STAGE REVIEW : ‘The Chairman’s Wife’: A Great Rise and Fall in China

A figure sits on stage huddled in shadows. When the lights go up, we see it’s an old woman. Not a frail old woman but a vigorous, embittered one. A guard appears and she springs from her reverie, talking the guard to death with stories he knows by heart because garrulous memory is her daily bread.

Meet Madame Mao, once the most powerful woman in the People’s Republic of China, now a political relic who has languished in prison for 11 years, serving a life sentence for crimes against the state.

In the premiere of Wakako Yamauchi’s “The Chairman’s Wife,” at East West Players, the fires still burn in Madame Mao in a multifaceted performance by Karen Huie. Her vocal dexterity subtly helps dramatize Madame Mao as a raggedy little girl, as a popular stage actress, a seductress, a companion of young Chou En-lai (Yoshio Be) and ultimately enforcer and key player in the Cultural Revolution.

As communist rulers topple all around us, we tend to forget that one of the great falls was Madame Mao’s, after husband Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. Today, she’s 74 and reportedly in a prison hospital suffering from cancer. But in this play, which is based on fact and rumor, Madame Mao is the conqueror of her imprisonment. “I will prevail, even here,” she says.

It’s curious how Madame Mao is on a roll. A few months ago, Kim Miyori’s one-woman performance piece, “Madame Mao’s Memories,” by playwright Henry Ong at Theatre/Theater, covered much the same material from the same cell.

But the portraits are starkly different. In “Madame Mao’s Memories,” Miyori’s performance had a ritualistic purity that was steely, ice-like and forbidding. In “The Chairman’s Wife,” Huie’s interpretation is more accessible, a variously crotchety, ranting and more human old lady. In both plays, the tone is non-judgmental.

In any event, the fall from grace is a great story, and “The Chairman’s Wife” has a sprawling canvas on which director Nobu McCarthy plays with the past and present. The production artfully segues into episodes from Madame Mao’s life utilizing seven supporting actors, many of them in white face to underscore the fragmented dream nature of her memories. (Strangely, Chairman Mao, of all people, is not dramatized).

The most compelling visual elements in the show are rear projections that psychologically heighten the text, and a garish, expressionistic background of jangled faces painted by set designer Gronk.

The emerging vision is that of a driven woman who slept her way into power (at one point, during her Shanghai stage days, with a leading theater critic).

Her line about an early “sense of destiny” may sound corny, but when Madame Mao declares, “I wanted to be somebody--that’s why I joined the theater,” you see this spider lady as a woman who would make it on the Long March.

The expressionistic style is balanced by the reality of the cell, a cot and the ever-present guard. The latter is a likable character symbolic of the China that replaced Mao. His disgust for his charge peaks near the end when he almost throttles Madame Mao. It’s a strong performance by Bill Cho Lee.

Jusak Bernhard delivers a brief, dynamic appearance as a young soldier who sets in motion the play’s lingering political echo when shots and screams erupt off stage. This brings the play to its perfect conclusion: It has been the playwright’s imaginative license to set the action of her play on the very day of the massacre last June in Tian An Men Square.

Everything has come full circle. Madame Mao sits in fading, coppery light (designed by Rae Creevey) and whispers the play’s last words: “Politics is like fashion. Yesterday, me. Today, you. Tomorrow . . . .”

At 4414 Santa Monica Blvd., Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 2 p.m., through Feb. 11. Tickets: $12-$15; (213) 660-0366.