You’ve probably seen photos of bafflingly mistranslated English signs in China, some of which couldn’t be quoted in a family newspaper. “Chinglish,” David Henry Hwang’s comedy now onstage at San Francisco Playhouse, uses those risible flubs as a jumping-off point for a masterful series of reversals about language, different cultural expectations, American complacency and the social complexities of doing business in China.
In fact, the play begins with a seminar exactly about doing business in China from a white American man with a salesman’s veneer of easy amiability and warmth. This is Daniel Cavanaugh, played by Michael Barrett Austin with an endearing air of bewilderment and the persistence to carry on anyway.
We quickly dive deep into Daniel’s own experience trying to pitch his sign-making family firm to city officials in a mid-level Chinese city. He quickly finds that his practiced sales pitch is of limited usefulness when everything’s filtered and warped by translation and subtext.
We see that right away in his first meeting with glad-handing Cultural Minister Cai (Alex Hsu, jovial and amusingly distractible) and the impassive, unimpressed Vice Minister Xi (Nicole Tung, exuding savvy confidence).
Everything Daniel says is inadvertently undermined by Sharon Shao’s hilariously struggling interpreter, whose every mistranslation belittles Daniel and his business. Likewise, Matthew Bohrer’s smooth and slick Peter, a British self-styled consultant with impressive fluency, takes every opportunity to impress the officials by overstating Daniel’s credentials.
With the possible exception of Shao’s Miss Qian, nobody in that meeting is entirely what they seem to be. Everybody has a hidden agenda.
And this isn’t international espionage or anything like that. It’s something much more sordid. It’s business.
“Chinglish” had its West Coast premiere in another excellent production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2012, but Hwang has revised the script since then, and it’s stronger than ever.
SF Playhouse gives it a superb production in director Jeffrey Lo’s pitch-perfect staging with a knockout cast. Andrea Bechert’s set conjures a multitude of locations with a series of shifting screens and a bit of furniture here and there, textured and colored by Wen-Ling Liao’s lighting. Some delightful multilingual hip-hop selections provide the interstitial music in James Ard’s sound design.
Phil Wong is wonderfully funny as Cai’s sullen, petulant nephew who barely pays attention to the conversation he’s supposed to be translating, and as an ambitious politician who’s perversely impressed by Daniel’s worst missteps. Shao shines in additional parts such as a scowling bartender and government functionary who shifts from dismissive to giddily enthusiastic with comical swiftness. Xun Zhang also proves versatile in several roles from a smiling waiter to a stony translator.
Tung’s Xi in particular reveals levels upon levels as her interaction with Daniel takes many twists and turns. Sometimes she’s stolid and unreadable, sometimes refreshingly frank, and she quickly becomes the most important person in the play, for all that it’s Daniel’s story.
A whole lot of the humor lies in the Chinese dialogue, with English supertitles filling the surrounding walls in Spense Matubang’s projection design. Daniel being the fish out of water who hasn’t learned the language, much of the comedy is at his expense. When practically everything relies on subtext, you’re at a distinct disadvantage when you don’t even understand the text.
Ultimately, though, the play and the performances make it easy to sympathize with pretty much everybody in it, not despite all their failings and skulduggery but partly because of those flaws. Everybody’s playing the games they think they need to play to get ahead or to get by. “Chinglish” hilariously depicts just how much is lost in translation, but what’s at the core of these characters comes through loud and clear.
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘CHINGLISH’
By David Henry Hwang, presented by San Francisco Playhouse
Through: June 10
Where: San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco
Running time: Two hours and 10 minutes, one intermission
Tickets: $15-$100; 415-677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org.
