“ 'The Far Country' meditates on ethnicity and identity...There is so much more history to recover. More love. More promise. More pain."
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"One of Suh’s strengths is his ability to mix realism and poetic elements. He uses that here as he shines a light on a dark slice of American history and builds a play around it."
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"Suh’s strengths is his ability to mix realism and poetic elements. He uses that here as he shines a light on a dark slice of American history and builds a play around it."
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"In just over two hours, Suh succinctly and humorously covers 21 years, two continents, two interrogations and two obscenely expensive trans-Pacific crossings from Taishan to San Francisco."
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"As a history lesson, 'The Far Country' is enlightening, sobering, even at times enraging. As drama, Suh's play is on shakier ground."
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This is Suh's second pass (at least) at dealing with the Chinese Exclusion Act…It was an unjust law that resonates discomfortingly in today's America, and all praise to the playwright for bringing it forward. But if Suh could find a strongly dramatic matrix to further illuminate this dark chapter of our history, his arguments might pack a true knockout punch. In The Far Country, they land, but sometimes too glancingly.
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"If you want to get something out of the experience, they seem to be telling us, you'd better be paying careful attention. Our 'intimate epic' offers up a significant piece of history that you probably know next to nothing about. Listen, learn, and digest it all later."
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If "The Far Country" has a shortcoming, it's that the second half feels like a sequel to what came before rather than a continuation of the same play, despite the sensitive efforts of director Eric Ting to emotionally stitch everything together. In part, that's because characters disappear entirely after Suh's story resumes, though the more salient cause is the relatively late introduction of Yuen (Shannon Tyo), a desperate, but still strong-willed, young woman to whom Gyet proposes marriage after returning to China with his U.S. citizenship, essentially replicating Gee's offer to him with an even more intimate bond.
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