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    ‘Real Women Have Curves’ and ‘Heart Sellers’: Snapshots of Immigrant Lives

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    A musical adaptation of “Curves” and a play about two Asian women becoming friends both look at immigrants’ experiences, with mixed results.Body positivity was not at all the cultural vibe in 1990, when Josefina López’s play “Real Women Have Curves” was new. There was a rebelliousness to its climactic strip-down scene, in which a group of Latinas sewing dresses in a roasting-hot Los Angeles factory peel off layers of their clothing and shed a bit of shame, reveling in their lived-in bodies.In the 2002 film adaptation starring America Ferrera, the scene is similarly feel-good — a refutation of everything the women know to hate about the way they look, because the world around them reinforces their self-loathing every day.In the new musical adaptation currently making its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., under the direction of Sergio Trujillo, the scene becomes a skivvies-clad, song-and-dance display of female empowerment. A dressmaker’s dummy, tiled with mirrors, is lowered like a disco ball, and the show’s title figures in the lyrics. It’s an upbeat crowd-pleaser of a number.Yet in a musical that pushes body image to the periphery, bursting into defiant song about it feels oddly out of place. With a book by Lisa Loomer, music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez, and additional material by Nell Benjamin, this ungainly iteration of “Real Women Have Curves” is primarily interested in the tensions and vulnerabilities of immigrant life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Poor Yella Rednecks’ Review: A Writer’s Origin Story Remixes Conventions

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      Qui Nguyen’s crowd-tickling comedy about a Vietnamese family in Arkansas mixes hip-hop and martial arts with soapy twists and turns.The playwright Qui Nguyen has made a career of imagining marginalized people as heroic leads. That includes his parents, who emigrated from Vietnam and met in an Arkansas refugee camp, a story Nguyen chronicled in his raunchy rom-com-style play “Vietgone.”“Poor Yella Rednecks,” which opened Wednesday in a rollicking, comic book-inspired production at New York City Center, picks up five years later, in 1980, when their marriage hits the rocks and the playwright is a 5-year-old struggling to learn English.Commissioned by Manhattan Theater Club and South Coast Repertory, where it premiered in 2019, “Poor Yella Rednecks” functions as the playwright’s own superhero origin story: Nguyen has become not only a wizard of language and form, but also an expert M.C., subverting and remixing conventions to confront abiding questions about displacement and assimilation. How can immigrants become legible to the American-born generations of their own families, and to audiences who are so white, the playwright’s mother says, that they resemble a Fleetwood Mac concert?Nguyen’s answer is an expletive-filled fusion of hip-hop and martial arts with the soapy twists and turns of addictive serial television. Under the wry and nimble direction of May Adrales, “Poor Yella Rednecks” is a crowd-tickling comedy that squashes preconceptions in order to place hearts in a vise grip.Framed as recollections Nguyen gathered from his mother, Tong, in 2015, the show begins with the playwright (portrayed onstage as a middle-aged man by Jon Norman Schneider) interviewing Tong (a dynamite Maureen Sebastian), who speaks with a pinched face and a thick accent. But Tong soon demands to have her son’s “pot and a mouth” style of talking in the play he is writing, and for white characters to sound the way she hears them, as a garble of slang and empty signifiers (so he has them squawk exclamations like “Yeehaw!” or “Mitch McConnell!”). From then on, we hear Nguyen’s family talk in frank, and often crass, English when they are understood to be speaking Vietnamese. (Nguyen’s parents were heartbroken when they met, Tong says, “so we comforted each other with our crotches.”)Though his family’s history is rooted in upheaval and loss, Qui Nguyen presents it with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity, our critic writes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesRewind 35 years, and Tong tears away her granny garb (thrifty southwestern costumes designed by Valérie Thérèse Bart) to play a younger version of herself. Tong and the playwright’s father, Quang (Ben Levin), who looks like a matinee idol but can’t find work, are nearly broke and are each being drawn back into previous relationships. Tong, a waitress at a diner, partly blames her mother, Huong (a dry-as-gin Samantha Quan), for the difficulty that her son, known as Little Man and represented by a wide-eyed puppet, faces fitting in at school. Huong, who only speaks Vietnamese, worries that learning to talk like his peers will turn Little Man (endearingly designed by David Valentine and maneuvered