Tiger Style!
Mike Lew
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley
The thirty-something Chen siblings’ lives are a mess, and they are looking for someone to blame. Sure, MD/PhD Jennifer is a successful oncologist and also a classical pianist who has played Carnegie Hall; but her do-nothing boyfriend of three years is walking out on her because she is too dominant and no fun. Cello-playing Albert, also Ivy School educated, is a hard-working, software engineer who is a total team player but who has been passed over for a promotion by his Asian boss for the team’s biggest slack-off – a white whacko who has fun making jokes guessing Albert’s exact Asian heritage. Both siblings are furiously frustrated and are ready to point full blame for lack of life skills on their tiger parenting parents. In fact, Albert promises to Jennifer, “I’m going to yell at mom like a white girl.”
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley opens Mike Lew’s Tiger Style! — a crackling, laugh-out-loud satire bordering on total farce where the stereotypes that are faced by two, third-generation Chinese American siblings are given a fast-paced and irreverent lashing and thrashing exposure. With performances by a cast of five who at times seem to be in a reality TV show’s competition as to who can be more outrageously funny than the others, Tiger Style! as directed by TheatreWorks’ own Jeffrey Lo is on the surface an outlandishly hilarious romp. Underneath, Tiger Style! is also a serious statement about the both self-and-society-induced pressures and pre-conceived notions that high-achieving, successful Asian American, young adults face.
Please continue to Talkin’Broadway for the rest of my review.
Rating: 4.5 E
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Tiger Style! continues through April 28, 20244 in a two-hour-plus (one intermission) production by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA. Tickets are available online at www.theatreworks.org or by phone at 877-662-8978 or by email at boxoffice@theatreworks.org
Photo Credit: Kevin Berne
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