Reviewed by:

• The Headlands by Christopher Chen
• Janine Sun Rogers

Set between fog-shrouded locales on either end of the Golden Gate Bridge, Christopher Chen’s The Headlands contends with how the precarities of memory, family structures, and atomized geographies render the familiar unfamiliar and the known mysterious. The story follows Henry Wong, a Chinese American Silicon Valley techie and true crime enthusiast, as he works to solve the decades-old cold case of his father George’s mysterious death. Along the way, he ends up discovering a great deal about the dark recesses of his family history—and the fallibility of his own mind. The case of George’s death is ostensibly closed, presumed to be a burglary gone wrong. Henry does not buy it, however; the alleged burglary does not match the pattern of others in the neighborhood at the time, and a vague deathbed comment made by his mother Leena further incites his scrutiny of the case. Henry, a professed film noir buff, plays detective, following hunches—depression, money troubles, an affair—until he uncovers Tom, a brother he didn’t know he had, hidden in the fogs of the Marin Headlands. Throughout the process, Henry peers into many sites and perspectives on San Francisco, popping into various domestic scenes, and visiting and revisiting his evolving memories, which build and morph as he gleans new pieces of information. The play, as a result, destabilizes the concept of fixed or truthful memory as Henry revises and restages scenes from his past in ways that, we discover, refle t more about his mental state at the time of remembering than the truth of the remembered situation. The play’s engagement with San Francisco, the Marin Headlands, and the communities that live there as affec ive sites reflec s social and psychological entanglements with place.

The particularities of Bay Area geographies and temporality took on special resonance in this production, played to a hometown audience in its West Coast premiere at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. In a metatheatrical nod at the start of the play, Henry wandered onto the stage and engaged in some direct-address crowdwork, peering at the audience with the house lights still up. He introduced himself as “that rare bird known as the San Francisco native” and gestured to various sites around the city with a sense of immediacy and intimacy. He pointed stage right, to the northeast, to self-deprecatingly confess to “‘work’ at Google, over by the Ferry Building,” drawing attention to the proximity of the Google campus to the historic trade terminal in a move that signaled the specific - ties of a San Francisco in flux. As Henry traveled between San Francisco neighborhood enclaves, their own stories entered the frame and illuminated shadowy missing elements of the narrative, sketching a parallel between an atomized metropole and a complicated family history. The foggy stretch of the Marin Headlands, just across the Golden Gate Bridge, offe ed a vantage point from which to view the city diffe ently; it was introduced at first as a beloved childhood day trip destination from where Henry and George could gaze at and reminisce about the city, only to be revealed later, uncannily, to be the home turf of Tom, Henry’s mysterious brother. Specters of labor and class haunt Henry’s family dynamic. George was an immigrant who worked his way up from washing dishes in Chinatown to founding a contracting business. He was never considered quite good enough for Leena, the daughter of a shipping magnate who “was courted by everyone, even the heirs of the white elite.” Despite the fraught class tensions, the pair married, and their son Henry became a corporate tech worker. The three of them form the recognizable paradigm of Asian American success: the trifecta of legacy wealth, bootstrapping upward mobility, and technocratic white-collar labor. Tom, however, is a destabilizing figu e; as a fugitive foster child, a tackle shop clerk, and an agent involved in vaguely illicit deeds, he is illegible, and an abject reminder of unfortunate potentialities. Tom faces Henry...

 审阅者：

• 
  克里斯托弗·陈 (Christopher Chen) 的《岬角》
•  珍妮·孙·罗杰斯

克里斯托弗·陈 (Christopher Chen) 的《海岬》以金门大桥两端雾气缭绕的场景为背景，讲述了记忆的不稳定、家庭结构和原子化的地理如何使熟悉的陌生和已知的神秘。故事讲述了硅谷华裔技术人员和真正的犯罪爱好者亨利·黄（Henry Wong）致力于解决他父亲乔治神秘死亡的数十年悬案。一路走来，他最终发现了很多关于他家族历史的黑暗隐秘——以及他自己思想的错误。乔治之死的案件表面上已经结案，推测是一起入室盗窃案。然而亨利并不买账。这起盗窃案与当时附近其他人的盗窃行为并不相符，而他母亲莉娜临终前的含糊评论进一步激发了他对案件的审查。亨利自称是一名黑色电影爱好者，他扮演侦探，跟随直觉——抑郁、金钱问题、外遇——直到他发现了汤姆，一个他不知道的兄弟，隐藏在马林岬的迷雾中。在整个过程中，亨利观察了旧金山的许多地点和视角，突然进入各种家庭场景，参观并重新审视他不断变化的记忆，这些记忆随着他收集新的信息而建立和变化。因此，这部剧动摇了固定或真实记忆的概念，因为亨利修改和重演了他过去的场景，我们发现，这些方式更多地反映了他在记忆时的精神状态，而不是所记住的情况的真相。 。该剧将旧金山、马林岬以及居住在那里的社区作为情感场所，反映了与地方的社会和心理纠葛。

湾区地理和时间的特殊性在这部作品中引起了特殊的共鸣，在旧金山美国音乐学院剧院的西海岸首演中向家乡观众播放。戏剧开始时，亨利以一种超戏剧式的点头，漫步走上舞台，进行了一些直接演讲的人群活动，在灯光还亮着的情况下凝视着观众。他将自己介绍为“那种被称为旧金山本地人的稀有鸟类”，并以一种直接和亲密的感觉指着城市周围的各个地点。他指向舞台右侧的东北方，自嘲地承认“在渡轮大厦附近的谷歌‘工作’”，引起人们对谷歌园区靠近历史悠久的贸易码头的关注，这一举动标志着特定的- 旧金山的关系不断变化。当亨利在旧金山的社区飞地之间旅行时，他们自己的故事进入了框架，照亮了叙事中模糊缺失的元素，勾勒出原子化的大都市和复杂的家族历史之间的相似之处。马林海岬的雾气弥漫，就在金门大桥对面，提供了一个以不同方式观看这座城市的有利位置。它最初被介绍为一个深受喜爱的童年一日游目的地，亨利和乔治可以在那里凝视并回忆这座城市，后来却令人惊奇地发现，它是亨利的神秘兄弟汤姆的家乡。劳工和阶级的幽灵困扰着亨利的家庭动态。乔治是一名移民，他从在唐人街洗碗一路打拼到创办了一家承包企业。对于航运大亨的女儿莉娜来说，他从来没有被认为足够优秀，她“受到所有人的追捧，甚至是白人精英的继承人。尽管阶级关系紧张，两人还是结婚了，他们的儿子亨利成为了一名企业技术人员。他们三者构成了亚裔美国人成功的公认范例：遗产财富、自力更生的向上流动性和技术官僚白领劳动力的三重奏。然而，汤姆却是一个不稳定的人物。作为一名逃亡的寄养儿童、一名渔具店店员和一名参与模糊非法行为的特工，他的字迹难以辨认，并且令人悲惨地提醒人们潜在的不幸。汤姆面对亨利……