By Dominic P. Papatola
From the the Pioneer Press CLICK HERE to go to the Pioneer Press web site.
It's not every day you see a play that addresses issues of cultural identity, maternal yearnings, the world of online gaming, indentured servitude and infidelity and also includes a good old-fashioned tap-dance number.
And that's not even the entire bill of fare in "Ching Chong Chinaman," Lauren Yee's charming, amusing and entirely overcrammed play now being staged by Theater Mu at Mixed Blood Theater.
Set in the Palo Alto of today, the play presents us with the upper-middle-class Wongs, a fourth-generation Chinese-American family. Father Ed is an amiable xenophobe, so divorced from his own cultural past that he can barely operate a pair of chopsticks. Mother Grace is perched on the edge of obsolescence since her teenage kids don't need her anymore, and would like a new addition to the nest. Dying to get into Princeton, eldest daughter Desdemona kipes scenes from "The Joy Luck Club" to make herself interesting enough for her college essays.
And then there's the youngest ... Upton Sinclair Lewis Wong who, despite his literary-sounding name, has only one abiding passion: "World of Warcraft." In order to qualify for an international gamer's competition, Upton figures he'll need to spend every waking hour behind his laptop. To that end, he lures a homework machine named Jin Qiang with a one-way ticket from China; unaware that "J" has terpsichorean dreams of his own.
Her dramaturgical embroidery could hardly be called tight and tidy, but Yee more or less ties all these threads together over the course of two hours. All the while she gives broad, wise-cracking treatment to a host of issues of ethnic identity, assimilation and latent racism.
In one comic but telling scene, Desdemona attempts to pull ancestry information from her father, who is unwilling or unable to discuss the family's roots much past his own birth in California. "Where are you really from?" she finally demands, a question that — one way or another — permeates the entire play.
Director Jennifer Weir trusts in her playwright, realizing that the script's off-kilter wackiness doesn't require large-bore acting. As the father, Kurt Kwan's facial expression hardly ever changes from a pained quarter-smile as he laconically endures his family's mania. Eric Sharp's deadpan is so delightfully dry that you could blow dust off it.
Sherwin Resurreccion's "J" doesn't say a whole lot, but still manages to anchor things as the voice of reason in this unmoored family. Maria Kelly is right on pitch as the giggly, needy, hapless mother. The most demonstrative member of the family, Katie Bradley's Desdemona gives fine voice to college-application mania as a metaphor for the search for self. And Erika Danielle Crane completes the cast with a suite of nifty, odd little character turns, from the voice of a Chinese language tape to a newly conceived baby.
"Ching Chong Chinaman" could lose a subplot or two without suffering in the slightest. But the playwright Yee nevertheless pulls off the tidy trick of creating an ensemble of not-very-likable characters with whom we still want to spend some time.
Theater critic Dominic P. Papatola can be reached at 651-228-2165.
What: "Ching Chong Chinaman ," staged by Theater Mu
When: Through March 1
Where: Mixed Blood Theatre, 1501 S. Fourth St., Mpls.
Tickets: $18-$9
Call: 612-338-6131
Capsule: A comic search for cultural identity and other unattainable goals.