The Headlands by Christopher Chen (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Headlands by Christopher Chen
• Janine Sun Rogers

THE HEADLANDS. By Christopher Chen. Directed by Pam MacKinnon. American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco. March 4, 2023.

Set between fog-shrouded locales on either end of the Golden Gate Bridge, Christopher Chen’s The Headlands contends with how the precarities of memory, family structures, and atomized geographies render the familiar unfamiliar and the known mysterious. The story follows Henry Wong, a Chinese American Silicon Valley techie and true crime enthusiast, as he works to solve the decades-old cold case of his father George’s mysterious death. Along the way, he ends up discovering a great deal about the dark recesses of his family history—and the fallibility of his own mind. The case of George’s death is ostensibly closed, presumed to be a burglary gone wrong. Henry does not buy it, however; the alleged burglary does not match the pattern of others in the neighborhood at the time, and a vague deathbed comment made by his mother Leena further incites his scrutiny of the case. Henry, a professed film noir buff, plays detective, following hunches—depression, money troubles, an affair—until he uncovers Tom, a brother he didn’t know he had, hidden in the fogs of the Marin Headlands. Throughout the process, Henry peers into many sites and perspectives on San Francisco, popping into various domestic scenes, and visiting and revisiting his evolving memories, which build and morph as he gleans new pieces of information. The play, as a result, destabilizes the concept of fixed or truthful memory as Henry revises and restages scenes from his past in ways that, we discover, refle t more about his mental state at the time of remembering than the truth of the remembered situation. The play’s engagement with San Francisco, the Marin Headlands, and the communities that live there as affec ive sites reflec s social and psychological entanglements with place.

The particularities of Bay Area geographies and temporality took on special resonance in this production, played to a hometown audience in its West Coast premiere at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. In a metatheatrical nod at the start of the play, Henry wandered onto the stage and engaged in some direct-address crowdwork, peering at the audience with the house lights still up. He introduced himself as “that rare bird known as the San Francisco native” and gestured to various sites around the city with a sense of immediacy and intimacy. He pointed stage right, to the northeast, to self-deprecatingly confess to “‘work’ at Google, over by the Ferry Building,” drawing attention to the proximity of the Google campus to the historic trade terminal in a move that signaled the specific - ties of a San Francisco in flux. As Henry traveled between San Francisco neighborhood enclaves, their own stories entered the frame and illuminated shadowy missing elements of the narrative, sketching a parallel between an atomized metropole and a complicated family history. The foggy stretch of the Marin Headlands, just across the Golden Gate Bridge, offe ed a vantage point from which to view the city diffe ently; it was introduced at first as a beloved childhood day trip destination from where Henry and George could gaze at and reminisce about the city, only to be revealed later, uncannily, to be the home turf of Tom, Henry’s mysterious brother. Specters of labor and class haunt Henry’s family dynamic. George was an immigrant who worked his way up from washing dishes in Chinatown to founding a contracting business. He was never considered quite good enough for Leena, the daughter of a shipping magnate who “was courted by everyone, even the heirs of the white elite.” Despite the fraught class tensions, the pair married, and their son Henry became a corporate tech worker. The three of them form the recognizable paradigm of Asian American success: the trifecta of legacy wealth, bootstrapping upward mobility, and technocratic white-collar labor. Tom, however, is a destabilizing figu e; as a fugitive foster child, a tackle shop clerk, and an agent involved in vaguely illicit deeds, he is illegible, and an abject reminder of unfortunate potentialities. Tom faces Henry...