The Wongs are not your stereotypical Chinese-American family from Palo Alto. Oh sure, dad likes to spout tin-eared platitudes, mom has squelched her dreams to raise a family, sis is a 4.42 GPA high-school student obsessed with getting into an Ivy League university, and Junior is a classic video-game nerd. But beneath this familiar veneer of comfortable clichés, something is not right in the house of Wong.
Aided by the deft direction of Jeffrey Bracco, playwright Lauren Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman, now through February 24, 2013, at City Lights Theater Company in San Jose, is packed with snappy, funny dialogue and quick scene changes, having more in common with an episode of The Big Bang Theory than a play by David Henry Hwang. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it was something of a relief to see and hear serious issues of cultural identity handled with such casual irreverence.
Like a good TV sitcom, Chinaman juggles multiple plots, each with its own looming deadline, a formulaic device to force resolution and keep things moving. Predictably, household patriarch Ed (Lawrence-Michael C. Arias) gets the dullest story: He must find a member of his family to participate in his company’s annual golf tournament. His wife, Grace (Chiho Saito), on the other hand, is fixated on having a baby, even though she and Ed have a 17-year-old daughter, Desdemona (Monica Ho), who’s about to head off to college, and a 15-year-old son, Upton (Anthony Chan), still living at home.
Desi, as her dad calls her, is a nervous wreck, waiting for that all-important letter from Princeton, where she has applied for early admission (Desi’s curt dismissal of Stanford as a palatable alternative is priceless). Meanwhile, Upton is trying to log enough hours on World of Warcraft to earn himself a trip to an international video-game competition in Seoul.