Romeo Chang - A Review

No, not THAT Romeo!

Oh man, do I have some complicated feelings about this play. Written by Barbara Blumenthal-Ehrlich and directed by Brett Marks (full disclosure: I am friends with Brett (but then, who isn’t? This guy gets around!)), Romeo Chang opens on a pair of bickering nurses trying to run simultaneous tests on a patient, Jen (played by the very strong Jessica Webb). One nurse is trying to do an ultra-sound and the other is trying to do another complicated procedure to see whether or not Jen can withstand an experimental procedure for what we soon discover is a terminal illness (I never caught a specific reference to the disease itself, though it’s possible I missed it in the early first scene as I was simply trying to figure out what was going on. My guess: lung cancer).

The play smartly leaps past the moral quandary of whether or not she should take treatment to save her own life at the cost of her unborn baby. The outlook is already grim and the odds on the last treatment option working are not good. From very early on in the play, Jen is determined to keep her baby and resolves to keep alive long enough to successfully “incubate” her daughter.

This is extremely hard on both her husband and father (splendidly played by Paul Melendy and Ron Lacey respectively) and particularly the scenes involving her and her husband are heartbreaking in their candor and warmth. However, resolved to keep alive for the four months it will take carry her child to term, Jen seeks out the help of a practitioner of “Eastern Medicine” who reportedly cured a dog of a similar condition years ago, a man by the name of Romeo Chang.

…Ooh boy. Okay, let’s start with the good stuff, and it’s a long long list. First, the cast: Every single one of them were outstanding. I may not have liked his character very much, but Steven Barkhimer was great: he completely inhabited a role that I found highly problematic with a sense of swagger and panache that the script absolutely demanded and he absolutely delivered. I found Ron Lacey very convincing as Jen’s high strung father too glued to his phone and business to emotionally deal with his family. I absolutely adored Paul Melendy. His sense of both comic timing and honest pathos were an absolute treat. He had such camaraderie with his cast mates that I swear that guy could have chemistry with a statue. And of course Jessica Webb as Jen was absolutely lovely. She sold even the strangest bits, including parts of the play where she had to fling her arms about wildly like an epileptic marionette. Her handling of the character and the journey were so completely believable and lived in, that it completely sold the play.

And let’s talk about that play: before I begin to air my grievances it’s important to point out that this is a well written play. I’m talking VERY well written. All of the scenes are written with a both a tenderness and wit that was so assured and accomplished that it is very very clear that this is a playwright who knows what the fuck she’s doing.

In particular the second scene, in which Tom wakes Jen up in the middle of the night to aimlessly talk around their feelings of Jen’s impending demise is so deft and so so well written. Tom has a beautiful and funny monologue in which he confesses all of the doubts and fears and random thoughts he’s been stewing in. Near the end, Jen invents a “code phrase” or a “signal” which they’ll use when the time comes for her to have the child, a process it is heavily hinted at she will not survive. Later, in the second to the last scene when she finally uses the signal the meaning had already been infused with so much portent and weight that it became this exquisitely powerful euphemism that literally has me in tears right now remembering that scene.

But then we come to the titular character: Romeo Chang. Introduced as a chain smoking homeless looking drunk, this “doctor” became famous, as I mentioned, because he apparently cured a dog of a disease thought uncurable. The man, and the way he’s presented in the script, sort of represents a fumbling clown presentation of an alternative healer. But while often his antics are indeed played for laughs, we’re simultaneously supposed to take him seriously, particularly when it comes to the subject of his expertise: medicine.

I don’t mind magical realism. There’s a scene at the beginning of Act 2 where the four characters are working on one of his exercises when seemingly the ceiling opens up and fall leaves rain down from the sky. I loved that. I thought it was beautiful.

What I found less beautiful was the implicit endorsement of quack medicine as a legitimate way of treating disease. Various forms of alternative medicine have many of their proponents. The chiropractic field is very popular, almost to the point of ubiquity. I know many people who swear by acupuncture (which to be fair, there are some studies which have demonstrated its efficacy, a claim that eludes most other alternative medicine). Homeopathy remains popular, despite that the principles behind the practice make absolutely no sense to anyone who has a basic grasp of the way matter works.

Romeo Chang (the person, not the play) is clearly capable of some Harry Potter style witchcraft. He heals Sam’s headache and sore feet with a touch. By touching Jen’s back he somehow manages to gyrate her arms (in what had to be my least favorite bit of Romeo business), and in a truly baffling moment, he manages to halt both Tom and Sam in their tracks and then push them back through the air with the power of his mind. That’s some Neo from the Matrix shit right there.

He's a quack! Quack! Quack!

Now, you might say, “Well, okay. But this is obviously fiction. This is that magical realism you were so pleased with earlier”, to which I respond with: But there are people out there right now claiming with a heady mix of bullshit and sometimes even parlor tricks to be able to perform equally astounding things, and like Romeo, they’ll cure you with a steady stream of placebo and fortune cookie wisdom as long as you keep their coffers filled.

And it’s not so much that I hate con artists (who doesn’t love The Sting?) it’s that, just like in this play, when people seek out and receive medical treatment that has no basis in science, they often do so instead of getting actual help. It’s not just that quacks con people out of their time and money, they also convince people to refuse help from the people who are the most capable of providing it. I find it akin to spreading the dangerous myth that vaccines cause autism, a specious rumor that has caused several diseases long thought to be dormant to come flooding back into elementary schools across this country. A rumor that has been thoroughly and utterly debunked.

Now look, I understand that this was just a story and I’m not sure that any of this was the playwright’s intent. After all, just because Shakespeare wrote Macbeth that doesn’t mean he was endorsing murder. But it’s the way Romeo is portrayed in the play that bothers me. His powers and expertise are never called into question by Jen, and both Tom and Sam who are originally highly skeptical are shown to be foolish doubting Thomases. If we didn’t live in a world where people like Romeo Chang weren’t actively scamming people using the exact kind of fabricated B.S. the character in this play employs, then I’d be much more forgiving. But the only kind of people who do this in real life are either deluded, criminally reckless, or intentionally malevolent, and to imply that there might be some kind of basis to fraudulent medicine seems unconscionable.

BUT, at the same time, there was so so so much I loved about this play and its performance. I haven’t mentioned the humor, but the play was just as consistently funny as it was filled with rich and honest pathos. And I’ve already described the obvious craft of the dialogue. In almost all respects this was an excellent play. I just wish the playwright had gotten rid of the “doctor” and called it something else.