Kristina Wong’s Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord is, and will likely remain, an invaluable artifact of the current Pandemic. It stands that extremely good chance for its skillfully capturing the overwhelming anger and frustration that Covid-19 has produced in American society to date. The intermissionless 90-minute performance-art piece explains a good deal of what unfortunately (and even, in some instances, fortunately) has transpired during an unprecedented historical event.
By no means is it perfect. Writer-solo performer Wong should have rethought her audience participation sequences and a few handfuls of the lamer jokes. (Most of them only tepidly land during her audience-warming introductions.) Otherwise-proficient director Chay Yew and she might also have devoted time to editing some sections.
But here’s the thing: The good in Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord is so good, so powerful that it ultimately makes no matter of the lapses. The often-blazing work comes directly from Wong’s determination as a crusading activist, the unbounded activism resulting from how she chose to devote her time through the last seventeen months.
Shortly after Covid-19 took hold in this benighted land, Wong got wind that face coverings were essential but not in sufficient supply. Taking little time to think the situation over, she established Auntie Sewing Squad, acronym A. S. S. (One of her school-grade giggles is based on those letters.)
Joined by others she knew in the Los Angeles Wilshire Center Koreatown Subdistrict 5, she formed a local collective that billowed into a nation-wide aggregate eventually turning out and dispensing some 350,000 masks. Some of those fabric products were even donated to governments domestic and, if I have it right, international. Addressing one of her many targets more than once, Wong wonders where FEMA was through all this.
Using her primary focus as mask maker, the wily Wong discourses on those particulars to expand into the universal. On Junghyun Georgia Lee’s set, a playroom with an upstage table on which an inoperable red sewing machine perches, Wong turns out supposed masks while repeatedly darting from the sewing machine to digress on negative and positive Pandemic aspects that fuel her rage or give her hope.
Not that she holds out much hope. At one point standing mid-stage center, she asks the audience seated on three sides of her whether the nation has become “a banana republic”? “Yes.” She blares. She isn’t the first to declare as much, but when she speaks, her arms raised in triumphant despair, she’s the poster girl for the perhaps very real existential truth.
As for the audience participation requests, one does work. It isn’t the one where she realizes how low she is on elastic for her masks ear grips and exhorts onlookers to throw her whatever they can spare. Neither is it the one where she asks ticket buyers to join her in shouting “F**k” without the asterisks. (Many don’t need much encouragement to comply.)
The audience participation chunk that works gangbusters is the one where she divides the audience into two parts: those vaccinated and those not. She goes to the not-vaxxed side and holds up cards on which are written various explanations for the choice and enjoins three audience members to read in turn the unconvincing answers. Presumably, all Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord patrons have shown, as a matter of today’s policy, proof of vaccination at the New York Theater Workshop doors and will delight in the ploy. They certainly did at the performance I attended.
Among several others whom Wong celebrates is the late Asian-American photographer Corby Lee, who became politically activated after seeing a photograph of 19th-century railroad workers that doesn’t include the Chinese American contingent. He set out to rectify that for the Asian-American community. Those efforts prompt Wong to address the long-overdue “erasure” issue increasingly mooted today.
Wong, for whom Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord is the latest addition to a long list of attacks on the political status quo, is an example of energy realized. Here she’s dressed in a black outfit that costumer Linda Cho fashioned to cover a colorful undergarment. Possibly the sunnier outfit is intended to take some edge off Wong’s darker visions. Amith Chandrashaker cogently designs his lights to heighten not only the dark segments but the brighter ones.
At the core of Wong’s unmitigated screed are her fears about the devastation abroad in “the banana republic.” One result is that a pair of old clichés can be applied to her because she indisputably vivifies them. Wong puts her money where her insistent mouth is. Wong also makes certain that what she sews provides meaningful reaping. It may be that on leaving her presence, spectators will give serious thought to where their money is going nowadays as well as to considering what they’re going to sew in the future.
Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord opened November 4, 2021, at New York Theatre Workshop and runs through November 21. Tickets and information: nytw.org
