“Hoops Diplomacy”
Last night, as LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers were
being whomped by San Francisco’s Golden State Warriors, I was watching an
equally intense basketball involving a San Francisco team. The latter
game, though, was fictional, and seen in my imagination, not in the flesh.  |
| BD Wong, Ned Eisenberg. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
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| BD Wong. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
The play, very loosely inspired by the experiences of Yee’s
father, a phenom of San Francisco’s Chinatown sidewalk courts who actually did
get to play in China, follows two arcs that come together at the end in a dramatic
conclusion.
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| Ned Eisenberg, BD Wong. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
One concerns the relationship between Saul (Ned Eisenberg), a
Jewish, Bronx-born and raised, foulmouthed, washed-up former player and USF
coach, and his complete opposite, Wen Chang (BD Wong), the dignified, robotically
well-mannered, Mao jacket-wearing, English-speaking, Chinese coach.
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| Tony Aidan Vo, Ali Ahn. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
The men first meet in 1971, when Saul is in Beijing to provide
coaching advice to Wen, who discovers how different the aggressive American
playing and coaching style is from the polite Chinese approach, which avoids
physical contact. The cultural contrast between the men, while exaggerated on
both sides, is nevertheless amusingly instructive. Saul, by the way, brags that
he brought basketball to China but Wen corrects him, noting the game’s long
history there and even that Mao Zedong loved it. Saul also makes no bones about
his belief that no Chinese team will ever beat an American one, a remark that
will come back to haunt him.
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| Ali Ahn, Ned Eisenberg. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
The other arc begins 18 years later in 1989 and deals with
the ambitions of a cocky, wiry, height-challenged, 17-year-old, non-Chinese
speaking kid, Manford Lum (Tony Aidan Vo), whose hoops-loving mom has just
died. A feral point guard with solid street creds, Manford—the theatrical
avatar of Yee’s dad—boasts he can sink 100 free throws in a row. Manford, a
high school senior, wants more than anything to join the USF team Saul is about
to take to Beijing for what, oddly, he calls a “rematch,” which it certainly is
not, with a team coached by Wen. Saul resists, not least because of Manford’s
size (unlike Yee’s 6’1” father). Anyway, the presence of a high school kid,
even such a short one, joining a college team for an international match against
players described as seven feet tall, is one of several questionable things you
have to buy to enjoy Yee’s play.
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| Tony Aidan Vo. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
Looking after Manford’s interests is a vibrant young woman,
Connie (Ali Ahn), who considers herself his “cousin” in the way of close but non-familial
relationships within San Francisco’s Chinese-American community.
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| Ali Ahn, Ned Eisenberg, Tony Aidan Vo, BD Wong. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
The game not only brings Saul and
Wen together again, it also introduces several melodramatic plot devices
concerning Wen and Manford. Even more contrived—but undeniably absorbing—is its
nexus between sports
and politics, since the game coincides with what was happening politically
in China in June 1989. That, of course, is when thousands of young people were marching
in protest through the streets of Beijing, shouting “U.S.A.,” encouraging one
of them, wearing a white shirt and holding a parcel in either hand, to stand in
front of a huge tank in Tiananmen
Square as if daring it to flatten him in its treads.
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| Tony Aidan Vo, BD Wong. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
Regardless of its several implausibilities, not all of which
are noted here, and its need to depend on soliloquies for important exposition,
The Great Leap (a title that connects
the Great Leap
Forward political movement of 1958-1962 to a script photo of Yee’s father
leaping to block a shot) holds you as tightly as a ball in Bill Russell’s palm.
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| Tony Aidan Vo. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
Director Taibi Magar (The
Underground Railroad Game), making extensive use of excellent video
projections by David Bengali, keeps the dialogue pounding, and the actors in nearly
constant motion. The play’s technical expertise is further heightened by the thumping
inter-scene music of Broken Chord and the period-perfect costumes of Tilly
Grimes.
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| BD Wong. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
The acting is uniformly exciting. Ahn makes the basketball
savvy Connie delightfully spirited and outspoken, while Vo is magnetic as the
demanding, eternally angry (a bit too much, I’d suggest), fire-in-the belly
Manford. Eisenberg brings out not only Saul’s brashness and ruthless ambition
but the anguish of a man separated by a continent from his young daughter,
while the lustrous Wong, using a light Chinese accent, is perfection as the eternally
restrained comrade forced to suppress his secrets and longings until circumstances
overwhelm him.
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| Ali Ahn, Ned Eisenberg, Tony Aidan Vo, BD Wong. Photo: Ahron R. Foster. |
The Great Leap has
leapt to New York from workshops and productions earlier in the year, including
those at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and the Seattle Repertory
Theatre. It makes up for its various fouls with enough two and three pointers
to make the game worthwhile.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
Atlantic Stage 2
330 W. 16th St., NYC
Through June 24