by Schneider) into a stranger.As in “Vietgone,” “Poor Yella Rednecks” shows Nguyen’s onstage parents expressing their most vehement feelings, and occasional exposition, in verse, rapping over uncomplicated beats composed here by Shane Rettig, who also designed the game show-like sound. (“Cuz I’m more than just pretty, my brain is damn witty,” Tong raps. “Gimme one hot second Imma run this city.”) For the title song, Nguyen borrows a familiar declaration about the work ethic of immigrants from the musical “Hamilton,” though his own less sophisticated lyrics, which are better at illuminating conflict than romance, may not exactly hold up in comparison.Though rooted in upheaval and tragic loss, Nguyen’s family history is presented with a delicate balance of over-the-top humor and unforced sincerity. Jon Hoche, who plays Quang’s best friend Nhan, is a boisterous bro with a soft underbelly, while Paco Tolson is almost pitifully hapless as Bobby, Tong’s bumbling white ex. Tolson also plays the godfather of Marvel, Stan Lee, whose presence as a sporadic narrator adds to the show’s graphic-novel aesthetic; the set by Tim Mackabee spells out “yella” in big, rotating letters, lit in emphatic color by Lap Chi Chu.For all of its surprises, including action sequences I won’t spoil here, the play falters only when it tips into obviously earnest territory. Nguyen doesn’t need a surrogate to detail his intent; the story soars on its own.Poor Yella RednecksThrough Nov. 26 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Golden Shield’ Is an Exercise In Miscommunication

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      Anchuli Felicia King’s play about an internet firewall belongs to multiple genres all at once.In “Golden Shield,” which opened Tuesday at the Manhattan Theater Club, a blowhard executive at a tech company comes up with a way to build a more effective firewall: decentralize it into multiple checkpoints.This appears to also have been the strategy of the young Thai-Australian playwright Anchuli Felicia King, whose show belongs to multiple genres all at once: It is a legal drama, a romance, a story of sibling estrangement, and a cautionary tale about technology and the cost of political activism. “Golden Shield” is a lot to chew on and somehow it is not filling.The director May Adrales nimbly steers the production, which goes back and forth between 2006 and 2016 as we follow a class-action lawsuit by eight Chinese dissidents against the fictional ONYS Systems, an American company, led by the aforementioned tech bro, Marshall McLaren (Max Gordon Moore), contracted by the Chinese government to build a system filtering problematic internet content — the Golden Shield of the title. (The case borrows elements from real-life ones against Yahoo and Cisco.) Julie Chen (Cindy Cheung), a Chinese American partner in a law firm, leads the charge on behalf of the plaintiffs.Besides Marshall, Julie clashes with her younger sister, Eva (Ruibo Qian), whom she has hired as a translator because Eva has a better command of Mandarin. Julie says she picked her sister because she wants “someone I trust over there,” but the two women can’t stand each other, let alone trust each other. Eva won’t even tell her sibling how she makes a living, only specifying that “it’s not illegal.”Julie is a little slow on the uptake, and it’s a safe bet most audience members will be way ahead of her. She also appears to be terrible in court (I kept mentally interjecting “Objection!”) and flusters easily. “Where the [expletive] am I gonna get a Mandarin translator in Dallas?” Julie wonders after finding herself in a bind in the city where the trial is taking place. Where, indeed, could she possibly locate this unicorn in a huge agglomeration with enough corporate headquarters to sustain a cottage industry of specialized translators?The show’s main concern is communication, or rather miscommunication, an idea it incorporates in its very fabric with the Translator (Fang Du), an omniscient character who hovers on the periphery of the action. At regular intervals he volunteers context, explains what is spoken and verbalizes what is not — he essentially dispenses audio footnotes.At worst, which is most of the time, the Translator spells out the obvious, ruining the silences, allusions and, yes, lies that undergird many conversations, and by extension theater. It’s as if someone were filling in the blanks in a Pinter play. A little after Eva tells an Australian nonprofit employee named Amanda (Gillian Saker, in an unfortunate wig that looks as if the 1970s had crash-landed on it) that they could make out in the women’s room, for example, Amanda coyly announces, “I feel a sudden and overwhelming urge to powder my nose.” The hint is none too subtle, and yet the Translator immediately informs us that she means, “Meet me in the bathroom.”At best, which is not nearly enough, the Translator sneaks in insights that are tantalizingly thought-provoking, as when he steers a conversation between Marshall and a Chinese official, or says that his job “is not really to translate but to interpret. Not to transmit truth to truth but to give you informed approximations.”A wealth of possibilities lies in the difference between these two words, but “Golden Shield” is more interested in histrionics than in how approximations can get close to the truth, or at least a truth.Golden ShieldThrough June 12 at City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Letters of Suresh’ Review: Returning to the Fold

