Arts & Culture

What: Benevolence
Where: Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave.
When: Now, until Sun., May 4
Highlight: Kevin Matthew Wong’s physicality and embodiment of the space and characters
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Hilarious play that leaves plenty to ponder.

THE HYPHEN. Almost everyone in the world has a hyphen. Some people show all of their hyphens while others only show some. I am, of course, referring to how people often answer the complex question “Where are you from?”

That is exactly what Kevin Matthew Wong explores in his 80-minute solo show, Benevolence. Wong recounts travelling around Canada trying to find what it means to be Hakka after being tasked to create a play about, you guessed it, what it means to be Hakka. It’s just another play about finding your identity, right? Well, it’s not that simple.

The whole play is like a journey. At the start of the play, Wong explains the concept of being a good guest and how the Chinese characters of Hakka (客家) mean “Guest Families.” This idea of being a guest stuck with me because people often feel like guests in their own cultures. Many of us haven’t actually grown up in the places we’re from. We often feel confused about where we’re actually from.

Throughout the play, Wong introduces us to the various people he encountered on his journey. His specific use of repeated gestures and posture brings these people to life, and we feel like we are meeting them for the first time. One “new” acquaintance is the memorable Sonia, someone that I’ve never met before but whose aura and voice will now forever be ingrained in my brain.

Watching Wong summon these personalities feels like being at a family reunion — seeing Aunt Mary, who remembers me (but I don’t remember her) or my third cousin twice removed whom I apparently met last year. You meet characters that feel familiar but also aren’t. The multitude of characters introduced are like blips of disjointed memories, but maybe that is the point.

Sure, it’s easy for someone to say: “Hi, my name is __________, and I’m from __________.”

But what we often overlook is how complex our answers actually are when we say that we’re from one place, how our parents are from another and so on.

Wong’s piece doesn’t overlook the complexity. Instead, he embraces the confusion of finding one’s identity and embodies that confusion through his own quest to find his “Hakka-ness.” Although this is a Hakka story, it’s the audience who winds up feeling like welcomed guests. Instead of making us feel like outsiders, Wong invites us into his story, bringing us tea, apples and even having side conversations with us. He makes his journey, ours too.

A sweet treat that Benevolence gives us is a taste of Chinese culture. The set (designed by Echo Zhou 周芷會) is simple yet somehow full of Chinese culture. On one side of the stage stands a lonesome red plastic stool and a dim sum steamer, both common sights at Chinese food courts; on the other, a rice cooker and a phone on a table. Aside from the set, Wong provides small easter eggs like a projected door with the number “1713 ½” instead of 1714 (since the number four is unlucky in Chinese culture).

A highlight is the DIY lion dance, making use of the dim sum steamer as the mask, encapsulating the nature of the piece. The lion dance isn’t by any means perfect or professional, but it just feels right. It feels perfect.

Wong leaves us with fragments of information, preventing us from building the complete puzzle. The set is fragmented pieces of Chinese culture. The sound design, again, leaves us with fragments. The memories? Fragments.

At the end of the piece, Wong doesn’t wrap everything up in a nice bow. He doesn’t give us an exact answer on what it means to be Hakka or what Hakka means.

Why would he?

That’s exactly what identity is. Sure, there are singular words that we use to tell people where we’re from, but Wong’s piece reminds us that identity and where you’re from aren’t just summarized by categories like Hakka or Canadian. Our identity is made up of the stories and journeys that we experience.