EXPECTATIONS AND REALITY DUKE IT OUT IN THOUGHT-PROVOKING, WITTY ‘TIGER STYLE!’
At several points in “Tiger Style!,” playwright Mike Lew’s satirical portrait of a pair of frustrated, 30-something Chinese American siblings, we hear a particularly galling taunt: “Go back where you came from!”
For Albert Chen (Christopher Thomas Pow) and his older sister Jenny (Aurora Adachi-Winter), it’s a pretty nonsensical suggestion. They were born in Southern California, where Lew’s play is set and where Albert and Jenny’s parents also grew up after they emigrated from China as children. They already are where they came from.
Demographically speaking, the audience at a final preview performance of Lew’s play at Glencoe’s Writers Theatre didn’t include many who might have faced that particular provocation. But the crowd seemed to register the phrase when spoken by white characters, much as Albert does: as a perturbing microaggression that he sloughs off rather than make a scene.
The jarring exception comes when it’s invoked by Albert’s work supervisor Melvin (Rammel Chan), who is also Asian American. This instance sent a ripple of gasps through the audience, which was repeated when a panicked Melvin explains that Albert was making him look bad in front of their clueless white co-worker.
Lew’s somewhat shaggy script is inspired by these kinds of modelminority inconsistencies. As the play’s title suggests, “Tiger Style!” owes some credit to Amy Chua, the legal scholar and author who popularized the concept of the “tiger mom” a little over a decade ago.
As we meet Albert and Jenny, each is going through a minor identity crisis. Albert, a software developer who’s mostly content to coast through a mid-level career, finds a breaking point when Melvin gives a promotion to the devastatingly mediocre white guy (Garrett Lutz) whom Albert’s constantly covering for.
Jenny has gone the extreme overachiever route — she’s an accomplished doctor “on a highly detailed timetable of how I want to live my life” who nevertheless finds herself being dumped by a dud of a longterm boyfriend (Lutz again) who says she’s too intense and no fun.
Commiserating, Jenny and Albert recall their hyperscheduled childhoods, packed with academic drills and music lessons but low on socializing. Searching for an external force to blame for their current woes — and with systemic racism feeling too big to tackle on an individual level — Albert hits on the idea that their parents should take some flack for their kids’ inability to navigate the adult world.
When the siblings try to confront their parents, though, they find their mom (Deanna Myers) and dad (Chan) pretty unmoved. Did the parents push their kids to achieve tall heights in their youth? Sure, they admit. But that pressure applies only until they’re out of school — whether that’s undergrad or med school — and now, the parents genially insist, their kids’ lives are their own.
Director Brian Balcom is wellattuned to Lew’s heightened comic vibes; Balcom helmed a clever production of Lew’s “Teenage Dick,” a high-school resetting of Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” that was set to open at Theater Wit in March 2020 and wound up becoming an early streaming-theater success as the pandemic hit.
Balcom’s cast is admirably in tune for the most part. Pow is an able protagonist, and Chan and Myers do more than their duty in multiple roles. (Myers’ Upper Midwest accent in one scene as a therapist working with a resistant Adachi-Winter is priceless.)
Lew’s script falters a bit in its second act, which has Jenny and Albert attempting to de-immigrate (re-immigrate?) back to China. The playwright’s parallel critiques of his Chinese American characters and China’s wildly repressive government don’t quite add up to a whole argument.
But that’s the paradox of “go back to where you came from” — almost no one who would invoke such an insult actually has the standing to make it.