Chimerica

At Jericho Arts Centre until April 21, 2019
Tickets from $22 at reservations@unitedplayers.com or 604-224-8007

Posted April 1, 2019

If you’re someone who eats little but frequently, pack a snack before you go to see Chimerica. Act 1 is two hours long; Act 2, almost an hour-an-a-half.

Written by British playwright Lucy Kirkwood, Chimerica might be better read than staged: scene changes are so frequent and, although they’re accomplished efficiently by the cast, some of them are unnecessary; some of them are for a scene so brief, if you blink you miss  it; one is for a snapshot scene in which there is no dialogue at all. All that moving around of furniture adds about half-an-hour to an already very long play.

The backdrop to the scene changes are a series of hanging, white panels, arranged such that projections – like the play itself – appear broken up; it’s a beautiful, unsettling effect and perfect considering the content.

This is not a lightweight play, the material is interesting, and it’s a hugely ambitious undertaking by United Players and director Brian Parkinson. But the scattergun approach with all those scenes makes it a fragmented experience.

The action shifts back and forth from New York to Beijing (and, apparently, Denver) and from 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protest, and 2012-2013.

In the story, American photojournalist Joe Schofield (Alex Motherwell, making a strong theatre debut) returns to Beijing almost twenty-five years after capturing what became the most famous photo of the Tiananmen incident: the man (white shirt, dark trousers, carrying two white shopping bags) in a stand-off in front of a row of tanks. No one knows what became of ‘Tank Man’ and Joe is determined to track him down if, indeed, he is still alive. Blind to consequences, he puts himself and others at risk as he pig-headedly pursues his obsessive search for what he believes is one of the true remaining heroes of our time. Joe is looking for a story to get his flagging career back on track.

On the flight over with his journalist side-kick Mel Stanwyck (Jordon Navratil), he helps marketing consultant Tessa Kendrick (Carri Toivanen) work through her fear of flying by holding her hand. They click. They argue. They sleep together.

Joe’s main connection in Beijing is Zhang Lin (Kylan Liu-Johnston), a former dissident who was also at the Tiananmen uprising that day in June. Joe believes Zhang Lin can lead him to Tank Man.

Woven through all of this are a US senator (Barbara Ellison), Zhang Lin’s brother (Darryl B. King), Joe’s editor (Brian Hinson, giving the best performance of the evening), Zhang Lin’s young wife and, later, her ghost (Olivia Poon) and another half-dozen.

The problem is we don’t care about any of these characters.

But we do learn a few things. No one actually knows what happened to Tank Man. Speculations include his execution two weeks after the confrontation; death by firing squad three months later; escape to Taiwan; or a quiet life somewhere in China. In the meantime, the Communist regime has suppressed the incident so there are young Chinese who know nothing about the events of that sunny day in June almost thirty years ago.

Chimerica is a term coined by economist Niall Ferguson to describe the China/US relationship. In his program notes, director Parkinson writes: “Chimerica is a fragile, complicated, unarticulated balance – both superpowers asserting fierce independence while knowing their success lies in interdependence. An uneasy, unspoken truce prevails.” Little did the playwright, the director or United Players anticipate just how uneasy that truce would become when Canada intercepted Weng Manzhou at YVR and continues to hold her for extradition to the US. The subsequent imposition of tariffs looks like just the beginning as both China and the US flex their economic muscles.

For me, the most provocative part of the play comes late but very welcome when Tessa Kendrick, about whom we have been wondering all evening, addresses what we assume is a roomful of multinationals hoping to cash in on the huge, expanding and increasingly wealthy middle class in China. Tessa begins with good news  but falters before she finishes. The chilling implication is that if this billion-strong, middle class embraces consumerism and personal debt the way America has, the environment and the global economy is destined to go into free-fall. While the massacre at Tiananmen Square rocked China, a wildly out-of-control economy in China will send world markets into a tailspin. But Tessa’s awakening comes too little and too late in the play.

The Guardian called Chimerica “an electrifying thriller”. It won prizes. It should have blown me away.