Caustically funny play offers satirical look at search for identity
Desdemona ( Conni Mah, in a virtuoso turn), has a dilemma.
She’s trying to get into Princeton, and one of the requirements on the application is to write an essay about the obstacles she was forced to overcome in her life — and she doesn’t have much.
She’s an upper middle- class Chinese- American — at least that’s her family’s story and they’re sticking to it. She has always had great grades. She spent no time overcoming any obstacles that could really ignite that essay, particularly when compared to the women of The Joy Luck Club, which really bothers her.
Even though there isn’t much of it, it’s easy to feel Desdemona’s ( relative lack of ) pain.
That’s one of the narrative threads of Ching, Chong, Chinaman, American playwright Lauren Yee’s caustically funny drama about one upwardly mobile American family’s upward mobility, and how all of it gets thrown into upheaval when they sponsor a Chinese immigrant, J, ( Kida Nakamura), whose presence in their house manages to toss their lives into upheaval.
There’s Upton ( a hilarious Devin Kotani), a World of Warcraft addicted teenager fond of quoting historical texts to justify the need to employ an indentured servant. ( He hopes to qualify for a huge gamer competition in South Korea, where gaming is accorded the respect he is certain it deserves, and he needs a hand with his homework and household chores).
There’s Ed ( Ben Wong), the family patriarch, who wants J to caddy for him as he attempts to master golf, a white man’s game Ed is certain will pave his pathway into the American corporate elite.
And most of all, there’s Grace ( Grace Lu), Desdemona and Upton’s mom, a desperate housewife trying to get pregnant to fill her increasingly lonely, empty days.
Yee has taken the dysfunctional family drama — an American staple — and in Ching, Chong Chinaman, given it a marvellously satirical spin.
Director John Iglesias has his cast — apart from J — made up in a kind of stylized white face, suggesting that they inhabit a world ( America) where whiteness is the idealized state of being, where upward mobility starts when people of colour put aside their diverse backstories and get with the program of moving on up the economic ladder that is America.
It all unfolds, in rather claustrophobic fashion, in Motel, where J. P. Thibodeau’s innovative, but ill- fitting white set suggests a kind of generic, suburban America where every home looks just like the one next door.
The cast — particularly Mah’s Desdemona, who alternates between being an unbearably entitled, preening teenage girl and a young woman on what turns out to be a comedic quest for self- identity — deliver excellent performances, and maybe in a larger theatre, with a little more breathing room between the play and the audience, the laughs would have landed even louder ( they were still pretty loud at the Halloween performance, though).
As Upton, Kotani dryly delivers his screeds about the human tendency to exploit other humans, while Desdemona shrilly instructs him in how to dehumanize the help so you can treat them even worse without feeling bad about yourself.
Ben Wong’s Ed is marvellously oblivious to the idea that he was ever Chinese, and that obliviousness creeps up again when Grace’s efforts to help J ( a very good Nakamura) make it onto a TV dance show to fulfil his destiny to become famous in America.
Ching, Chong Chinaman is one of those sneaky good shows, filled with smart writing, strong performances and solid direction, that remind you of the ways in which theatre is still capable or reinventing the conversation to connect to a new generation of audiences.