Promising Chinatown comedy loses its way
THEATRE: Play turns into a Chinese-American variety show
King of the Yees opens with the promise of a wacky and engaging house of mirrors as Gateway Theatre’s artistic director Jovanni Sy (also a fine actor) enters with the line, “I can’t talk right now, I’m in Lauren’s play.”
Lauren is playwright Lauren Yee, whose play-within-a-play-within-aplay is having its Canadian premiere at the Gateway. Yee has big fun with cultural difference and the conventions of theatre as she explores the relationship between a Chinese-American father and his resolutely assimilated daughter.
Aiming to avoid the clichés associated with the familiar cultural identity generation-gap play, King of the Yees performs a multitude of theatrical juggling acts, becoming in effect a funny Chinese-American variety show set in San Francisco. But keeping all those balls in the air is no small feat. The play gradually loses its way and never quite recovers.
Playwright Lauren (Andrea Yu) is trying to direct her play about her father and herself with two actors (Raugi Yu and Donna Soares) while her “real” father, Larry Yee (played by Sy), distracts her with his garrulous banter. Larry is a good-natured guy, proud of his heritage as a Yee and of the Yee Association building, with its traditional Chinatown architecture, that dominates the stage in Pam Johnson’s handsome set.
Lauren and Larry have their differences. She and her Jewish husband are moving to Berlin. Larry wants her to stay in San Francisco, have kids and visit China with him. He’s devastated by her plans.
She’s exasperated with his loyalty to a local politician also named Yee. When the politician is arrested for corruption, Larry disappears and Lauren spends the rest of the play trying to find him.
Meanwhile, much else is going on. A woman in the audience (Soares) challenges the playwright for not reaching out to the Chinese community, not dealing with the social problems plaguing Chinatown or with the Yee Association’s discrimination against women. Another audience member (Milton Lim) joins the ensemble. There’s a slide show about the original Chinese Yee and a discussion of the building’s doors. A lion dancer and a traditional Chinese musician briefly appear. In the play’s funniest sequence, the “actors” Soares and Yu practice the proper way of delivering the word “Chi-nese” in a Chinese accent.
Not much comes of any of this, although the lion returns in a funny dance scene, as the second act introduces a new potpourri of diversions while Lauren searches for Larry.
A gangster named Shrimp Boy quickly comes and goes, telling an amusing story about his relationship with Charles Manson in prison. In a series of dreamlike sequences, Lauren meets a goofy Chinese chiropractor-acupuncturist (Lim) and a trio of fortune-cookie oracles who explain the tests she has to pass to reach her father.
Despite the good acting and director Sherry J. Yoon’s best efforts, most of these scenes go on too long and lack comic punch. The ending, despite some fireworks, proves as sentimental as any of the generic clichés the play is trying to explode. And its most compelling character, Larry, disappears for almost the whole second act.
I wanted more Larry, more Jovanni Sy singing the mock song he starts at the beginning, “Secret Asian Man.”