The major fall offering at Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Mike Lew’s “Tiger Style!” is a heartfelt, youthful, overextended farce, directed by Brian Balcom, about a pair of high-achieving, third-generation Chinese American siblings who find themselves not fully at home in either the USA, where they are subject to a barrage of stereotyping, or China, where the ruling Communist Party is not just comically disconcerting but intimidating and totalitarian.
In essence, it’s a caught-between identity play, mining a familiar theme especially popular among young writers. Most immigrants feel some version of what Albert (Christopher Thomas Pow) and Jennifer Chen (Aurora Adachi-Winter) experience, finding themselves mired in a zone of misunderstanding, fighting back against the perceptions of them at home and yet also feeling even more uncomfortable in the land of their ancestral birth, especially when that land claims a hold over them it has no right to exert. As this play makes clear, this sense of dislocation can extend to multiple generations.
Lew is a smart, funny writer whose best work is still ahead and, even though this play follows a standard ideological and dramaturgical map, I’ve seen it work reasonably well in front of a more youthful and diverse audience. But it didn’t land at Writers Theatre on Friday night.
Part of the problem was that the generally older audience in Glencoe just didn’t seem to be in tune with the broad strokes of the piece; by the time you reach middle age, concerns over identity tend to be replaced by concerns with mortality and loss, and with the search for meaning and explanations of the universal human condition. By then, you’ve come to see that familial pressure to achieve, which is a huge part of the comedic action here, is ultimately trumped by the need for good health and firm friendships. And, of course, the specificity of the intergenerational comedy is aimed at Asian Americans, of whom there were precious few present.
That said, this is an audience willing to appreciate lives other than their own, I’ve found over the years. So the bigger issue here was the show was just hugely overplayed. And it’s an ironclad rule of comedy that you have to keep at least your big toe in the world of truth.
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Not so much here; instead of trusting the comedy in the script, some of the actors seemed to scream and shout every line, perhaps in search of an exciting pace but not healthy for either the emotional subtext of the play or the actual comedy therein. The staging certainly is lively and, at times, even fun. But with the exception of some moments from Pow, who draws deep in places, nothing ever feels real or truly felt.
These are performers who I’ve seen do fine work in the past (the cast also includes Rammel Chan, Garrett Lutz and Deanna Myers). But without some kind of honest dock to tie up against, the zany comedy just flattens out and starts to feel like more and more of the same. And the satiric bite gets blunted.
This was weird mainstage fall programming for Writers and a bit of a rough go, all in all.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Tiger Style!? (2 stars)
When: Through Oct. 30
Where: Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Tickets: $35-$90 at 847-242-6000 and www.writerstheatre.org
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