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    ‘Franklinland’ Review: A Founding Father, but Not the Best Dad

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    Lloyd Suh’s nimble period comedy about Benjamin Franklin examines a timeless struggle: the unmet expectations that divide parents and children.Lloyd Suh’s “Franklinland,” now running at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan, finds Benjamin Franklin (Thomas Jay Ryan) at a crossroads: balancing his roles as a founding father of a young nation and floundering father to his naïve son, William (Noah Keyishian). In six tight scenes, Suh whisks us through three decades of their turbulent relationship, starting in 1752 when William is an eager young adult and ending with the men at odds in 1785.The result is a nimble period comedy — with enough spoonfuls of droll humor to help the history lessons go down — but Suh’s play is just as concerned with a more timeless struggle: the friction of unmet expectations that can divide parents and their children.“Franklinland,” developed through the EST/Sloan Project in 2011, had its premiere in 2018 at Chicago’s Jackalope Theater. It shows the playwright’s early fascination with great historical figures and movements and the personal wreckage left in their wake. These themes resurface in works like “The Chinese Lady” and “The Far Country,” a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama.Suh paints a narcissistic portrait of Benjamin. His obsession with progress — first scientific, then political — is exemplified by his purchase of 20,000 acres in Nova Scotia (the real Franklin did own land there), with the intent of building a “playground of imagination and possibility” he calls Franklinland.Though Benjamin’s inventions — harnessing lightning for electricity, creating bifocals, adding flexibility to the urinary catheter — are undeniable societal improvements, his work sessions with William consist of bullying jokes at his son’s expense. This is not your grandmother’s Benjamin Franklin. In Ryan’s mischievous hands, the old man is downright sassy — quick with an eye-roll and oozing condescension. The actor’s antics convey a man obsessed with control, but blind to the familial cost.As a young William, Keyishian is an awkward goof who begins the play unexceptional and prosaic. But by the middle of the show, Suh levels the playing field. William — now in his 30s — is appointed royal governor of colonial New Jersey, though his moments of self-empowerment are weighed down by spurts of pedantic dialogue. Veering away from the playfulness we’ve enjoyed so far, the script resorts to playing out a melodramatic truth we’ve already gleaned: life is cold in Benjamin Franklin’s shadow.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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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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      Lloyd Suh’s Plays About the Past Speak Directly to Our Present

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      The 47-year-old playwright Lloyd Suh is having a moment, with a handful of plays that reveal how history can exact an emotional toll across culture and time.His latest, “The Far Country,” opens at Angel Island, the notorious checkpoint off the coast of San Francisco, and explores lives fractured by the Chinese Exclusion Act, a racist policy that severely restricted immigration of Chinese people and limited those in the United States from gaining citizenship.The play, running at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through Jan. 1, has been well received by critics. In her review for The New York Times, Alexis Soloski called it “an act, loving and sorrowful, of reclamation, salvaging the history of early generations of Chinese Americans.”His aim, Suh said during a recent phone call, is to prove “the way in which memory becomes hereditary because of the way it lives in the body, the way it lives in the family. There’s poignancy there, but power too.”This mission also plays out in his acclaimed “The Chinese Lady,” in which audiences learn of Afong Moy, who, as possibly the first Chinese woman in the United States, was exhibited across 1830s America. The story, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote in her review for The Times earlier this year when it played at the Public Theater, traverses “188 years of American ugliness and exoticization.”Then there’s his fanciful “Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery” — a metanarrative of Asian American history, set in Berkeley in 1967, a year before students there coined the term “Asian American” — which finds charm even in grotesque rebuttals of racist caricature. And an early one-act, “Disney & Fujikawa,” that dramatizes a 1942 meeting between Walt Disney and the Japanese American illustrator Gyo Fujikawa, whose family was held at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.Next up is “The Heart Sellers,” which debuts in February in Milwaukee and involves two housewives navigating feelings of isolation in a new country in 1973. The play’s title is a pun on the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which, by ending U.S. quotas on the number of immigrants from outside Western Europe, saw a dramatic rise in global newcomers — especially Asians.Shannon Tyo and Jinn S. Kim