Lauren Yee’s ‘The Great Leap’ stumbles at ACT in SF
“The Great Leap” scores big points for its athleticism with language.
Lauren Yee’s basketball drama displays the most speed and agility in its repartee. In the macho banter between swaggering coaches, in the trash talk flying on and off the court and in the fast-and hard schmoozing of a player desperate to make the team, “The Great Leap” has got real game.
Sadly, for the most part, the play stumbles under the weight of its heavy political and cultural ambitions. The promising local playwright (“The King of the Yees”) zigzags between the terror of the Chinese cultural revolution, the tragedies of Tiananmen Square and American teenage angst. But she never arrives at a way to palpably connect the characters with the brutal legacy of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, from which the play takes it title.
In its regional premiere at ACT, it’s hard to tell whose story this is. At first it seems like the coming-of-age tale of Manford, (Tim Liu) a small but scrappy basketball player hailed as the best in Chinatown in late ’80s San Francisco.
Bursting with verve and bravado, he’s chomping at the bit to prove to a skeptical USF coach he is the best point guard no one has heard of, despite his diminutive height and weight. He has waited a lifetime to prove he can play with the big boys. Liu beautifully evokes the visceral power of youth as Manford plunges into danger abroad without a thought for the consequences.
Liu also never been to China, his ancestral homeland, but he will risk everything to go there. Yee never quite locates the source of his pain so the text ends up dancing around the subject more than exploring it.
Once you meet Wen Chang (the masterful BD Wong), you can instantly guess how he might be connected to Manford. Yee painstakingly reiterates how the character has been stymied and stunted by the culture of fear created by the cultural revolution. Yee bops back and forth in time from ’80s San Francisco to 1971 Beijing but many of the transitions don’t flow.
From there, it’s hard not to feel like the play takes a long time to travel a short distance, filling in blanks we don’t need filled, while never connecting the dots that matter.
The historic student rebellions of Tiananmen Square seem awkwardly jammed into the narrative, many plot points feel forced and Yee hasn’t quite figured out how to handle Manford’s relationship with his mother. As a result the characters seem to float out of place and time, belonging neither to the past or the present.
Still there’s no denying the muscularity of the dialogue and the nimbleness of Manford’s limbs (movement by Danyon Davis). A sense of the thrill of the sport suffuses this piece from start to finish.
Even if you don’t know basketball from bocce ball, you can appreciate how intimately Yee knows her hoops.
Director Lisa Peterson also has a light touch with the comedy of cultural collisions. The priceless exchanges between Chang and a brash American coach Saul (an agile turn by Arye Gross) give this play more than one slamdunk of a punchline. In one hilarious interlude, Chang translates one of Saul’s foul-mouthed boasts as “you copulate on their feces.”
Certainly just watching Wong in the play’s final moments, when a graceful sacrifice is made, is worth the price of admission. The Tony-winning actor packs a lifetime of repression and regret into walking a few steps forward, straight into the maw of history.
‘THE GREAT LEAP’
By Lauren Yee, presented by American Conservatory Theater
Through: March 31
Where: ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco
Running time: two hours, one intermission
Tickets: $15-$110; 415-749-2228, www.act-sf.org