The Great Leap
Lauren Yee
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| BD Wong, TIm Liu, Arye Gross & Ruibo Qian |
“I am quick, I am relentless. I am the most relentless person you have ever met and if you have met someone more relentless than me, tell me, tell me and I will meet them and I will find a way to become even more relentless than them!”
He may be still a senior in high school; he may be a couple inches short of six feet; and he may be only famous as a point guard on the streets of Chinatown; but the forever feisty, always bouncing Manford Lum knows he needs to be a member of the University of San Francisco basketball team that is heading in a couple of months to play a “friendship game” in Beijing, China. Now all he has to do is convince the sour-faced, crusty, disbelieving Coach Saul Slezak that it is true that “I will win you games … I will score you points.”
Lauren Yee’s play, The Great Leap, is in many ways a tribute to another bold, scrappy player still a legend in today’s Chinatown – her father, Larry Yee (also the subject of the recent San Francisco Playhouse’s King of Yees). With much the physicality, tension, and excitement of a up-and-down-the-court game of hoops, American Conservatory Theater brings Lauren Yee’s fast-moving, furiously funny, and heart-grabbing showdown between two world-power giants and foes that have graduated in 1989 from ping pong to basketball to prove which system is the better. And in the midst of this hoop-filled showdown on June 4, 1989, the world watches in horror as tanks roll across Tiananmen Square.
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| BD Wong & Arye Gross |
The game on that fateful day is slated as a “rematch” between two coaches whose newspaper-printed picture in the midst of a game eighteen years prior in Beijing carries a lot of meaning for the Party faithful in China. While no American team played that day, Saul Slezak – who was ending an extended stay to teach a young Wen Chang how to build and coach a basketball team – made a published boast that the Chinese had not forgotten: “No Chinese team will ever beat an American team, I promise you.”
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| Arye Gross |
Arye Gross plays the foul-mouthed, crass Coach Saul who manages to forge a mentoring and even friendly relationship with the reserved, cautious Wen Chang (the venerable A.C.T. favorite, BD Wong) – a relationship we watch develop in a flashback to 1971. Saul figures out every way in the world to use blue-language to describe to Wen how to motivate and instruct his players, with Wen furiously digging through his dictionary to translate all the four-letter, obscenely ribald words into some convoluted, nonsensical translated phrase that he can add to the notebook where he is furiously taking notes. Saul also employs crude, schoolboy humping gestures and descriptions of sex to encourage Wen Chang to make advances of a 6’2” Chinese woman who keeps coming to his team practices and only seems to be watching Wen’s every move.
Saul keeps on telling Wen that the teachings he is giving him (basketball and dating-wise) will help him be someone, that this is “his moment.” But given Saul’s initial visit to China is still during the Mao Cultural Revolution, Wen Chang informs him, “Growing up, you did not want to be someone; you wanted to be the person three people behind someone because being someone could get you killed.”
But someone Wen Chang does become during the eighteen interim years, with basketball – which actually has a history in China almost as long as in the U.S. – being his ticket to a plush office overlooking Tiananmen Square and a chance to revenge that long-ago comment that this American coach – his friend and now rival, the yin to his yang – so callously made. Saul, on the other hand, has long left behind the glory days of his USF career when victories and championships were common and now faces a possible firing after yet another losing season. For him, an invitation by his ol’ friend to return to China may be his last, possible ticket to another year as coach in San Francisco.
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| Tim Liu |
Which brings us back to the one who might be his secret weapon – this kid that is the bold-speaking, cocky, but contagiously likeable Manford Lum. Manford is a living example of Sam’s favorite philosophy about basketball and about life, one he likes to share by shouting in a lion-like voice: “It is always your turn, every time you are on court!” Manford is close to manic to go to China and to be on this team; and he sees every minute of his day as a possible next step in that direction. He wants to prove he can be a star outside of Chinatown; he wants to see his native country first-hand; and he has a personal mission no one but he knows — the answer to a question that only he dares ask himself.
Tim Liu is nothing short than fabulous in the role of Manford Lum. The energy he exudes every time he walks on stage electrifies the entire arena. His moves are those of both a boy playing a spontaneous game of hoops on the back alleys and those of a kid who has spent disciplined hours practicing his in-and-out approaches to the hoop and perfecting his lay-ups. But more than that, his Lum is burning with a passion, a drive, and a determination that is the American spirit in action. He brings a crafty sense of how to eek a victory against all odds. Lum is a young man very much still a boy who gets his ticket to China only to find himself in the middle of a controversy his insatiable curiosity leads him into the middle. Tim Liu gives us no option but for our to be an audience of avid cheerleaders for Manford and to care deeply about the journey of self-discovery this trip of a lifetime affords him.
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| Ruibo Qian & Tim Liu |
While her play is mostly about this triangle of sports-centered males, Lauren Yee adds a welcome twist by including Manford’s cousin-of sorts, Connie, played with her own burst-down-the-door-as-needed spunk and spirit by Ruibo Qian. Connie is a stand-in guardian for the seventeen-year-old Manford, whose mother has recently died. While she is only the daughter of the building superintendent where his mom worked as a guard, she is now family and her apartment is where he sleeps on her couch. “Chinese people are weird like that,” she shrugs to Coach Saul as she arrives unexpected, fully intending that Manford will not go to China, from where she daily receives faxes of friends protesting in an ever-increasing tense Tiananmen.
The build-up to both the showdown game and to the June 4 arrival of tanks is directed with incredible mastery of movement and sequence of time-skipping scenes by Lisa Peterson. The actual game is a sweat-producing, heart-pounding verbal yet entirely physical description the director orchestrates between opposing coaches Wen Chang and Saul. To accompany the dance of words and moves of the coaches, Movement Coach Danyon Davis choreographs lightning-fast twists, turns, and leaps of Tim Liu to produce a Manford show that is exhausting but exhilarating to watch. The drama is fantastically highlighted and pinpointed by the lighting design of Yi Zhao while the sounds of athletic shoes on wooden floor and dribbled balls are just one more part of the overall excellence of Jake Rodriguez’s sound design. With the Party-correct Wen Chang, the American typical Saul, and the Nike-covered Manford, Meg Neville capstones an entire evening of costumes that tell us much about the two time periods, the two cultures, and the four people that captivate our attention.
Throughout the two-hour evening, the full-stage-length projections of Hana S. Kim combine with the overall scenic design of Robert Brill to capture the essence of locations, the fury of games in action, and the grainy but graphic details of photos and videos that headline contemporaneous events, both small and monumental.
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| BD Wong |
One of those videos – one that is still firmly planted in a world’s memory almost thirty years later – becomes part of a final scene where fiction and reality meld into an ending of Lauren Yee’s play that also will be long-remembered by audiences. BD Wong’s Wen Chang takes center stage as he writes a post-game fax before taking a stroll into history. Both his revelations in the fax and the familiar, searing moment he provides us are delivered by a seasoned actor who proves once again why he is so well-loved and respected, not only by his hometown, San Francisco audiences, but by an appreciative world-at-large.
Also a beloved, local treasure, Lauren Yee once again provides San Francisco audiences with a script that allows this stellar cast, astute director, and beyond-words-talented creative team to produce for American Conservatory Theater an evening of slam-dunk, exciting live-theatre that is nothing short of a “must-see.”
Rating: 5 E, “MUST-SEE”
The Great Leap continues through March 31, 2019 at at American Conservatory Theater, 405 Geary Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online at http://www.act-sf.org/ or by calling the box office 415-749-2228.
Photos by Kevin Berne
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