Asian American kids yell at parents ‘like a white girl’
Comedy provides both filial catharsis and compassion toward elders
Imagine confronting your parents about everything they did to mess you up. Like a swamp geyser, you’d spew everything out, spasming with the adrenaline and catharsis of it all. Then your tag-team partner — your sibling — would take up the attack whenever you needed to catch your breath or leap atop a table to make your point.
That’s how Albert (Will Dao) and Jennifer (Jenny Nguyen Nelson) start out accosting their Chinese American parents in “Tiger Style!” The adult siblings might have all the outward markers of success — a slew of Harvard degrees, steady jobs, property ownership — but they still let failing-upward white people (all played by Jeremy Kahn) walk all over them in their professional and romantic lives. The fault surely lies with their parents (Emily Kuroda and Francis Jue), whose so-called tiger parenting deprived them of real childhoods, self-confidence and any emotional tools to deal with their unhappiness.
Mike Lew’s comedy, whose TheatreWorks Silicon Valley production opened Tuesday, April 9, is balm for any thwarted adult who has ever fantasized,
“I’m gonna yell at my mom like a white girl.” But the show is just as compassionate toward parents, inflating filial ingratitude into a bubble that Mom and Dad can pop with knightly righteousness. The physical transformation that Dao enacts in this moment — from raging whirlwind to shuffling, pouty puppy — is so complete you might think he’s sprouted a tail to trail between his legs.
As the siblings abandon their American lives for a fan
tastical “Asian freedom tour” to China, where they believe their dating profiles and career résumés will finally be appreciated, director Jeffrey Lo brings verve, tenderness and acuity to the script. In American locales, scenic designer Arnel Sancianco appends labels such as “recreation” and “work” above sets that slide on and off, as if different spheres of life were little department store displays one could purchase. The canny choice reflects how Jennifer and Albert compartmentalize their worlds into separate campaigns to be won — “I want to be the best at therapy! The absolute best!” Jennifer tells her new therapist (Kuroda) — while also amping up the cartoonish hyperreality of the writing.
Yet “Tiger Style!” at times overstays its welcome, with scenes that try to coast on fumes long after stakes have sputtered out. And for all Lew’s comic piquancy, some of his lines have the wheezy feel of a sitcom from the laugh track era: “No, I definitely don’t think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in
Turns out that decades of tiger parenting isn’t just good for one’s CV; it can lead to moments of stirring artistry entirely unrelated to getting ahead in life.
my life.”
Still, Lo’s doughty cast members can make gems of almost anything — the way Jue, as a busybody stranger, zeroes in on Dao’s Albert as if there’s a tractor beam in his nose; the way Kuroda, as a long-lost cousin, seems perpetually on the verge of smacking someone, hyperventilating or flitting away like a butterfly.
For all its jabs at both the siblings and the racist world around them, “Tiger Style!” also etches moments of transcendence. Turns out that decades of tiger parenting isn’t just good for one’s CV; it can lead to moments of stirring artistry entirely unrelated to getting ahead in life.
As the play proposes in its final moments, years of nose-to-the-grindstone labor isn’t necessarily opposed to taking a stand one day. In fact, maybe all that time spent in quiet toil makes a rebellion all the more principled and meaningful.