When the curtain opens, we see a solitary figure striking some acrobatic dance moves, twirling gracefully on a mountaintop. He’s the aptly named Lone, a laborer working on the transcontinental railroad in 1867 — the subject of David Henry Hwang’s moving drama “The Dance and the Railroad.”
Written in 1981, this Pulitzer Prize nominee — the precursor to Hwang’s Tony-winning, 1988 “M. Butterfly” and the recent “Chinglish” — has just been revived by the Signature Theatre. At just $25 a ticket, it’s worth the journey.
Depicting the interactions between the haughty, cynical Lone and the recently arrived Ma (Ruy Iskandar), a fellow worker who dreams of striking it rich in America, it’s an evocative portrait of the immigrant experience and the sacrifices that entails.
Lone (Yuekun Wu) spent 10 of his years in China studying to be an opera performer, until his impoverished parents forced him to go to America to make a living. Once there, he shuns his fellow railroad workers and spends his free time alone, practicing his dancing.
That is, until Ma appears. An aspiring performer himself, he asks Lone to tutor him in the ways of Chinese opera — confident he’ll return to his homeland, where he’ll become a star and have 20 wives.
“His head is too big for this mountain,” Lone says about the foolish younger man.
Nonetheless, Lone agrees to teach him: To amuse himself (and us), his first lesson involves showing Ma how to waddle and quack like a duck. Eventually the two men improvise an opera about their journeys to America and unhappy experiences working for the “white devils.”
This short one-act is more of a vignette than a fully fleshed-out drama. What we hear in terms of dialogue is less important than what we see — Lone’s elegant, self-possessed dancing, a visible sign of pride in his heritage.
Director May Adrales’ staging fully mines the play’s emotional richness. Performing on Mimi Lien’s abstract set featuring large sculptural formations gorgeously lit by Jiyoun Chang, the actors deliver stirring turns, while Huang Ruo’s Eastern-inflected score strikes all the right notes.