Ai Yah Goy Vey! – Adventures of a Dim Sun in Search of His Wanton Father

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Richard Chang’s Ai Yah Goy Vey!’s impish tag, “Adventures of a Dim Sun in Search of His Wanton Father,” signals, with vaudevillian flourish, the hybrid sensibility at play: a solo performance that rummages through the comic attics of Cantonese wordplay, Borscht-Belt cadences, and a strain of camp that delights in its own brazenness. The piece is structured as a theatrical tasting menu, a comic pu pu platter of identities and idioms. One samples it agreeably enough, though the portions, at 75 minutes, feel more like appetizers than a meal.

Chang makes his entrance as if pedaling in from another borough of the imagination: he rides a bicycle onto the stage, his smiling face neatly bracketed by thick glasses and swinging payos, and immediately begins calling out greetings in a voice that refuses to settle in one place. The accent glides mischievously between the bright, careful tones of a recent arrival and the nasal music of Brooklyn Jewish speech, as though both were sharing custody of the same vowels. The result is a kind of Brighton Beach-all-the-way-to-Avenue-U patois—part immigrant optimism, part Catskills echo—announcing, before a word of exposition is offered, that this evening will traffic in the comedy of cultural crosscurrents.

Chang’s protagonist, Jackie Sun, is a recent immigrant navigating New York with the wide-eyed tenacity of a pilgrim and the timing of a standup comic. By day, he delivers takeout for a Chinese restaurant whose name, “Fook Hing,” he hastens to clarify, promises fortune in Mandarin even if it startles Anglophone ears. By inheritance, he carries a more complicated cargo: the story of a mother who performed Chinese opera on an island archipelago nicknamed “Long Island,” and a father rumored to be a globe-trotting Jewish comedian who passed through her life with the casual intimacy of a one-night booking. Jackie recounts this lineage in a lovingly borrowed New York Jewish accent, turning the word “shlept” into both punch line and origin myth.

The clues to his paternity are as improbable as they are theatrical—cassette recordings that evoke a certain mid-century Jewish comic sensibility, and circular bits of cloth that reveal themselves, with a small epiphany, as yarmulkes. Armed with these talismans, Jackie sets out across the boroughs like a comic Odysseus, meeting the human choruses of the city along the way: Chinatown vendors hawking batteries in singsong patter, the polyglot bustle of Atlantic Avenue, the musical and spiritual textures of Harlem and Crown Heights. The journey proposes that Jackie, with his Chinese heritage and adopted Orthodox trappings, is not an oddity but an emblem of the city’s exuberant pluralism.

Chang is an agile performer, and his quick shifts among characters recall the early solo work of urban shapeshifters who built entire neighborhoods out of voice and posture. Yet here the gallery of types is unevenly realized. Too often, figures arrive as the sketch of a stereotype rather than the surprise of a person. When Chang draws on the stylization of Chinese opera—particularly in the rendering of Jackie’s diva-like mother—the show briefly discovers a richer theatrical language, one in which Eastern and Western performance traditions spar and flirt on equal terms. Such moments hint at a more adventurous piece than the one that predominates.

A firmer directorial hand might have served the evening well. One senses that Laura Josepher, with a nudge here and a sculpting there, could have coaxed greater precision from the comic timing and fuller life from the sketchily drawn personae, shaping the rhythms so that punch lines arrive with a satisfying click rather than a soft thud. Dialect work, always a high-wire act, brings its own hazards—most notably the blur of consonants and swallowed syllables that can turn wit into murmur, a recurring affliction here. Still, direction can refine but not wholly reinvent; when the underlying script offers only intermittent sparkle, even the most attentive guidance cannot transform modest humor into sustained comic momentum.

Josepher and Chang, to their credit, rally the design team with the efficiency of hosts determined that the party at least look festive. Sheryl Liu supplies a multicolored, skate-park-like set whose ramps and platforms give Chang a topography to traverse and, just as crucially, a variety of playing areas to suggest the many stops on his cultural itinerary. Samantha Weiser’s lighting works in tandem with the robust color palette in the set and costumes. The surrounding flat planes double as screens for Scott Leff’s video projections—slickly assembled yet conceptually thin, consisting largely of Chang in prerecorded dialogue with himself, a device that promises theatrical magic but delivers something closer to a well-edited mirror.

The production leans heavily, and not without charm, on visual wit. The parade of costumes, hats, and props supplies a steady stream of sight gags and transformations, and the design elements conjure a genial variety-show ambiance. Karen Boyer’s costumes lean into bright, broadly legible signifiers; their cheerful stereotypes often do the clarifying work that the script and performances only intermittently manage, telegraphing which immigrant milieu is being affectionately spoofed at any given moment.

Meanwhile, Chang reveals a nimble visual imagination in his prop work. A procession of whimsical hats and handheld items punctuates the action, most memorably an operatic crown ingeniously fashioned from bath brushes—a small burst of theatrical alchemy that transforms dollar-store materials into a wink at grandeur. Such touches suggest a scrappy inventiveness at the heart of the production, even when the surrounding theatrical frame feels less fully realized. Spectacle can only do so much narrative lifting. Without sharply etched characters to inhabit the finery, the pageantry risks becoming an end in itself—a dress-up box in search of drama.

Music threads through the evening as a unifying aspiration. Klezmer riffs brush up against rap rhythms and Broadway pastiche; Chang also turns lyricist as familiar tunes are retrofitted with new lyrics to accommodate Jackie’s genealogical anxiety. New words are grafted onto “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!,” refitting a Borscht Belt reliquary with a comic overlay of Chinese-inflected humor. The pastiche has an affectionate cleverness—one hears the performer’s delight in braiding disparate comic lineages—but it is delivered over prerecorded tracks whose tinny exuberance evokes the bygone majesty of the MIDI era. The effect is knowingly retro, though whether the joke is on nostalgia, technology, or the material itself is sometimes left teasingly, if not entirely satisfyingly, unresolved. Only sound designer Howard Ho can answer that question. In a parody of a well-known musical-theatre soliloquy, the character of Fagin’s “Reviewing the Situation” in Oliver!, he spins through hypothetical ancestries with comic panic, only to land on the conclusion that more pondering is required. The joke is serviceable, if not devastating.

What emerges, finally, is a show animated by generous intentions. It celebrates mixture, migration, and the comic possibilities of cultural overlap. One senses Chang’s affection for every tradition he samples, and his belief that humor can serve as a common language. Yet goodwill and clever premises do not always crystallize into theatrical cohesion. The mosaic remains a mosaic: colorful, earnest, intermittently delightful, but rarely fused into a singular, resonant picture. The audience leaves amused and lightly charmed—though, like diners after a round of dim sum, still a little hungry.

Ai Yah Goy Vey! (through March 1, 2026)

Pan Asian Repertory Theatre

Mezzanine Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres, 502 West 53rd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit www.panasianrep.org

Running time: 75 minutes without an intermission