Chay Yew may not be represented in the annals of Gay Theater as prominently as, say, Tony Kushner or Mart Crowley, but hindsight affirms the impact of his 1992 play, Porcelain addressing prejudice—racial, cultural and sexual—in a country where consensual sex between men had been decriminalized only a bare 25 years earlier.
Our story opens in a London prison cell where John Lee sits, origami-folding dozens of paper cranes, following his arrest for fatally shooting his boyfriend in a Bethnal Green public restroom rumored to be a refuge for "cottaging." Since the murderer readily confessed to the crime—indeed, was discovered immediately afterward, weeping inconsolably over his victim—the question for the courts is not whether this lonely son of Chinese immigrants is guilty, but whether he was sane at the moment of his misdeed. Left unspoken is the question of whether a man who engages in sex with other men can be considered sane at any time.
The narrative technique reflects its text's vintage: Verbal montages delivered by a chorus of four men swarming the stage around the withdrawn Lee acquaint us with our environment before the speakers assume the roles of key figures and witnesses. These include a weaselly television reporter, assorted law enforcement officers, Lee's bewildered father, community leaders eager to distance themselves from any notoriety, a lone defiant gay-rights activist, the aforementioned paramour and a court-appointed psychiatrist no more empathetic than the rest of his fellow Brits.
Gradually—and not without conspicuous symbolism involving red poppies, Lee's inmate uniform suggesting Chinese funeral garb and a folk tale based in avian social habits—we come to understand the alienation that drives Lee to seek the temporary affection of strangers and to read more into a relationship than his Anglo-privileged partner is willing to offer. (The brutal rape scene that shatters his fantasy is enacted in total darkness—another indication of the play's age.)
This could easily come off today as quaintly academic, if not for Matthew Ozawa's primary directorial experience lying in classical music theater. Under his deft physical orchestration, the didactic textual elements are presented with crisp efficiency on a set designed to invoke a shabby latrine covered in broken and discolored—you guessed it—porcelain tiles, swiftly moving to the intimate dynamics surrounding the crime of passion.
By the time the action reaches its climax with the revelation of Lee's obsessive manufacture of the delicate artificial birds, the sheer romance is all but overwhelming. Bring your hankies.
