production photo of Louis Le in *Caught* taken by Jodie Hutchinson.

Near the end of scene four, we see Lin Bo and Wang Min slowly come to the realisation that Yu Rong, their lover and artistic idol, has been cheating on them with the other. It is the first time in the play that the audience arrive at the truth first, leaving the characters to catch up.

However, just as that satisfaction is about to play out, a potted plant rolls on to the stage, perched on top of a stool. Then the lights flicker, and a McDonalds paper drink cup flies in. Then a McDonalds takeaway bag, then a few more. Then a flood of McDonalds bags, cups and wrappers rush in from beyond the veil. The rapidly approaching moment of our power over the characters - where it’s we who know the truth and they who are floundering – is swatted away by something completely unexplained. No science, no rhetoric, no contextualising can help anyone here. And suddenly the audience and the characters are joined together for the first time in collective bewilderment. No one is guarding the truth anymore, it’s just lost.

Then Lin Bo reads a passage, the last one that Yu Rong managed to smuggle out of prison before he died. And it’s… sad? Morbid maybe? I don’t know. Honestly, it seems a little conceited that a person who is most likely starving, unwell and about to die should write to his long-time romantic partners with such vagueness and pomposity concerning his artistic principles. Not even an “I love you”?

That’s rough. And I think Lin Bo and Wang Min agree. Was that a smile and a chuckle I saw from them? Or one of those uncomfortable face tightenings we do when we’re trying to vacuum the tears back up into our eyes? The play makes one last subversion, but ends shortly after.

This shared confusion is what always remains for me whenever I see it, and it’s the frustrating, inexplicable confusion that we most commonly experience in our lives. We feel it, if we’re lucky we feel it together, and then we shuffle on.

Who Did We Catch When We Restaged Caught?

We at Red Stitch acknowledge and pay our respects to Australia’s First Peoples and Elders past and present, and offer our gratitude to the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, on whose unceded lands we work.