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      Rajiv Joseph’s new drama revisits the protagonist, and the metaphoric possibilities of origami, of his earlier play “Animals Out of Paper.”We live in the age of the reboot: an era of reimaginings, spinoffs and sequels upon sequels upon sequels. Theater, with its dependence on adaptation and revival, got there first. But this impulse now extends to new plays, too — “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” Zoom installments of the Apple Family Plays, the way that “Pass Over” riffs on “Waiting for Godot.”So it’s surprising, yet not surprising at all, to sit down at Rajiv Joseph’s “Letters of Suresh,” which opened Tuesday night at Second Stage Theater, and discover a follow-up to “Animals Out of Paper,” his petite and practically perfect dramedy from 2008.A three-character play originally produced as part of Second Stage’s uptown series, “Animals Out of Paper” traced the relationships among Suresh, a teenage origami prodigy who is mentored by Andy, his calculus teacher, and Ilana, the professional origamist that both men fall for. It ended in an unresolved fashion. Joseph (“Guards at the Taj,” “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”), a playwright who specializes in putting big ideas into small and sparsely populated spaces, isn’t big on resolution. Yet “Animals” had seemed complete enough. I have rarely wondered how Suresh’s life — forgive me, I can’t resist — unfolded. Joseph must have felt differently.Directed by May Adrales, “Letters of Suresh” is, as the title suggests, an epistolary play, with a script composed entirely of letters. Well, letters and one FaceTime conversation. It opens with a letter from Melody (Ali Ahn, frenetic and endearing), a 40-year-old writing teacher. Melody has inherited the worldly effects of her great-uncle, Father Hashimoto: a Bible, an origami bird, a box of letters from Suresh. She writes to him, asking if he wants them returned, narrating the text as she scribbles. Despite receiving no response, she keeps writing and narrating, marveling at the way she can reveal herself to a blank page.If narrating letters to nowhere seems like a writerly conceit, that’s because it is, though Ahn’s messy charisma puts it over. She soon disappears, replaced — within the set designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s false prosceniums — by Ramiz Monsef’s Suresh. He narrates the letters in the box, which take him from a confused boy of 18 to an equally confused man of about 30. Utkarsh Ambudkar created the role of Suresh in the earlier play, which means Monsef has some big high-tops to fill. Cocky, appealing and forlorn, he fits them just fine.Ramiz Monsef, left, as Suresh, and Kellie Overbey, as Amelia.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere are two other roles, Father Hashimoto (Thom Sesma), and Amelia, a onetime colleague of Suresh’s, played by Kellie Overbey — who originated the role of Ilana, which makes her appearance in this different guise a little confusing. “Letters of Suresh,” sweet and even soppy, finds its characters in various stages of heartbreak, with no fracture fully healed. Mixing originality and cliché, the play surveys the near impossibility of connection, a theme reflected in its structure, in which everyone, more or less alone onstage, speaks their truths into a void. It offers up its metaphors — that paper bird, the heart of a whale — with a hand as heavy as an anvil. “Letters and origami,” Amelia muses. “These ancient, archaic art forms of folding paper into something else.”Adrales keeps the pacing sprightly, and the actors mostly resist the pull of sentiment. (Shawn Duan’s projections, which have the screen saver quality of most projections, don’t exactly help.) A play, though, is also a way of making paper (a script) into something else (a show), and “Letters of Suresh,” despite its adroit, layered performances, never executes that transformation fully, persisting as a literary work rather than an entirely theatrical one.Joseph wrote the play before the pandemic, which seems prescient. With everyone homebound and exhausted by Zoom, letter writing experienced a brief vogue. But we can see each other in person now. And as of late summer, we can see live theater, too. “Letters of Suresh,” though, mostly withholds the pleasures of dialogue and interaction. It gives us paragraphs, signed sincerely and very truly, instead.Letters of SureshThrough Oct. 24 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Second Stage Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More