in “The Far Country,” at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through Jan. 1.Richard Termine for The New York TimesDaniel K. Isaac and Shannon Tyo in “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater earlier this year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBeyond its storytelling, “The Far Country” has reunited Suh with the actor Shannon Tyo, who originated the role of Moy in 2018 in a Ma-Yi Theater Company production of “The Chinese Lady.” She returned to the part for the show’s run at the Public.Suh and Tyo both said their continued collaboration is a testament to new creative and professional growth for Asian American theater workers made possible by diversity, inclusion and equity strategies as well as the broader racial reckoning in America that dovetailed with the pandemic.Having performed in “The Chinese Lady” both before and during the pandemic, Tyo explained the shift. “Prior to the pandemic, it’s almost like audiences didn’t believe us about our history of violence against our community,” she said. “The violence we’ve seen in our present is unfortunately what it takes to make our violent history come alive. People are more ready to believe us, ready to empathize.”In “The Far Country,” that sense of personal resonance and theater’s ability to refract a scene for different audiences — as was the case with Suh’s children’s play “The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go!” — was amplified by the show’s director, Eric Ting.The script subverts immigration, he said, by focusing on how “the only way the characters can achieve a place in the American project is by severing ties with their ancestors.” He added that Suh “is really focusing on the destructive force of capitalism, how it disrupts and destroys families.”Separate from bureaucracy and labor, one character notes, “there is more strenuous work: the work of being Chinese in America.”For the cast and crew, takeaways varied. Whit K. Lee, who plays both a translator and a detainee, said he wept when he first read the script. His maternal great-grandfather had been a translator for 19th-century Chinese railroad workers in Montana and his paternal grandfather was held at Angel Island when he was just 9 years old (separated from his mother, Lee said, the malnourished child used rice rations to lure, kill and eat a pigeon).“So much is lost because our ancestors didn’t want to pass down these stories,” Lee said. “‘The Far Country’ allows me to help tell the story that I was never taught in school. I’m very proud to be Chinese, Chinese American, American Chinese and American.”But Suh, who last week won a $100,000 prize as a recipient of this year’s Steinberg Playwright Awards, is not alone in his success.With his work, Suh says his aim is to prove “the way in which memory becomes hereditary because of the way it lives in the body, the way it lives in the family.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesIn spring 2020, Asian American theater professionals mourned nine plays that were scrapped or curtailed when live performance spaces closed amid the unfolding pandemic chaos. In the last six months, a number of works by Asian American playwrights have been produced Off Broadway, including Jiehae Park’s “Peerless,” presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters, and Daniel K. Isaac’s “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” a Ma-Yi Theater Company production at La MaMa. Several more are planned for the spring, including “Elyria,” the playwright Deepa Purohit’s Off Broadway debut at Atlantic Theater Company, and Hansol Jung’s “Wolf Play,” which, after an engagement last winter presented by Soho Rep and Ma-Yi Theater Company, will return to the stage in January at MCC Theater.The works are not only the fruit of prepandemic efforts to include more Asian American storytelling in theater, but also a reclamation of agency and identity following anti-Asian bigotry and violence during the pandemic itself.“There’s certainly a range of activity now and a quantity of work and a variety of work that feels pretty fresh,” said David Henry Hwang, who became the first (and remains the only) Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award for best play, for “M. Butterfly” in 1988.“There has been an increasing number of AAPI playwrights challenging what has come before,” Hwang added, referring to Asian American Pacific Islanders. “Asian actors have been largely employed by ‘The King and I’ and ‘Miss Saigon,’ which have Orientalist aspects, white supremacist aspects, and with ‘Miss Saigon’ is actually pretty racist.”By contrast, said Suh, “I want Asian American actors to feel like it’s for them, their ownership. Not just roles in plays.” Asked if he has any interest in revivals of “The King and I,” “Miss Saigon” or “South Pacific,” he offered a deadpan “no” before laughing. “I don’t think those are pieces where it’s possible to have any kind of take that is meaningfully transformative.”More recently, breakthroughs and opportunities have manifested in the revisiting of classic works: An Off Broadway production of Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” this fall had an all-Asian-American cast and a “Little Shop of Horrors” revival in California was set in Chinatown. And newer works have found audiences nationally: Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band” and Kristina Wong’s “Sweatshop Overlord,” which had Off Broadway runs in New York.“It’s exciting to me,” Tyo said, “that we could build our canon ourselves.”Suh added: “This industry can be a marketplace where plays have value as commodities, but with all these shows it’s a reminder that the power of theater is in the conversations it creates, how one play leads to the next. That’s how the conversation sustains.” More

