The Dragon and the Pearl
An active and influential woman in a turbulent era, Pearl Buck is a likely candidate for a one-person show about a famous writer, which is what led producer Tony Cacciotti to commission such a play for his wife, Valerie Harper, from playwright Marty Martin. But unlike other literary heavyweights such as Gertrude Stein (played by Pat Carroll in an earlier Martin script), Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Emily Dickinson, Buck has no familiar public persona on which an actor can capitalize. Nor is her work filled with witty epigrams or clever conundrums or exquisite imagery. Drawing on the oral tradition of the land she grew up in, Buck was a storyteller, not a stylist; her solid, straightforward tales gave authentic and candid voice to Asian characters at a time when most Americans thought of Orientals in terms of Hollywood performances by the likes of Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Myrna Loy (and, yes, Paul Muni and Luise Rainer when The Good Earth came to the screen).
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I don’t know if Pearl Buck was as animated a storyteller as Harper, but I doubt it; and while the script (based on Peter Conn’s Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography) crams a good deal of factual information into two acts, it leaves out an awful lot too. The Dragon and the Pearl may be less than fully satisfying as biography, but it succeeds in celebrating the kind of tale spinning that not only transmits information but affirms the self in response to painful conditions. The script needs editing, but it’s a treasure trove of ideas and feelings. And Harper, a forceful stage presence under Susan V. Booth’s direction, is effectively supported by Rita Pietraszek’s lighting and Joe Cerqua’s sound, which transform Kerry Sanders’s terrace set into a variety of locales–from bustling Shanghai streets and peasant huts to the throne room of the Forbidden City’s imperial palace and the breakfast table of the Roosevelt White House. The simple but evocative shifts of color and shadow mirror Harper’s subtle use of facial expressions, gesture, and rhythm to credibly switch races and ages as she tells the story of one remarkable woman and the women who inspired her.
