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Review: Chinglish

© Michael McCabe

Miscommunication—of the linguistic, cultural and relationship kind—is the subject of David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish. Receiving its Broadway premiere after an acclaimed run earlier this year at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, this witty new comedy by the author of M. Butterfly concerns the travails of an American businessman trying to negotiate the labyrinth of Chinese commerce. But with its repetitive gags involving mistranslations, it frequently feels more like an overextended sketch and ultimately lacks the depth to make it more than a slight if entertaining diversion.

 

Daniel (Gary Wilmes) is a Cleveland entrepreneur who has traveled to the mid-sized city of Guiyang to secure a contract to provide the signage for their new cultural center. Not knowing a word of Chinese, he enlists the service of an Australian émigré interpreter (Stephen Pucci) to help him in his dealings.

 

At first, his meeting with the minister (Larry Lei Zhang) and his stern female vice-minister, Xi Yan (Jennifer Lim), seems to go well, despite the comic mistranslations of a young translator whose mistakes become evident to the audience via projected supertitles of the actual words being spoken. (Indeed, lengthy portions of the play’s dialogue are in Mandarin, which is surely a first for a Broadway play.)

 

But complications soon abound, as the English speaking Xi Yan insists on a private meeting with Daniel in which she professes to want to secretly help him for reasons of her own. Daniel quickly falls in love with his unofficial partner, even while their different agendas and inability to fully communicate with each other cause an endless series of problems.

 

The playwright has a great deal of fun not only with the language barriers separating the various parties, but also their cultural differences. One of the wittier extended gags involves the Chinese bureaucrats’ unexpected reaction to the revelation that Daniel once worked as a salesman for the disgraced company Enron.

 

But the comic conceits ultimately wear thin, and the ostensible love story between the two principals, culminating in a surprise plot twist, doesn’t have the desired emotional resonance. Not helping matters is the play’s tired structure, with the action consisting of a flashback framed by Daniel’s Powerpoint presentation about conducting business in China.

 

Although Wilmes is rather bland as the hapless American, he’s certainly convincing enough. The real acting honors go to Lim, superb as the double-dealing Xi Yan, and the supporting players, who fully mine the laughs in the complex dialogue in both English and Chinese. Director Leigh Silverman has provided a fast and breezy production, aided mightily by David Korins’ wonderfully versatile sets and those terrific projections.

 

Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200. www.ChinglishBroadway.com