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To watch Lan Tran’s one-woman performance Elevator/Sex is to see her transform into facets of her psyche. Speaking through five different characters—a professional hugger, an old woman, a pickpocket, a surfer and a photographer—Tran shifts identities and switches perspectives to take on one issue: the after-effect of sexual molestation. An autobiographical work, each of the characters that Tran skillfully portrays emerged as a consequence of her immersion in various healing therapies, both psychological and physical, and each of the stories she tells through them allude, in some way, to her childhood experience of sexual violence. |
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Sex in an Elevator? – Colleen Becker
To watch Lan Tran’s one-woman performance Elevator/Sex is to see her transform into facets of her psyche. Speaking through five different characters—a professional hugger, an old woman, a pickpocket, a surfer and a photographer—Tran shifts identities and switches perspectives to take on one issue: the after-effect of sexual molestation. An autobiographical work, each of the characters that Tran skillfully portrays emerged as a consequence of her immersion in various healing therapies, both psychological and physical, and each of the stories she tells through them allude, in some way, to her childhood experience of sexual violence. But just as Tran’s communicative strategy thwarts any direct engagement with her personal history, the characters themselves speak in metaphor, mediating tales of emotional shock through reminiscences of the large-scale attack on New York’s World Trade Center. The “aftermath of trauma” is the broad theme that brings structure to her constellation of stories, allowing Tran to extrapolate from her private past to touch upon current public issues, but the conceptual basis of the piece is surrogacy. Tran performs aspects of her persona, reenacts lived experiences and recreates personalities encountered in her life, but, in the final analysis, she presents her audience with an act of self-protective deferral rather than one of unguarded disclosure. Directed by Michael Kearns, Elevator/Sex premiered at the Pan-Asian Repertory Spring Festival of New Works at New York’s off-Broadway West End Theater. Tran continues to perform the piece, excerpts from it and variations on it, at venues throughout her home state of California.
The self-referential nature of Tran’s material is never revealed in the show—she instead transfigures herself into a succession of characters, leaving the viewer to draw connections between each of the vignettes. A petite, first-generation Vietnamese American, Tran’s first incarnation is as an obese Southern white woman—Daisy, a professional hugger. Propagating her homegrown therapeutics, which she calls LACE (love and comfort energy), Daisy accosts an audience volunteer, surrounding him from behind. As she envelops him with her physicality and “healing vibrations,” she tells of her time on duty at a hospital in the Bronx on September 11 when the only victims of the attack that appeared in the emergency room were the masses of pregnant women who spontaneously aborted their babies as a consequence of their trauma. Speaking of her own need for LACE in the wake of this little-known aspect of the event, she describes the way in which it invaded her subconscious and later awoke repressed memories through dreams of her molestation at the hands of a female grade school teacher.
From Daisy, Tran moves to Mrs. Pham, an elderly Vietnamese immigrant who begins her story of physical violation by describing the medial malpractice that ruptured her internal organs, and the consequent confrontation with her daughter who visits her bedridden mother—not to offer solace, but to accost her while blaming her father of sexual impropriety. Discounting her thoroughly Americanized daughter’s accusations by likening them to a “dream,” Mrs. Pham describes her own nightmares after September 11, emphasizing their unreality.
Tran then convincingly transforms herself into Tara, a tough African-American adolescent pickpocket who is briefly trapped in an elevator in the Twin Towers during the attack, and who, during the course of her monologue, reveals that she is raped on a regular basis by the elderly Chinese man who taught her how to steal. Able to “take a lot of shit,” Tara earns her living by “taking other peoples’ shit.”
Posing next as a male surfer, Hawaii’s “Most Eligible Bachelor,” Tran narrates his bizarre encounter with a tourist from New York, who brings up her girlhood molestation during sex. In a reenactment of her father’s aggression, the New York girl anally rapes the surfer as he climaxes.
Most resembling Tran, her last character, a Vietnamese-American photographer, speaks of attending the wedding of a girl whose taste in clothes has earned her the derogatory nickname “Immigrant Wardrobe.” Held at the former Windows on the World, an incident at the wedding forces the photographer to care for a girl five years old, who is at the precise age and level of development that she was when she was molested.
Like the adage “you gotta laugh to keep from crying,” Lan’s treatment of the affects of trauma is as fanciful and absurdist as it is moving and provocative. The larger implication of Tran’s very personal Elevator/Sex is not limited to the idea that everyone is affected by specific incidences of violence, but also indicates the difficultness of directly confronting inner
