Ideas stimulate, but dialogue underwhelms
Much of the buzz around Lucy Kirkwood’s play Chimerica has been about its cinematic features, as if the political thriller has always belonged exclusively in the film world.
The play stars a rugged and troubled American male protagonist; there are about 40 scene changes that jet the audience halfway across the world to discuss economics, politics and social justice; and a mystery unfolds over the three-hour run time that culminates in a twist.
On paper, it’s a potential Oscar winner. In director Chris Abraham’s staging, a co-production between Canadian Stage and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, there’s even the quintessential intense opening scene — green photojournalist Joe on the phone with his editor as Chinese police bang on his hotel room door and he snaps the iconic photo of a man standing down tanks at Tiananmen Square — followed by a high-tech video montage almost tailor-made for rolling credits.
It’s a stunning start that lives up to the hype of the play’s 2013 London run, where it gained an Olivier Award, an Evening Standard Award and earned Kirkwood the 2014 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
It’s also a testament to Abraham, one of the city’s most reliable directors, who has transitioned from the intimate Berkeley Street Theatre to the Festival Theatre in Stratford to the infamously difficult Bluma stage. He fills it expertly with an enormous white wall and two doors for entrances and exits, placed on a revolve designed by Judith Bowden.
It’s a great tool to move rapidly through the 20 years of massive change that separate the opening scene from the rest of the play. But the constant rotation becomes exhausting, no matter how symbolic the circular motion might be for the transfer of power and money from one nation to another, or the cyclical repetition of history.
Here’s the plot, in a nutshell: We meet Joe (Evan Buliung) again at age 40, on a plane back to Beijing where his friend and host Zhang Lin (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) insinuates that the young man in Joe’s famous photo may still be alive. It sends Joe on a search in Manhattan to photograph the “Tank Man” again as a symbol of modern-day heroism, despite the reservations of his editor Frank (Ross McMillan) and colleague Mel (Doug McKeag).
Lin, an English teacher, struggles with reconciling his formerly revolutionary self with his current life of silence and passivity, while Joe’s investigations splinter the lives of recent Chinese immigrants, the 2012 U.S. election and a burgeoning romance with a British marketing guru named Tessa (Laura Condlln). In one of the play’s highlights, Tessa loses her cool and collected charm by warning a leading credit card company of the danger of oversimplifying over one billion people as a group of “savers,” which has defined the Chinese/American economic relationship that the term “Chimerica” refers to.
Kirkwood herself resists these oversimplifications. She took six years to write Chimerica. The result is an assault of intellectually stimulating ideas. It’s just a shame her dialogue is underwhelming.
The biggest offender here is Joe, who’s motivated by both white guilt and overinflated self-importance. His newspaper contemporaries are equally shallow, so he doesn’t have worthwhile antagonists either. His character is much easier to root against than for, so his journey becomes a trial of the audience’s patience, especially since it puts Chinese-American immigrants in often secondary roles, serving his purpose.
While Lin is also concerned with a past and, in his mind, more idealistic version of himself, his self-destruction is at least grounded in flashback scenes and contrasted with his brother Zhang Wei (a wonderful Richard Lee), who has seemingly “adjusted” much better to China’s rapid growth. Their evolution over the play feels more dramatic and more deserved.