Theater review by Alex Huntsberger
On the heels of Victory Gardens’s stellar production of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, it’s hard to resist drawing parallels between that work and her play The Great Leap, now playing at Steppenwolf. Both shows follow a similar recipe: one part historical atrocity (the Khmer Rouge, the Cultural Revolution), one part immigrant family drama and one part pop-cultural touchstone. In Cambodian Rock Band the latter element was rock music; in The Great Leap, it’s basketball. Like former Oklahoma City Thunder teammates Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, the two plays form a dynamic but ultimately mismatched duo. Cambodian Rock Band is Durant: elegant, powerful, silky smooth and unblockable. The Great Leap is Westbrook: relentless, kinetic and a little too reckless for its own good.
The Great Leap bounces between Beijing in 1971 and the Bay Area in 1989, following the path of Saul (Keith Kupferer), the down-on-his-luck basketball coach of San Francisco State University. After accepting an invitation in 1971 to coach the Beijing University men’s team, Saul befriends his translator, the shy, revolution-scarred Wen Chang (James Seol). When Saul departs, he leaves Wen Chang in charge, and 18 years later, Wen Chang invites Saul’s team back for a “friendship game” rematch. With the Tienneman Square protests growing larger by the day, and Saul’s promise that no Chinese team would ever beat an American one still ringing in his ears, Wen Chang is a man on a mission—as is Manford Lum (Glenn Obrero), the fire-spitting Chinese-American streetballer who approaches Saul in the play’s opening scene. Sweet and slightly troubled, Manford bullies the coach into putting him on the team for Beijing, to the chagrin of Manford’s worried cousin, Connie (Deanna Myers). But what can Saul do? The kid can really ball.
The pick and roll—a basketball building block where one player stands still while the other zooms around her—serves as the play’s animating metaphor: Saul and Manford are hard-charging Americans, while Wen Chang is a cautious Communist bureaucrat. Director Jesca Prudencio’s athletic production builds nicely on this idea; Obrero zooms up and down Justin Humphres’s basketball-court set as Seol’s Wen Chang remains a static, isolated figure. Prudencio does a fine job of dramatizing the game of basketball itself, especially considering she doesn’t even have enough cast members to fill out a starting five. Intricate on-court projections by Rasean Davonte Johnson (with an assist from Nok Kanchanabanca’s bopping ’80s-style tunes) add both pop and clarity to the story’s ever-quicking character beats.
As the story elements pile up, however, The Great Leap falls back down to earth, and not even Kupferer and Seol’s outstanding performances or Yee’s knack for gleefully foul-mouthed dialogue can keep it aloft. The Great Leap is wildly entertaining, but it tries to do too much. It racks up a theatrical triple-double, but fails to pull out the win.
Steppenwolf Theatre Company. By Lauren Yee. Directed by Jesca Prudencio. With Keith Kupferer, Deanna Myers, Glenn Obrero, James Seol. Running time: 2hrs. One intermission.