"Strong
female characters...Elegantly directed."
- New York Times
THEATER
REVIEW
New York Times
By Laura Weinert
Jude Narita in 'Walk the Mountain,' on the Vietnam War's
Effects
In
dramatizing unspeakably horrific events, must an artist end up
brutalizing her audience as well? Jude Narita's one-woman show "Walk
the Mountain," about the hellish effects of the Vietnam War, reminds
us that it's possible for a performer to treat both her material and
her audience with respect.
Ms. Narita used interviews with Vietnamese and Cambodian women who
lived through the conflict to shape a nuanced account of their lives.
Interspersing her monologue with photographs, film clips, facts and
quotations, she portrays strong female characters: a warrior, a
doctor, a student, an activist. We see Vietnamese women defending
their country for as long as it's been prey to invaders, from the
Trung sisters, who fought off the Chinese in A.D. 39, to those who
helped battle the French, the Japanese, the French again, and then, of
course, the United States.
Elegantly directed by her daughter Darling Narita, Ms. Narita's
understated performance allows characters to speak through her without
affect or manufactured emotion. She retains a certain narrative
distance by presenting her material as recollections, rather than
theatricalizing their experiences as if in real time. A doctor
stoically recalls the physical effects of the bombing: bodies that
vanished entirely, and those nearby that looked like "burnt leaves and
vines, flat."
A South Vietnamese student, educated in the United States, describes
her shock at learning that the North Vietnamese write poetry and love
their country as much as she does. An adopted Cambodian child, awed by
the abundance she sees in America ("So much everything I cannot
believe!"), realizes that what she most wants is to take the
family torn from her by the Khmer Rouge to a Lucky supermarket.
Vietnam is often portrayed through American eyes here, so it
is refreshing to be offered a different view.
November 11, 2006
NYtheatre.com Review
By Martin Denton
"War is not about policy-it's about people."
This simple, powerful statement is part of Jude Narita's message to
her audience in the program for her one-woman show Walk the Mountain.
It's also the theme of the play; there's really not much else I need
to tell you to explain what she's conveying here.
But I will tell you that Narita expresses herself with potent
eloquence, so much so that her work here is unforgettable in its
emotional directness. Narita tells us stories about Vietnamese and
Cambodian women during and after the terrible wars in Indochina from
the 1950s until the 1990s. They started when the French returned after
the Japanese were driven out after World War II; and although the
Americans stopped fighting in 1975, Pol Pot continued to terrorize the
people of Cambodia for several years after that, and the United States
embargo on trade-which resulted in a great deficit of medical supplies
and technology in the newly united postwar Vietnam-didn't get lifted
until the Clinton administration.
In Walk the Mountain we meet people we're tempted to call "innocent"
or "victims" or both, but neither word really gets to the heart of it:
they're just plain people, not personally at war with any cause or any
country, whose suffering is the supposed "unintended" consequence of
warfare. Americans in particular seem prone to forget about or ignore
these people because, except for 9/11 and a few other isolated
incidents, we remain a country that has not been attacked within in
its own borders. The Vietnamese and Cambodians were attacked, for
decades, by foreigners and in some cases by themselves. The characters
in this play include a mother searching for sons killed in battle
whose bodies are now missing, desperately seeking closure for them
and for herself; a doctor who worked for a decade during the war in
a jungle hospital, now giving tours to foreign dignitaries of the
laboratory where the horrifying effects of Agent Orange are being
documented and researched; a survivor of the Khmer Rouge's brutal
regime; and a Vietnamese immigrant in America, adjusting to the myriad
cultural differences between her homeland and her new adopted country.
Their stories have largely gone unheard, which is a principal reason
why Walk the Mountain is so significant a work, not only of theatre,
but of oral history. (Narita's text here is based on conversations
with Vietnamese and Cambodian women in America and in those two
countries.) Narita's performance captures the voices and spirits of
these women magnificently; she shifts from one to another with
additions of just a few props or costume pieces. During the
transitions, video and slides are projected at the rear of the stage,
generally offering views of some of the places or events she talks
about in the guise of one of her characters.
One story in Walk the Mountain-about an American attempt to airlift
Vietnamese children out of the war zone-is so shocking that several
people in the audience gasped as Narita completed it. My companion
and I were both alive and aware at the time when this happened, but
it was the first either one of us had ever heard of it. Too much of
the human cost of war is hidden from us, now as much as then. How many subjects
are more essential that the one Narita boldly confronts in this
remarkable show? And why is it that her voice, stirring and powerful
as it is, still feels so alone?
"Powerful" - Los Angeles Times
"Haunting...Heroic" - LA Weekly "Pick Of The Week"
LA
Weekly
THEATER * PICK
Walk the Mountain
That our enemy may be our greatest teacher is the poignant
lesson of Jude Narita's haunting solo performance. With eloquent direction
by Darling Narita, Jude's heroic characters, drawn from interviews with
Viet namese and Cambodian women who lived through the Vietnam War, reveal
the humanity of a culture made faceless by the American war machine.
The hourlong multimedia show incorporates storytelling, poetry and interpretative
dance, in which Jude expresses the significant historical role of Vietnamese
women warriors, whose country was occupied for hundreds of years first
by the Chinese, then the French and finally the Americans. A young doctor
in a jungle hospital, a freedom fighter imprisoned in a tiger cage,
a shell-shocked immigrant in the U.S. all survived against incredible
odds, but not without paying an agonizing price. Graphic slides of victims
of napalm, the carpet-bombing of villages, provocative quotes by Ho
Chi Minh and American military leaders, and shocking statistics bring
home the harsh reality of wars we never see.
THEATER
BEAT
Los Angeles Times
The View Is Different From the 'Mountain'
Jude Narita's powerful one-woman show "Walk the Mountain,"
at Highways Performance Space, is an antidote for the commercialism
of "Miss Saigon" and a cautionary tale of warfare American-style. On
Jerry Browning's stark set, wooden grates are suspended around a central
screen on which slides of quotes and photos of real Vietnamese people
are flashed. Narita opens with a creation legend, telling of how the
mountain spirit and the dragon lord begat offspring that became the
Vietnamese. Narita tells of warrior women who led armies against the
Chinese and the French. Contemporary female heroes are also portrayed.
A female doctor who performed operations without anesthesia ("no-pain
medicine") during the "American War" witnesses what may be latent effects
of Agent Orange in the grossly deformed babies she delivers. A mother
prays for her dead sons. A rebel leader remembers her days in a tiger
cage. A young woman recalls turning away from her family to survive.
Director Darling Narita (Jude's daughter) gives the material the gravity
it requires. Jude Narita's show points out how these people were oppressed
by the Chinese, the French, the Japanese and the Americans. By putting
faces on the enemy, Narita challenges concepts of Vietnam and the war
Americans fought there. --Jana J. Monji