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      Review: ‘The Far Country’ Brings a Neglected History Closer

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      Early 20th-century San Francisco and Guangdong, China, overlap in Lloyd Suh’s artful examination of the emotional price of immigration.A young man in a fine suit outlines the terms of the deal: The ocean crossing will be maddening, the detention that follows worse. Even assuming release, a person of Chinese descent will feel no welcome in America. The “Gold Mountain” that has been promised? It’s a mirage. And yet, if one wishes to pay for passage, the young man will offer — for a very high price — his American name and scant protection.This is the devil’s bargain at the center of Lloyd Suh’s fluid, artful “The Far Country,” at the Atlantic Theater Company. Set in the early decades of the 20th century, in both China’s Guangdong Province and San Francisco, it examines the cost — literal and emotional — of immigration. Those who have suffered in their pursuit of a larger, more prosperous life might, the play suggests, inflict that same suffering on others. Then again, they might also find redemption.The drama, directed with sensitivity and spirit by Eric Ting, begins in 1909. Han Sang Gee (Jinn S. Kim) sits at a table in an interrogation room. A more recent iteration of the Chinese Exclusion Act has made his citizenship tenuous, and Gee must substantiate his American birth. He has difficulty proving his status to a skeptical white interrogator (Christopher Liam Moore), as his papers have been destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. But a sympathetic interpreter (Whit K. Lee) gives him subtle aid. (Translation is another interest of Suh’s.)Most spectators’ sympathies will incline immediately toward Gee, owing both to Kim’s sturdy affability and to our innate compassion for anyone demeaned or distrusted by officialdom. But Suh and Ting aren’t interested in easy answers; there’s a more sophisticated moral calculus at play here.Citizenship is, among other things, a moneymaking tool. Its possession will lead Gee to China, where he can offer others the chance at an American life, however constricted that life may be. In Guangdong, Gee encounters a widow (Amy Kim Waschke) and her teenage son, Moon Gyet (Eric Yang, in an impressive Off Broadway debut). Moon Gyet, in his turn, will make a vexed proposal to a young woman (Shannon Tyo, a Suh regular, always dynamic).Clint Ramos’s set, with shadowed illumination by Jiyoun Chang, appears simple at first: a square platform backed by a dark mirror. But no element — walls, floor, mirror — is exactly what it seems. Like our sympathies, the set shifts and shifts again. Fan Zhang’s rumbling sound design suggests layers below the surface.As with Clint Ramos’s shifting set, no element of Ting’s production is exactly as it seems.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt the center of the play’s overlapping worlds is Angel Island, a detention center that opened in 1910 as a curb to immigration. The majority of its detainees were Chinese men, men like Moon Gyet, who undergoes his own interrogation there. Some eventually gained entry; others were deported. In 1970, nearly three decades after the center had closed, a park ranger discovered poems etched into its walls, lyrics of despair and love that had re-emerged from beneath putty and paint. Here is one: “Nights are long and the pillow cold; who can pity my loneliness?/After experiencing such loneliness and sorrow,/Why not just return home and learn to plow the fields?”Like Suh’s other plays (“The Chinese Lady,” “Charlie Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery”), “The Far Country” meditates on ethnicity and identity. It is also an act, loving and sorrowful, of reclamation, salvaging the history of early generations of Chinese Americans. These men left their fields for the same reason almost any immigrant does: the promise of a better life. Suh is specific in his imagining of the particulars of the Chinese American, but as America is a nation of immigrants, there is space here for others (including others like me, whose great-great-grandparents came from Eastern Europe) to trace vestiges of their own histories.“The Far Country” ends in 1930. That ending isn’t necessarily abrupt. But it does feel somewhat arbitrary. Why not 1950? Or 1970? There is so much more history to recover. More love. More promise. More pain. Moon Gyet claims that the strenuous physical labor required of an immigrant is nothing compared with the work of being Chinese in America. This takes patience and focus, he says. A serious mind and a necessary grace. Suh possesses these qualities in full. He has more work to do, more stories to tell.The Far CountryThrough Jan. 1 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Review: ‘The Chinese Lady’ Casts a Long Look at Hate

