Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord
Reviewed by Socks Whitmore
Center Theatre Group, co-produced with East West Players
Through March 12
RECOMMENDED
Back in 2020, actor-comedian Kristina Wong was touring her one-woman show Kristina Wong for Public Office, a solo performance/satirical political campaign based on the premise that it’s all performance anyway. In March . . . well, we all remember what happened in March. Though that show’s trajectory was cut short by the public health edicts (and everything else) that began that fateful month, the Pulitzer Prize finalist is back at the Kirk Douglas with a new comedic solo show co-produced by Center Theatre Group and East West Players: Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord.
Beginning with that fateful day in March, Kristina recounts her own experience with the U.S. COVID-19 lockdown as a then-unemployed artist in an industry deemed “non-essential,” and the journey she took to launch and lead the Auntie Sewing Squad — a heroic grassroots mask- making movement to address the nationwide shortage that plagued the plague-ridden United States throughout 2020. What started as a Facebook post grew into a movement, until vaccines rolled out and the world seemed to move on from the need for home-sewn masks — leaving the “L. Ron Hubbard of sewing group leaders” to figure out who she and her troupe were in a world that labelled itself “post-pandemic.”
Before launching into a beat-by-beat replay of national events, Wong opens the show with a land acknowledgement, jokes about masking, and a complete list of content warnings, all delivered with her characteristic humor and spunk. Her re-enactment of her own life is delivered with hilarious over-dramatization and a plentitude of fourth-wall breaks, the script skillfully navigating between humor and pathos to hold equal space for the absurdity and grief of it all. One might imagine that much of what Wong shares is not dissimilar to the audience’s own pandemic life stories, but knowing the future takes no thrill away from the suspense; perhaps some of the hardest-hitting moments are the video clips pulled from the greatest moments of trauma and political unrest during the pandemic, their force magnified by our collective recognition. Various moments of audience participation enhance the show’s communal energy. (If you’re sitting in the front row, prepare for the potential of being interviewed and/or small objects flying over your head.)
The set designed by Junghyun Georgia Lee is decorated with whimsical oversized sewing tools and home-sewn USPS boxes, punctuated by the patchwork backdrop made of gray medical masks, but when the overhead lights go out, the set transforms into the figurative warzone that was (and is) pandemic-stricken America. Parallels are drawn between COVID-driven civil unrest and the 1982 Chinese American garment worker uprisings, as well as the 1992 Rodney King riots. Even as she tells jokes, Wong underscores the way in which identity and race continue to define the pandemic for many communities; as a third generation Chinese American in a country infected by the terms “China Virus” and “Kung Flu,” she notes, “This is a mask I cannot take off.”
Sewing is a tradition that was passed down through the women of Wong’s family, partially as an act of assimilation to America — but when America needed it most, Wong and her Hello Kitty sewing machine were there. The themes of motherhood and family are present throughout the recounting of her intense tenancy as the mask-sewing “sweatshop overlord.” Though her fight against the mask shortage began with the insistence that, “No, you are the hero,” by the end of her journey, Wong recognizes a more important title: you are my family.
Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord is gut-wrenching in all the best ways, using the power of laughter to underline a fascinating, yet startlingly true notion: “We’re trying to fight for a country that doesn’t want to be saved.”
Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City; Tues.–Sat., 8 pm; Sat., 2 pm; Sun., 1 pm & 6:30 pm; through Mar. 12. centertheatregroup.org. Running time: 90 minutes with no intermission.
