Searching for truths about fathers has been a recurrent theme in the work to date of the playwright Lauren Yee, whose 2018 drama, “The Great Leap,” gets the full-court press in the Upstairs space at the Steppenwolf Theatre. Enter the theater and you’ll find a facsimile of a basketball court with the audience seated, bleacher-style, on two sides. You can see balls, a scoreboard, a wooden floor marked for play. Everything you need for a game except nets.
That’s because Yee has set herself the job of telling the story of a rising young Chinese-American basketball star using far fewer actors than you’ll find on a basketball team. And, of course, most actors are not going to be able to make (or miss) a basket every time the plot demands. This is, of course, the tricky aspect of writing plays about sports. Such stories invariably climax with a great victory or a crushing defeat, a life-changing play right at the buzzer. If you can’t recreate that, then you have to get the audience seeing those moments in their minds’ eye.
The director, Jesca Prudencio, works hard to make that happen. But the problem with “The Great Leap” is that some of its plot machinations are, frankly, too great a leap for those images to fully form.
The central character here is Manford Lum (Glenn Obrero), a young high-school basketball star in San Francisco’s Chinatown, who has found out that his local university, San Francisco State, is going to play a game against a Chinese team. In order to get on the team, Manford has to sweet-talk the coach, Saul (Keith Kupferer), the gruff, tough, divorced, Maalox-chewing man in charge, half from the Bronx and half from central casting. “The Great Leap” begins with Lum’s entreaties and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that he’ll make the team before intermission.
For a four-character play, Yee’s story is very ambitious. As was the case in “Cambodian Rock Band,” an excellent piece, Yee inserts fiction into historical truths much as does Tom Stoppard in plays like “Rock ‘N’ Roll.” Saul, it turns out, has a history in China, where, on a previous trip, he mentored a young Chinese apparatchik, Wen Chang (James Seol), who, as a result of that encounter and fealty to the party, was able to reinvent himself as a great Chinese basketball coach. But this is 1989 and the U.S. team arrives in China as the tanks are rolling across Tiananmen Square. So Wen has some tough choices to make.
There is another revelation that you’ll likely see coming here, too, as “The Great Leap” becomes both a play about the agony felt by many Chinese citizens as the party cracked down on protesters, and a teenage boy’s quest among dueling father figures (a theme that sometimes gets in the way of the protagonist’s self-actualization). Yee is a gifted writer (“Cambodian Rock Band” is really something), but I think she needed more characters to tell this particular story (her fourth, Connie, played by Deanna Myers, is mostly there to encourage and worry about Manford). Yee also wants to see 1989 as an era of zero information emanating from China — to buy this plot, you have to believe that Saul knows nothing now about the team he once coached, just as he is blissfully unaware of this high-school phenom tearing up the nearby courts in Chinatown and Oakland. (It’s certainly true that, basketball stereotypes being as they are, such a coach might not look first in Chinatown, but a man who has worked in China surely would be modestly more enlightened.) And he also plans to take an underage kid to China without even asking him if he has a passport, which is pretty tough to swallow. He’d have needed a visa which, I know from personal experience, was a lot of hassle back in those days.
All that said, Yee clearly has affection for her foul-mouthed, Yiddish-quoting Saul, manifest in a hilarious monologue where he tries to get his players to stay out of trouble. And all four of the performances in Prudencio’s hard-working production are very solid; Obrero bursts with energy and talent and, more than once, Seol’s Wen is very moving. Yee has a further surprise when it comes to that character, which is a bridge too far for me, but certainly provides a poetic and resonant end to two hours of lay-ups and baskets in the theater.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “The Great Leap” (2.5 stars)
When: Through Oct. 20
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $20-$89 at 312-335-1650 or www.steppenwolf.org
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