WHO KILLED THE DRAGON LADY
The latest addition to the small-but-growing repertoire of Asian American plays is Who Killed the Dragon Lady, a murder mystery farce by Seattle playwright Gary Iwamoto. The story begins with the murder of the ruthless Madam Carmen Yaki, aka the Dragon Lady, founder of a multimillion-dollar microwave-sushi empire, and follows the efforts of her survivors to inherit her prodigious wealth. These include Suki Yaki, her goody-two-shoes eldest daughter; Teri Yaki, her rebellious second daughter (“Didn’t it ever bother you that Mama named us all after food?” she asks her sister. “At least no one ever called you ‘chicken’ or ‘beef,’” Suki replies); Teri’s Caucasian husband, Conrad, a marine ecologist who loathes Carmen’s wholesale slaughter of sea life; Bento, Carmen’s profligate ne’er- do-well son; Sashi Mei, her illegitimate daughter by the ex-husband of Shoo Mai, the equally ruthless head of the rival Dim Sum frozen food corporation. Shoo Mai is understandably anxious to acquire the dynasty of the late Dragon Lady, and may or may not be her twin sister. (“But you’re Chinese!” protests the skeptical Suki. “I was adopted by Mormon missionaries,” Shoo Mai replies. “They didn’t know Japanese from Chinese.”) After the obligatory complications, during which the surviving siblings are bumped off one by one, the mystery is resolved in a flurry of twists and turns so swift that we leave the theater still befuddled.
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Novelist Theodore Sturgeon has an axiom regarding the ratio of good art to total art produced–I believe he estimates it at 30 percent–which would seem to imply that the more of something there is, the more good something there will be. Who Killed the Dragon Lady is no masterpiece, but it may inspire as-yet-untapped Asian American talent to persevere in creating artistic expressions that reflect this still largely underrepresented people.
