Preview Thoughts on The Chinese Lady

I am a huge fan of Lloyd Suh - his play Charles Francis Chan Jr's Exotic Murder Mystery was one of my favorites a few years ago (you can remind yourself of my thoughts HERE) and I recently saw a reading of a new play of his that I'm dying to see produced. So, he's one of my favorites and of course I had to buy a ticket to another new play, The Chinese Lady, produced in the Beckett Theater at Theatre Row.  So as not to bury the lede: GO! There are only six or seven more performances and you must see this play. Whew.  OK. Got that off my chest...

I'll go into a little more detail now, though not too much, since I did see the performance right before opening night.  The Chinese Lady is a tale about the first Chinese woman to arrive in America - the self-named Afong Moy.  She arrived in 1834 as a fourteen-year-old and she was essentially displayed, like a museum exhibit, for Americans to pay to gawk at.  This part is true.  She was considered exotic and unusual, so her father sold her to two American businessmen and they brought her to America to be exhibited.  The play takes the basic bones of the true story and builds on it a tale of beauty, agony, cultural appropriation, exploitation, and Western imperialism.  All in a fast and often-funny-yet-still-moving 90 minutes.  

photo credit: Carol Rosegg

When you enter the theater, you see an enormous shipping crate onstage.  The play begins with a Chinese man opening the crate and setting up the exhibition room inside with a bunch of objects that are used to evoke China.  A character even says "I'm sitting in a Chinese room that looks nothing like China."  The lights go down and come back up on an attractive young Chinese girl who addresses the audience directly. She is Afong Moy and she is there for our entertainment.  Her sweet affect and excitement about being in America (she is fourteen at the top of the play) is very infectious.  She is joined by her translator, Atung, who explains the artifice to us: Afong Moy cannot speak English when she arrives in America, so what she is telling us is from her mind.  Atung reminds us that translation isn't all that it appears to be and sometimes the words will not match the intent.  It is a fascinating premise and one that is explored again and again.

Each time we see Afong Moy, she recreates her 'show' for us, with the demonstration of eating with chopsticks, or the tea ritual, or walking on her bound feet, but each time it's a little different, showing us that history often repeats itself and some things never change, but yet as our perceptions change, so do our expectations.  Over the years (and we see Afong Moy over a sixty-plus-year span), we see how disillusioned Afong Moy has become and through her disillusionment, we also see the evolution of the Chinese experience in America; we learn about the horrible ways America has treated the Chinese; and we see a chilling parallel to the crisis of immigrants living in America today. The play is truly brilliant in how it tells one story, which is telling another story, and how what we are looking at is not what we're actually seeing.

photo credit: Carol Rosegg

I don't want to say too much, because watching this beautiful piece unfold was a pleasure that I don't want to take from you.  The show is brilliantly acted by Shannon Tyo as Afong Moy and Daniel K. Isaac as Atung (he has a monologue about all of his thwarted desires that is simply breathtaking) and they have a wonderful rapport and chemistry throughout. They both change and grow and harden over the years depicted, and they deliver the funny dialogue with a light touch and the more serious stuff even more delicately.  They are truly wonderful.  The show is also beautifully directed and designed - this theater is tiny and they truly make it expand and find so many dimensions, it's really amazing.

I highly recommend your going to see The Chinese Lady - you'll see/hear a story you haven't heard before; you'll experience fabulous performances; and you'll think, hard, about what it means to be an American.  This is a very special play and it (and its author, Lloyd Suh) deserves your attention.  But please don't wait because the run won't last much longer...