The Great Leap

Goldcorp Stage at the BMO Theatre Centre until May 19, 2019
Tickets from $29 at artsclub.com or 604-687-1644

Posted May 3, 2019

Under the superb direction of Meg Roe, this Arts Club production of The Great Leap is so thrillingly fast-paced and fantastic visually that it’s easy to overlook a script that doesn’t always score. American playwright Lauren Yee takes a cocky Chinese-American basketball prodigy, a Communist Party-fearing Chinese basketball coach from Beijing University, and a foul-mouthed American basketball coach from San Francisco University and puts them in a “friendly” match in Beijing on the eve of the culmination of the student’s uprising in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

The two coaches had previously met back in 1971 when, ostensibly, the Americans introduced the game to the Chinese. Coach Saul left China arrogantly declaring, “No Chinese team will ever beat an American team.”  That chicken – and others – comes home to roost in the Spring of  ’89 when the Chinese invite the Americans back. But now the University of Beijing has a bunch of 7-footers on the team and the Party’s reputation is on the line.

The basketball metaphor works on several levels: the great leaps required to move the ball down the court and, dogged by guards, to put the ball through the hoop, and Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, his push to move China from a mainly agrarian society to a modern industrial nation.

But a previous director of the Playwrights Theatre Centre (formerly the New Play Centre) always cut to the chase on the first reading of a new play: “What’s it about?” she’d ask. The Great Leap is about a lot of things to the extent that, ultimately, there’s no central character or narrative to invest in.

Is it about young Manford (Milton Lim) looking for his father? Or his identity? Or is it about Wen Chang (Jovanni Sy) confronting  his fear of and passivity under the Communist Party regime? It’s not likely about Saul (Toby Berner), the American coach, pulling his flagging career out of the dumpster; but he’s given a lot of air time anyway. The Great Leap is obviously a  comparison of stereotypical American and Chinese ‘character’ (loud, vulgar versus quiet, passive-aggressive) – and the Americans do not always come away looking good. But somewhere, in all those possible ‘abouts’, I wasn’t moved. (Maybe, once, when Wen Chang finally makes a good decision and possibly forfeits his life.)

Interestingly, many of the reviews of productions in the USA put Wen Chang at the centre of the narrative. That’s not so obvious in this Vancouver production, a Canadian premiere.

But if I wasn’t moved, I sure was impressed. Set ‘alley’ style – the way we would watch a real basketball game, the projection design by Chimerik under Projection Design Director Sammy Chien, is spectacular.  Without knowing enough about lighting, it’s hard to say exactly where the genius lies but somewhere between lighting designer John Webber and Chimerik, lines miraculously ‘grow’ across the floor, setting out a basketball court and then disappear; projections appear and disappear  on the floor almost faster than we can process them; and in a totally amazing sequence we ‘see’ but do not ever really see Manford’s mother, a reportedly 6’2” Chinese basketball star rushing back and forth across the court – all simply through the use of sound and light.

Milton Lim is absolutely stellar in the role of Manford. Not only does he embrace Manford’s brashness and drive, but in a prolonged scene – the dying moments of the match between the Americans and the Chinese – Lim (with coaching by Agnes Tong, who also plays Manford’s cousin Connie) mimes his character’s final rush to win the game: dodging, whirling, skirting, rushing, feinting, leaping, evading, blocking and scoring. The scene rivals the NBA for excitement and yet there’s no ball, no hoop, no opponents. It’s Lim/Manford all alone. And it works.

Agnes Tong’s Connie is the scrapper who keeps Manford going when he’s about to give up and Jovanni Sy, as Wen Chang, does get some sympathy going in a production that’s more about dazzling us than moving us.

Really problematic is Toby Berner’s Saul but, really, it’s in the writing not the performance. Berner really punches it up but what can he do with the locker room profanity – including “masturbating horsefuckers” – that’s given him? Does it really have to be this bad to make the point? And what is the point, exactly? That basketball coaches are foul-mouthed? And when Saul gives Wen Chang crude advice on scoring with a young woman, it’s cringe-making.

But with the exhilarating sound design by Alessandro Juliani and the undeniably creative excellence of the production team, The Great Leap had the opening night audience doing its own great leap. It’s a play for people who don’t necessarily love the game but who look to the theatre for great creative leaps of imagination. They will find those creative leaps on the Goldcorp Stage until May 19.