Ch'ing.lish

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David Henry Hwang is a playwright whose exploration of Chinese (and the intersection of Chinese and other countries's) culture I found fascinating in both the plays of his I have seen. In Golden Child, a Chinese-American man explores his family's past. In Chinglish, an American business man travels to China to try and sell signs to a new cultural center. But things turn complicated pretty quickly.

The play is told in flashback form, starting with businessman Daniel Cavanaugh (Gary Wilmes) addressing an Ohio business group. As he tells them that the most important thing for them to remember is to bring their own translator, we are transported to China, where Cavanaugh hires Peter Timms, a British born English teacher as a business consultant and translator. Unknown to Cavanaugh, Timms has an agenda of his own, as do both of the government officials they are working with.

I found the show most enjoyable when it focused on the business aspect of Cavanaugh's trip. When it shifts to the burgeoning relationship between Cavanaugh and Vice-Minister Yan (the phenomenal Jennifer Lim , it started to lose me, and when it shifted even more to the dealings between Timms and Minister Guoliang, I really didn't care.

The show is performed with the Chinese characters all speaking in Mandarin, with their words being translated for us in surtitles. I found myself examining each scene change to figure out where exactly the English would be projected. Most interesting, in a scene where Yan is attempting to convey a word to Cavanaugh that ultimately has no equivalent to him, no translation is projected.

I laughed at the bad translations and the misunderstandings stemming from cultural differences, but in the end, I felt that the play fell flat and that the some of the personal interactions scenes could have been cut to make it a tighter show.

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