On a Beijing basketball court in 1971, a young Chinese translator stands bemused while a white American coach explains the game’s finer points: How to be the bigger man, regardless of your size. How to trash-talk your opponent. How to grab your turn, not wait for it.
It all seems so American. “I was very, very interested,” recalls the translator, Wen Chang, at the time newly returned to Beijing after five years of “rehabilitation” during the Cultural Revolution.
Eighteen years later, Wen Chang and Coach Saul are reunited in Beijing, with Wen Chang now coaching the Chinese team playing Saul’s team in what’s being promoted as a “friendship game.” Saul has brought along a ringer: a teenage Chinese American point guard, Manford, who led his team to the city finals. And who has a very personal stake in coming to China.
Their three stories intersect in the Portland premiere of Lauren Yee’s 2018 play “The Great Leap,” which uses basketball as a framework for examining identity, history and cultural differences. Presented as a virtual staged reading by Portland Chinatown Museum, the play will have seven showings May 1 though 9.
Lawrence Kao (left) as Manford Lum and Kurt Kwan as Wen Chang in the 2019 production of Lauren Yee's "The Great Leap" at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis. Both actors are in the Portland Chinatown Museum's virtual production of the play.Dan Norman
The production is directed by Desdemona Chiang, whose credits include directing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Chiang said she sees the play as hinging on the tension between the collectivism of Chinese culture and the individualism of American culture, a tension that Wen Chang comes to embody.
“For me, it’s about the Chinese coach and the journey he goes on, coming from a culture that is about keeping your head down, staying invisible, being cooperative, and coming to find his own voice and his own individualism during the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989,” Chiang said, referring to the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in which soldiers killed and injured hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
In the context of Wen Chang’s journey, Chiang said, basketball provides an apt analogy. “When I talk to people who love basketball, there’s a celebration of the individual inside that sport,” Chiang said.
And basketball has almost as long a history in China as it does in America. YMCA missionaries who had learned the game shortly after its invention in 1891 took it with them a few years later to China, where its fans came to include Chairman Mao Zedong, who exempted basketball from his list of banned Western “bourgeois influences.”
Yee came by the basketball-driven narrative naturally: “The Great Leap” is inspired by the real-life experiences of her father, Larry Yee, a 6-foot-1 basketball player from San Francisco’s Chinatown who traveled to Beijing to compete in the early 1980s.
The culture clash that Yee depicts also resonates personally for Chiang, who’s Chinese American, and for Barbie Wu, a Portland-area actor who plays Connie, a young woman from Chinatown who’s like a cousin to Manford.
Wu, who’s Taiwanese American, said that for her, the play brings up questions such as, “How do we become better global citizens of the world? Because we’re not so different and the world is getting smaller and smaller, so how do we really take each other in as we are and still honor our beautiful differences and incredible similarities?”
“The Great Leap” is the second play by Yee that the Portland Chinatown Museum has presented. In 2018, it hosted the Portland premiere of “King of the Yees,” also done as a staged reading directed by Chiang.
This time, audiences won’t crowd into the museum for the show. Instead, they’ll turn on their screens to view a recording of what Chiang described as a “radio play with a little bit of Zoom and effects and some imaging.”
Chiang had the advantage of having directed a 2019 production of “The Great Leap” at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre. Three of the four actors from that production were cast in the Portland show, helping smooth the transition to a virtual stage.
Wu said that while acting virtually was “super tricky,” it’s been special to be part of an Asian American production during a time of increased reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans. “It feels really healing,” she said.
She hopes those who see “The Great Leap” will take away a better understanding of the complexity of American identity. “I hope people are able to see our humanity reflected back to them and feel like we’re not so foreign.”
“The Great Leap”
When: 2 p.m. May 1, 2, 8 and 9; 7 p.m. May 5-7. Each showing will be followed by a live talkback/question-and-answer session.
Tickets: $15 general admission, $9 students/seniors, $25 household, $50 and $100 patron (includes donation to Portland Chinatown Museum). Buy at pcm.booktix.com.
Accessibility: Showings with captions for the hearing impaired are available.
awang@oregonian.com; Twitter: @ORAmyW
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