THEATER - "Walk the Mountain"

Walk the Mountain, Jude Narita’s one-woman show about the effects of war on Vietnamese women, is a dull and encyclopedic restatement of facts. Occasionally, Narita finds some poetry and passion, but for the majority of the time, her characters are lifelessly matter-of-fact. Between scenes, a slideshow splatters horrific (and obligatory) images of war, along with the now-clichéd quotes of men like Ho Chi Minh; this scenery is more alive than the show.

Walk the Mountain never finds a way to excite the audience: most of the text is dry and factual, and presented as such. Too many of Narita’s characters are repressed, which creates a dulling inaction on stage, no matter how horrible the effects of Agent Orange and napalm are (“Destiny”). Words are just words here, and because they never seem to hurt Narita’s characters, they never hurt us, either. Children fall from the sky, she explains in the short vignette “For the Children,” and audience members, twice removed, don’t care. Narita shakes incense in “Prayer for Three Sons” until she is worked up enough to mourn her dead sons, charred somewhere in the infinite jungle, and then quickly scurries off, as if she is embarrassed to hold us in the moment. Her scenes are more fragments than pieces, and they spend so much time getting to the point that by the time each ends, we remember only the faintest semblance of grief.

Narita seems uncomfortable with her own show. She trips over words a lot, and her inflections are troublesome, too. The accent she affects may be genuine, but the way she pauses mid-sentence makes her seem like a Vietnamese William Shatner. Thankfully, by the final two scenes, Narita recomposes herself, and both “Dream Mountain” and “Long Journey” are examples of how potent this play might be. These characters, both so alive, remind the audience of how dead so many others who suffered in Vietnam are.

The effect of war on women (or vice-versa) is often overlooked, but all Walk the Mountain manages is to under-look at history, across an emotionally barren gulf.