The 'Wong Street Journal' at PIFA: Well-intentioned but jejune performance art

Kristina Wong is on a mission. As a performance artist who self-identifies as someone "who fights for the marginalized," she wanted to find some way to "leave a legacy" by "making a difference." The Wong Street Journal is her message. Treading the fine line between preaching and entertaining, she tells us about her three-week trip to Northern Uganda.

As a third-generation Chinese-American, Wong goes to Africa, where she is mistaken for a white person (so much for her idealized solidarity among people of color). She volunteers to work for an organization called VAC-NET, an NGO by providing micro-loans to impoverished rural women. With all the necessary self-satire, Wong machine-sews red cloth hashtags (she is a social-media addict) and performs rap songs with agitprop lyrics. Somewhere along the line (both in Uganda and in the show) she forgets about the women and hooks up with a young wannabe music star who wants her to provide him with a studio to record and sell records.

She lectures us on the history of the dire Ugandan civil war, shows slides of her trip and the people she met, commends how hard it is to leave a legacy without being a moron. Wong generates interest and sympathy in the audience, although she says that "existential crises are for women who read Eat, Pray, Love."

Wong's assumption is that she is the bearer of important news, and although there is no doubt a need for people to learn about the conditions in Africa, this show seems more suited to a high-school audience as a very cool after-school special.

By chance, a few hours before going to the theater, I'd taught Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter's In the Continuum, a funny and fierce play about the AIDS crisis among the black female population in Zimbabwe and Los Angeles. A couple of weeks ago, I saw Gurira's Broadway hit Eclipsed, about the women who are sex slaves in Liberia; this in turn reminded me of Lynn Nottage's play Ruined, about the plight of women sex slaves in Congo. These are all information-filled, impassioned, provocative plays that, unlike The Wong Street Journal, leave their authors' egos out of it and make powerful demands on the audience.

As the friend who saw the Wong show with me said as we left, "This isn't summer camp, folks." The "this" as I understood her to mean it, is both professional, mature theater as well as the complex political horrors of our time.

"The Wong Street Journal" plays through Saturday as part of the Philadelphia Festival of the Arts (PIFA), Innovation Studio at the Kimmel Center, Broad & Spruce Sts. Tickets: $25. Information: 215-893-1999, kimmelcenter.org