Review: Moving TimeLine play ‘The Chinese Lady’ is really about the audience’s act of watching
Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady,” now in its Chicago premiere from the TimeLine Theatre, is, in essence, a fervent and self-assured deconstruction of the long, Western objectification and fetishization of China and, especially, its women. It is a plea for Americans to look honestly at a Chinese face and truly see all its myriad contours and complexities, as buffeted by history.
It is as simple, and as complicated, as that.
As you enter Theater Wit, where TimeLine presently resides as the construction of its new theater progresses, you see the actress Mi Kang, playing a woman named Afong Moy, but also to some degree herself. She wears jeans and smiles as you enter. And then she disappears behind a curtain and back in time.
Kang, the modern-day actress, becomes Moy, a real-life historical figure who is often described as the first Chinese woman to set foot in the United States. Certainly, she was the first Chinese woman to achieve Stateside fame.
Moy arrived in 1834, a human promotional mechanism for merchants, soon morphing into a spectacle in and of herself, her bound feet, facility with chopsticks and traditional clothing all used to titillate American audiences with such touring success that P.T. Barnum eventually became her manager. In the play, the curtain opens and closes on the tableau (designed by Arnel Sancianco) that was Moy throughout different eras of the 19th century, riding the waves of American perception and fascination but never being truly seen as her authentic self. After Moy’s tours, America brought into place the Chinese Exclusion Act, its fascination with the other eventually morphing into primal fear.
Pulling the curtain through the years is Atung (Glenn Obrero), a figure who exists somewhere between spectacle and narrator, authorial representative and stagehand, factotum and moral conscience.
But most of this 90 minute play (produced in 2018 in New York by the Ma-Yi Theater Company) is made up of Moy sitting in her room, talking and explaining herself as simply as she can, perhaps as she would have done in reality. Suh clearly intends her as a one-woman metaphor for the dominant American perception of an entire nation across decades of formation of identity.
TimeLine’s production, directed by Helen Young, features a spectacular central performance from Kang, still in graduate school at Northwestern University.
I was struck by how well Kang navigated the play’s occupation of the space between determination and tacit sublimation, her attention to the courage and vibrancy of her character as well as the indignity of her situation.
This is, for sure, a moralistic play that wants to indict the audience in this particular history, which it does not see as having been subject to much improvement, and it makes a powerful case for that point of view.
The key to Kang’s excellence here, I think, is the specific detail of her work and her leaving space for the audience to comprehend (or not) what the writer is really trying to say about the watching of a Chinese, or Chinese American, woman. On stage and in life.
It’s an exceptionally sophisticated performance at the heart of a small, assertive, resonant and moving play.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “The Chinese Lady”
When: Through June 18
Where: Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $42-$57 at 773-281-8463 or timelinetheatre.com
