Two of L.A.’s premier regional theaters join forces to give Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap as unforgettable a production as Pasadena Playhouse and East West Players have presented in years.

Yee, whose recent Cambodian Rock Band and King Of The Yees have showcased her gift for taking flights of fancy and making them soar, plays it considerably more straightforward here, but no less magically.

Like Cambodian Rock Band, the Chinese-American writer manages to blend horrific chapters in an Asian nation’s history with frequent bursts of laughter, and like King Of The Yees, the story she has to tell is a personal one, inspired by an exhibition game her father played in early-1980s Beijing.

That 1981 match might well have been the result of fictional American basketball coach Saul’s (James Eckhouse) 1971 visit to the Chinese capital to school the Beijing University team in the American way of winning, imparting lessons so expletive-filled that his interpreter Wen Chang (Grant Chang) finds them as difficult to translate into formal Chinese as the self-assertive philosophy behind them is nigh-on impossible for the self-effacing, self-erasing Wen Chang to grasp.

Flash ahead to 1989 and the upcoming “friendship game” between the Chinese and Saul’s band of Americans, a match Saul is convinced is his team’s for the taking, no matter their current string of losses. (He did, after all, declare in no uncertain terms back in ‘71 that “no Chinese team basketball team will ever win a game against the Americans.”)

San Francisco Chinatown’s seventeen-year-old star point guard Manford (Justin Chien) isn’t so sure about that, and though Saul insists there’s no room on his college team for a high school senior (let alone for a basketball player measuring several inches under six feet), if anybody can make a case for Saul to make an exception in his case, Manford is that man.

And so, despite the reservations expressed by Manford’s 20something cousin Connie (Christine Lin), whose study-abroad year has schooled her in Chinese ways, the spunky all-American teen heads off to the land of his recently deceased single mother’s birth to visit a city whose Tiananmen Square now finds itself jam-packed with pro-democracy protesters clueless to what the government has up its murderous sleeve.

Oh, and lest I forget to mention, Saul’s one-time interpreter is now Coach Wen Chang, and the team the Americans are about to vie against is jam-packed with seven-footers.

Though The Great Leap could just as easily be performed sans intermission, playwright Yee wisely inserts one just as Saul and Manford are about to head off for Beijing, the better to give audiences the chance to rave amongst themselves about a side-splittingly funny first act and attempt to guess what Act Two has in store for its American Odd Couple and Saul’s former protege.

Suffice it to say that if The Great Leap’s first half has been all about laughter, what remains to be seen ends up so deeply moving and emotionally impactful, you may need a moment to pull yourself together before you stand up and cheer.

Broadway star BD Wong (who played Wen Chang off-Broadway last year) proves himself a supremely confident director, aided every step of the way by a supremely talented production design team–scenic and costume designer Lex Liang, prop master Glenn Michael Baker, lighting designer Rebecca Bonebrake, sound designer Leon Rothenberg, and projection designer Hana Sooyeon Kim.

USC grad Chien makes Manfred such an irresistible mix of bravado and heart, it’s no wonder Eckhouse’s amusingly crusty, foul-mouthed Saul can’t help falling under his spell, and Lin makes the most of every feisty Connie moment.

Still, if there’s one performance audience members will carry in their memories and their hearts, it’s Chang’s indelible star turn as Wen Chang, whose journey towards a courage he did not know he possessed is as powerful as life journeys get.

Fran de Leon is assistant director, Jake Choi is basketball consultant, and Andy Lowe is casting director, with additional kudos due Brandon Hong Cheng (stage manager), Lydia Runge (assistant stage manager), Brad Enlow (technical director/production supervisor), Jenny Slattery is (associate producer), and Danny Cron (production assistant).

I’d already fallen madly in love with Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap when the lights came up for intermission. Still, it’s what happens when its three male protagonists find their fates irrevocably intertwined in Beijing that makes this Pasadena Playhouse/East West Players collaboration one of the year’s most memorable.

Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena.
www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

–Steven Stanley
November 10, 2019
Photos: Jenny Graham

Tags: East West Players, Lauren Yee, Los Angeles Theater Review, Pasadena Playhouse