What if your devoted father was murdered in your home when you were a child? What if the police never figured out who did it? What if, even worse, everything you thought you knew about your parents was wrong?
These are the provocative stakes in The Headlands, a trim new San Francisco-set play—the title refers to hikes in the nature preserve across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin—that opened tonight in an LCT3 production at the Claire Tow Theater. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite deliver on them, with a tone that shifts ineffectively from smart-alecky noir satire to deep, dark family psychodrama and generally stolid performances that seem more to be examining the story than living and feeling it.
Things start off promisingly. I’ve often felt that for a young playwright, it must feel like winning the lottery to score a slot at LCT3, where big budgets and a beautiful space ensure that your “emerging artist” work is lavished with tender care. Here, we have a Chinese-American playwright, Christopher Chen, telling a Chinese-American story, with largely Asian-American performers. These are all things to celebrate. There is a big cast and an elegant, minimalist staging by Knud Adams that, van Hovianly, incorporates giant video projections on the upstage and side walls, some pre-recorded for scenic effects, some live.
But even as its protagonist, a young Google engineer named Henry (an adequate but not especially emotive Aaron Yoo), unlocks the mystery of his family history, the play itself never unfolds into something fully engaging. This might be because Henry’s parents—we meet them in flashbacks, his father (Johnny Wu) and his mother both as a romantic young woman (Laura Kai Chen) and a dying older one (Mia Katigbak)—are by design both reticent and also removed, relegated to those flashbacks.
Mostly, though, it’s because Henry and his girlfriend, Jess (Mahira Kakkar), are so opaque, both as written and as performed. Henry makes a point of telling us that he’s a software engineer, but that profession never relates back to the plot. He introduces himself as a true-crime aficionado and amateur sleuth, and makes a funny early joke about how their joint gumshoery brings he and Jesse together, but on the evidence we see the extent of his crime passion begins and ends with trying to figure out what happened to his dad. (Which, by the way, is quite a big thing on its own; I just don’t know that it makes one a Hardy Boy.) And when, late in the play, Jess announces that she needs a break from the relationship because Henry has become so obsessed, neither have we seen him behaving in an obsessed manner nor are there any plot stakes or development from Jess’s departure.
The mystery at the heart of The Headlands—what happened to dad, and what are mom and dad’s long-buried secrets—is nicely plotted and slowly, intricately revealed, even if if the emotional storytelling around it is not. There’s the real germ of something worthy here. Unfortunately, in what’s currently onstage at the Tow, it never comes to fully comes to, um, a head.
The Headlands opened February 24, 2020, at the Claire Tow Theater and runs through March 22. Tickets and information: lct.org
