The Brooklyn Rail

Sayings don’t translate cleanly across languages. From Mongolian, an expression for love translates to “their heart is as white as milk and their hands as intricate as a key.”

No one would say that in English, but how might the idiom be translated?

That’s one task for the audience at Tongues, an interactive performance in which four actors, of varying Asian descents, unveil their relationships to bilinguality. In Yibin Wang and Yejia Sun’s co-conceived performance, which played at JACK January 24 and 25 as part of Exponential Festival, audiences tried out curse words, translated idioms, and ate snacks from China, Nepal, and Mongolia. It’s as engaging as it sounds, and, with the actors seated alongside you at four round tables, Tongues offers a rare proximity to immigrant narratives.

To attract prizes, those narratives are often defined by hardship: The Brutalist is up for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and, now on Broadway, English won the Pulitzer Prize. Tongues, with its strawberry-red chairs, shimmering mylar curtains, and multi-shaped paper lanterns, leads from a sense of play without sacrificing candor.

Mia Zhu shared that her parents would be delighted to know she’s becoming a doctor. Sadly, her degree’s “not the medical kind”—she’s pursuing a Ph.D. in theater. Another performer, Om Raj Raut, felt uncomfortable calling an English teacher “Professor Stephanie”; in Nepal, elders are not referred to by first name. Doing so was awkward, he said… but also “maybe sexy.”

Passing around creamy candies (“We love dairy in Mongolia,” said Michi Zaya) and radish cakes (eaten around the Chinese New Year as “a good omen,” per the final performer, Andy Law), the four actors shared a story in English and their native tongue. Raut talks about having older siblings and being made fun of for being “extra”—not as in, per current slang, “over the top,” but instead what English speakers might refer to as a “mistake” baby.

Audiences were invited to respond to what they saw: one person said Zhu spoke louder in English than in Mandarin. That made sense to Zhu, who called English her “public-facing language.”

Anecdotes wade into more vulnerable territory, but fun persists: as the actors move audiences from four circles into one, inching everyone closer, they also go full-tilt on karaoke tracks in their mother tongue. Now in a circle, Zaya uses it as a clock to trace the chronology of her name, with each audience member representing a life event that shaped it. Mongolian has followed a patronymic style—your dad’s first name becomes your last name—so the changing of one name can alter a lineage. For Zaya, a family name, Tumur, was difficult for English speakers to pronounce; in Mongolian, it carries more of a flutter than the hard “r” might let on. People misread it as Turner or pronounced it “tumor.” Like a cancer, Zaya removed it.

With charm and specific insights, Tongues, which aims to tour community centers, exposes the mundane bumps bilingual speakers experience while also offering how the words we speak evoke not just meaning but being.

When speaking Mongolian, Zaya said, “In my head I am sixteen.”

That can be poignant—and playful. Teaching swear words, Law shared a Cantonese hyperbole that loosely translates to “whole family dies.” He said it in his native tongue, and the mixed-race audience echoed the phrase with startling clarity.

Law was stunned, ad libbing, “Am I back home or something?”

In Eulàlia Comas’s haircut play :€, getting a trim is its own hunt for shared language. Also part of Exponential Festival, haircut play :€ ran at Loading Dock January 3–5 and follows one trans girl (Eli Wassertzug as “girl”) trying to get a haircut. Directed by Comas, an ensemble of actors play varied roles, tonsorial and lay—from a barber and a fishmonger to a salon worker and a fear monger—who all refuse the girl service.

“It’s far too hair-colored,” one person tells her. Plus, “You need a permit to cut hair-colored hair.”

Comas’s metaphor for the girl’s struggle is not opaque: at January 20’s inauguration, the President said, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.”

The hairdressers and various mongers might as well be telling the girl: “Your personhood is far too person-y.” Even as references in the script to transness are oblique, one person calls the girl a “cruel beastly freak.”