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      Lloyd Suh’s play is a riff on the arrival of the real Afong Moy, possibly the first woman from China in the United States, and a lens on contemporary racism.Afong Moy is known as “The Chinese Lady,” but really she is just a girl — 14 when she arrives alone in New York in 1834, brought by a pair of merchant brothers who struck a deal with her father in China to put her in a museum for two years, on display.Possibly the first Chinese woman in the United States, she is marketed as a curiosity. Crowds pay to ogle her as she brews tea, eats with chopsticks and walks around the room on her bound feet. It’s a performance of cultural identity, and she is happy to enact it — enthusiastic, even, at the start. Cheerfully naïve, unsuspecting of the world’s cruelty, she views herself as an educator, fostering understanding.“Thank you for coming to see me,” she says to her gawkers, who are also us: the audience at the Public Theater, watching Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady,” a moving and often sharply funny riff on the story of the real Afong Moy, traversing 188 years of American ugliness and exoticization in 90 swift, heightened minutes. A two-hander, it hopes with all its battered heart that we will, by the end, see Afong in her full humanity, and through her see this nation with clearer eyes. But it is not optimistic.“The Chinese Lady” was first staged in New York in 2018, when Ralph B. Peña directed a profoundly affecting, smaller-scale production for his Ma-Yi Theater Company at Theater Row, on 42nd Street. That was of course before the pandemic — before an American president scapegoated an entire population by calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” and before physical attacks on people of Asian descent became an ever-present threat in New York and across the country.Peña’s current Barrington Stage Company-Ma Yi production, presented by Ma-Yi and the Public, retains the same gorgeous cast, with Shannon Tyo as Afong and Daniel K. Isaac as Atung, her cynical, deadpan interpreter. (Cindy Im and Jon Norman Schneider play the roles at some performances.) On Junghyun Georgia Lee’s gilt-framed set — simpler and more capacious than the one she designed for Theater Row — the show is more anguished, more mournful, more urgent than before, and sometimes that makes it heavy-handed.History is told through the eyes of Tyo’s character, Afong Moy, who arrives in the United States to be on display at a museum.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTyo and Isaac’s chemistry, though, has only deepened. In their bickering, their loneliness, their not-quite-solidarity, they remain entirely winning and occasionally devastating. (From here, proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the show.)When they are cut loose from each other, after decades of symbiosis — and years at a P.T. Barnum museum — there is no more forlorn sight than Atung alone, a tiny cog in Barnum’s exploitative machine.Long gone by then are the glamorous days when Afong toured to far-flung American cities and met a president — “your emperor, Andrew Jackson,” she calls him, to us. (If that’s an endearing misunderstanding of his title, it’s also a pretty accurate read on his expansionism.) In a revolting re-enactment, we watch him touch her foot: a cowboy barbarian looking down on her even as he sexualizes her.Afong, for all her childlike naïveté when she first arrived, has always been hungry for knowledge of the United States. She speaks of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Manifest Destiny; the Chinese men building the railroad out West; the people who were already living on these lands in 1492. She finds the country fascinating, and its self-mythologizing wildly overblown.It is not the place where she thought she would spend her life; she believed she would return to her family, not make a home in a place where she is not sure she belongs. When she realizes she will have to do that utterly on her own — breaking out of the box where American culture wants to keep her, under its hostile gaze — she becomes a roiling force of indignation and self-determination.That happens in the play’s penultimate scene, and Tyo absolutely kills it. So it’s unfortunate that the final scene undermines her with ill-conceived design.As Afong recounts horrific 19th-century acts of brutality against Chinese Americans, projections (by Shawn Duan) that had been subtle and mostly static throughout the show start flashing historical headlines and illustrations, then news coverage of contemporary anti-Asian attacks.The impulse is understandable — to make utterly clear that Chinese Americans, long the targets of racist violence, are still menaced as outsiders in their own country. But the intimate power of Suh’s text and Tyo’s performance would have made that connection potently on their own.The production’s final, upstaging image is a wall of disembodied eyes: a digital crowd, creepy and cold. It’s meant, presumably, to expand our sympathy into the wider world. But whatever moral reckoning the play sets in motion occurs between Afong — living, breathing avatar of generations — and the audience. Yet the lights go dark on her.We do, by the end of the play, fully see Afong Moy. In that last moment, let us look.The Chinese LadyThrough April 10 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More