Paranoia’s on the dinner menu at SF Playhouse
Everything’s not what it seems in ‘You Mean To Do me Harm’
Two couples are having a dinner party. They’re laughing and drinking white wine together, but there’s a touch of wariness underlying their playful chitchat, as if they’re sizing each other up.
That’s just the beginning of Christopher Chen’s new play “You Mean to Do Me Harm,” now making its world premiere as part of San Francisco Playhouse’s second-stage Sandbox Series. Seemingly innocuous comments made at that dinner have a strange and devastating ripple effect on the lives and relationships of all concerned, raising all kinds of thorny issues of race, gender roles, nationality and trust.
Each couple consists of one white American and one Chinese American, and from the start that lends some uncomfortable tension to conversations about business relationships between the U.S. and China.
The two white characters, Ben and Lindsey, are old friends who dated in college. Ben just got hired to work with Lindsey’s husband, Daniel, but hasn’t started yet, so they’re all just getting to know each other.
Even when everyone’s in an animated conversation at the start, the viewer becomes acutely aware of how much of each of them is unknown and perhaps unknowable. Don Castro’s Daniel is very restrained, with the amiably neutral expression of someone accustomed to playing his cards close to his chest. Lauren English has a similar reserve as Lindsey, but it reads — at least initially — as being very careful not to offend anybody.
Charisse Loriaux is all smiles as Samantha, Ben’s wife (who still works at the firm from which he was laid off), but she also clearly enjoys putting other people on the spot with incisive questions that throw them off balance. She’s particularly adept at cutting through others’ pretenses to strike at the heart of what they’re saying and what they’re not saying, but she gives little away herself.
James Asher’s Ben is ostensibly the most straightforward character, chatty to a fault, and yet it’s he whose intentions are most in question, precisely because he doesn’t seem to think things through enough to really know himself what his intentions are.
A Bay Area native, Chen has become known for mind-bendingly complex and thoroughly entertaining plays that often bring their own narratives into question. “The Hundred Flowers Project,” which Crowded Fire premiered in 2012, depicted a performance collective whose collaboratively created play takes on a life of its own that its creators get lost in. Chen’s play “Caught,” which played Berkeley’s Shotgun Players last year and just won a playwriting Obie Award for its New York run, pulls off one mask after another as fact and fiction are blurred.
There’s certainly an element of that theme of interrogating the narrative in “You Mean to Do Me Harm” as well. The dinner party sets off a number of one-on-one conversations in its aftermath, most of which hinge one way or another on speculation about what other people might be thinking or saying about them. After a while that speculation calls into question how much we might have been taking for granted about the conversations we’ve witnessed that really can’t be taken for granted.
That growing uncertainty is cultivated deftly in artistic director Bill English’s staging in the Rueff, the small upstairs stage at ACT’s Strand Theater. English uses Zoe Rosenfeld’s eye-catching set of a square patio surrounded by a ring of wood chips to great advantage.
When characters are offstage, they sit or stand in that outer ring, avidly watching the onstage characters. That’s not an uncommon device, but combined with the theme of wondering what people say when they’re not there, the people observing from the sidelines feel like active participants in scenes they’re not in. Their attention is palpable.