It is, for the girl, absurd to hear. Comas creatively depicts the linguistic gymnastics trans people must perform to express basic needs—and how those who are not allies wield language that bends over itself to deny others’ selfhood. These are often demoralizing retorts that, in Comas’s slanted dialogue, also teeter on the hilarious. One would-be hair cutter lacks razors—but does have razor clams. “They work just fine,” the person says.

Willing to splurge, the girl heads to a subscription-only salon. No luck: the subscription’s “only for people who don’t need it,” per the front attendant. However, at the salon, the girl notices a beautiful, obnoxious woman—or, technically, a blow-up doll of a beautiful, obnoxious woman, voiced via a mic and puppeteered by Sabina Sethi Unni.

“I want to glow like that,” the girl says, jumpstarting a high-octane chase to follow the woman. Comas’s chase is figurative: when the girl shadows the woman, she is chasing her essence, her femininity. That includes stealing her mic for a more “convincing” female voice, and hijacking her date at a movie theater. As with a haircut, goals are small but significant: what is more intimate than trusting someone with scissors at your head, or brushing elbows with a date at the cinema? The girl arrives at the movies with a boy, and, for a moment, that rite of passage is hers.

But, present or not, the woman’s words haunt: “You’ll never be as you as I am me.”

Comas does not shy away from gatekeeping language that draws imaginary lines between cis and trans people. But, as Comas asserts, a fake boundary has real repercussions.

In her sly and shape-shifting play, Comas reveals that a haircut, when finally achieved, can be its own transformation. An Odyssean quest, the girl’s hunt is for more than an act of vanity, even if the world that surrounds her only sees it as a physical vocabulary, one that says, in blinking lights, “FEMALE.” Regardless, the girl gets what she wants and sees herself the same way—even if others’ perceptions suddenly shift. Now, she’s allowed into that salon. “Love the hair,” one hairdresser tells her. “Looks great.”

While the girl lacks an ally, the actresses in Nina share a sisterhood—even as it splinters. And here, actresses refers to the characters, who are actresses—five, to be exact—in a top-tier New York conservatory finishing up their studies in Forrest Malloy’s comedy.

Ready to graduate and act professionally, the rising actresses share an industry language. Inside theater terms come and go like entrances in a farce: “dropped in,” “dramaturg,” “no marking,” “in character,” even “Edinburgh.”

That last one, the Scottish city that’s home to the famed international fringe festival, operates as a proverbial Moscow in this play whose title already alludes to Anton Chekhov. For Cate (Francesca Carpanini), the quintet’s most high-strung, Edinburgh offers actors a utopia to keep playing and devising together, somewhere more meritocratic outside the oppressive “industry.” But even in reaching toward that Eden, a shared language unravels. First, not everyone can just travel to act for little pay—Kyla (Jasminn Johnson) quickly asserts she needs to make money after graduating. Then there’s the fact that the group’s values might not be so shared.

To say more would spoil a juicy scandal, one that means very little to the outside world—which is to say, in the petri dish of a Juilliard-esque conservatory, it’s harder to ignore than a cast list. How the young women navigate the gossip tests their ability to find clarity in gray areas, and Malloy keeps the stakes ridiculous yet specific in Katie Birenboim’s tightly directed production, at Theaterlab now through February 9.

There is raucous humor and biting commentary in how much of the world MFA students think they know. Buzz words like “power structure” and sensitivities like giving actresses notes to “lift your face” to avoid saying “smile more” put everything under a microscope. Edinburgh or no Edinburgh, theater is not a meritocracy. But can it be?

Kyla is dissatisfied with the limiting roles she’s been given that stem from a canon of dead white men’s plays. Zoe (Katherine Reis), petite and white, offers to do a richer scene with her: Juliet and the Nurse.

“Who’s Juliet?” Kyla asks. Zoe sees a moment for “allyship,” touches her heart, and says, “I’ll play the Nurse.”