Review: ‘The Chinese Lady’ a layered intimate psychological drama at the Long Wharf

“The Chinese Lady,” which opens Long Wharf’s 2021-22 season with a run through Oct. 31, is about a genuine historical figure who came to America in the 19th century and showed us how we tend to gawk at other cultures.

The show, by Lloyd Suh, had been set up and ready to premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre when COVID shot down theaters. The set was kept in storage — as luck would have it, Junghyun Georgia Lee’s ingenious scenic design literally emerges from a large metal shipping crate and folds out into a small stage, complete with curtains.

Afong Moy was a real person, the first acknowledged woman to have come to the United States from China. She was also the first female Chinese celebrity in the U.S., exhibited in New York and on tour (including a stop in New Haven) in the 1830s and ‘40s. There are some major gaps in her biography, which give Suh license to make her ageless and timeless, a symbol of ongoing, unresolved and all too familiar issues with immigration and international relations.

“The Chinese Lady” is an interior monologue within a play within a play. Afong Moy, 14 when she comes to the U.S., is on show, performing for an audience, but it’s a calm, composed, almost meditative process. She does a special walk and explains that her feet are bound. She wears fancy clothes and explains Chinese customs and ceremonies. She wonders why Americans wear shoes indoors or prefer forks to chopsticks. She also confesses her fears, and tires of being a curiosity.

Afong Moy is abetted by the show’s only other cast member, Atung, her translator. He simultaneously offers comic relief and a sense of lurking menace. He is less reserved, more mischievous, than the woman he serves. They are not close and don’t speak well of each other. It’s a fun dynamic for a play when the only two people in it barely connect.

“I’m not talking to you,” Afong Moy says at one point. “I’m talking to them,” meaning her 19th century audience. Sometimes she’s talking, guardedly, to Atung. Often she’s talking to herself. She is constantly reintroducing herself to us.

Shannon Tyo as Afong Moy and Jon Norman Schneider as Atung play it just right, addressing the audience and rarely each other. They have their own sections of the stage, their own attitudes, their own needs and desires. Afong Moy refers to Atung as “irrelevant,” and we see that remark simmer for the rest of the play, until the Chinese Lady’s own status changes.

If this play had premiered in the spring of 2020 as planned, we would have seen it as a show about immigration, oppressions, misunderstanding of other cultures and exploitation, with a touch of female empowerment as its star keeps her dignity and tries to control her situation.

A year and a half later, “The Chinese Lady” is also about isolation, resignation, adaptability, disease, endurance. It may well be a better show for us having had to wait so long to see it.

“The Chinese Lady” is also active and immediate. It could be slow and pensive and removed if it wanted to be, but this production chooses to move around a bit, keep the patter peppy and the audience on its toes.

This is a show that sets its own pace, explains its own values, takes the time it needs to make its points, and expects you to keep up. It quietly, conversationally challenges you right up until its big unexpected ending.

Before the Long Wharf announced it, there had already been several successful productions of “The Chinese Lady” around the country. This one has the same director, Ralph B. Peña, and star, Shannon Tyo, as the show’s world premiere at the Barrington Stage Company in Mass., a co-production with the company that commissioned the play, the Ma-Yi Theater Company in New York, which will co-producing it again with New York’s Public Theater next year.

“The Chinese Lady” deserves to endure — not in the tragic, static, unsatisfied way she does in the play, but as an example of how some 19th century U.S. immigration policies eerily mirror some 20th and 21st century ones, how xenophobia is persistent, and so is loneliness.

Tickets and information at longwharf.org.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.