Hoop dreams and hardwood diplomacy
“The Great Leap” at the Ricketson scores
In her history-teasing play “The Great Leap,” Lauren Yee takes her own imaginative vault over the decades by telling the story of Manford, a hungry Chinese-American 17-year-old basketball player who persuades a college coach to let him join his team for its impending trip to Beijing. The year is 1989.
Eighteen years earlier, Saul Slezac, of the foul-mouth and protruding belly, took the American team for a exhibition game to China.
“I brought basketball to Chi- na,” he boasts.
He didn’t; it arrived a century earlier.
“I taught Beijing the game.” He didn’t.
“My visit changed everything.” When the San Francisco Chronicle runs a tiny piece buried in its obits about that initial foray into hardwood diplomacy and its upcoming sequel, Manford (Linden Tailor) sees it. So did Chinese party member Wen Chang (Joseph Steven Yang). Saul mentored Wen when he was a translator and neophyte coach. Years later, Wen is ready for the rematch, and has different memories of the earlier experience.
But on Saul’s assertion that everything changed, Wen agrees.
Manford, a Chinatown hot shot, does his own kind of boasting as he works overtime on Saul. Portrayed by Tailor with a zeal that at times seems to compensate for the sense he’s not on the edge of 17, Manford races through the cheat sheet in his hand like a newbie salesman on commission.
“I am relentless. I am the most relentless person you’ve ever met. If you have met someone more relentless than me, tell me, tell me ... . ”
Manford has an ulterior motive gnawing at him. His cousin Connie (Keiko Green) recognizes how restless he is becoming. The day he crashes Saul’s practice, he’s come from a funeral. And though he shrugs off the event, the departed is absolutely a central figure.
Yee took inspiration from her father’s tales of playing basketball in San Francisco and being part of a “friendship” game to China. And she captures a young man’s enthusiasm for the game. Still, I wish Manford’s deep gift for the game was more palpable. This doesn’t mean showing him nailing 99 free throws in a row — which director Eric Ting does a deft job suggesting in one scene — so much as giving us a little man (he’s under 6 feet tall) who succeeds in the company of giants.
“The Great Leap” ensemble is composed of newcomers to the Denver Center. Bob Ari chomps down on the role of Saul like it’s a stogie, spitting out obscenities like tobacco juice. Expletives strafe his unseen squad and the audience. There’s little in his appearance that says “former athlete.” Wen is his opposite: polite, conflict-averse, modest. Wearing a blue Mao suit (costumes by Valérie Thérèse Bart), government-issue glasses and bowlish haircut, Yang gets at youthful tentativeness and his functionary fretting.
When Yee’s play was selected after the Denver Center’s Colorado New Play Summit — along with José Cruz González’s “American Mariachi” — for a world premiere, one of the obvious considerations was “How would the production take on the basketball court environs and also travel to China?” Scenic designer Wilson Chan has resolved that with a set that re-creates a high-ceilinged gymnasium and relies on an elevated room where Wen has a view of the vast, soon-to-be-infamous Tiananmen Square from his hotel room.
Shawn Duan’s bold projections of image and words and sound design by Curtis Craig evoke Beijing at a time when the student demonstrators march toward the government’s violent pro-democracy crackdown.
Now might be a good time to mention the position that Manford plays: point guard, the player who is tasked with surveying the court, driving to the basket but, better, seeing a great scoring opportunity for a teammate. The playwright has said she wanted to write a work that moved like a basketball game. And so, she does something subtle and apt in having her lead pass the greatest moment of “The Great Leap” to another.
In a play punctuated with bluster — Saul’s to be sure but also Manford’s — the final scene of “The Great Leap” asserts a quiet, beautifully unexpected power.