We came for Daniel Dae Kim and was pleasantly surprised when Ryan Eggold from The Blacklist and New Amsterdam came on stage. I thought he looked familiar but I couldn't quite place him. I thought he might've just been a generic looking white guy they cast. Alas he was but a famous one at that. Funnily, he plays a macho white guy pretending to be Asian. The plot is hilarious with some genuine laughs. It cleverly blurs the line between reality and fiction, drawing from David Henry Hwang's own life. I love that meta plot. David and his father are two of the main characters. Francis Jue reprises his role as the father from the Off-Broadway run in 2007. Some 15 years later, Jue is older, perhaps a more convincing elderly Chinese father. I thought he was excellent. I saw Jue play Hwang himself in Soft Power a few years ago. I think time has probably served this play well. The thorny topics the play tackles are more germane now than ever in a post-Crazy Rich Asians, post-#OscarsSoWhite, post-Shang-Chi, post-Hamilton world. The play does need a lot of background context on Hwang's life. The small cast of seven feature actors who play multiple parts without regard to race or gender, while commenting hilariously on race-conscious casting. They recite lines from real (or we're at least led to believe they're real) articles to place us in context. It's a bit of a cheap conceit but it works. We enjoyed this very much! Lastly, the curtain call was super short. The small cast took their bows and they were off the stage in probably a minute, definitely no more than two. And it's not because the audience wasn't applauding. They were just really brief.
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