King of the Yees
Brody, the director, has the unenviable task of making Yee’s deliberately unstable theatrical architecture feel like a coherent evening rather than an assortment of comic sketches held together by a family name. His production, which gradually expands from a relatively contained rehearsal-room comedy into an extravagant excursion through Chinatown’s folklore and popular mythology, finds its footing in the contrast between the two acts. The opening establishes the play’s self-conscious machinery: Larry interrupts his daughter’s rehearsal, takes an interest in the audience, and begins to commandeer a production that was supposed to be about him only on Lauren’s terms. He is particularly interested in whether any Yees have come to watch. Lauren looks out at the predominantly white audience and wonders how that could possibly be the case. Brody allows the joke to land as both a comic provocation and an acknowledgment of the distance between a community’s self-image and the audience to whom its stories are being told. Once Larry disappears, the staging acquires a new freedom, plunging Lauren into a fantastical quest involving gangsters, elders, mythical ancestors and a Sichuan Chinese opera-inspired face changer. The occasional physical-comedy sequence feels more laborious than the production’s nimble dialogue, but Brody’s overall command of the tonal shifts is impressive. He understands that the evening’s wildness must ultimately serve the relationship at its center, and that the most spectacular transformation is not the one performed onstage but the one taking place in Lauren’s understanding of her father. [more]
