STAGE WEST
  • Home
  • About David
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Theatre Reviews
  • New Page

Theater reviews

Stage West

STAGE WEST: "The Great Leap" at Cygnet Theatre

1/26/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Foreground: Manny Fernandes (left) and Edward Chen in "The Great Leap."     Karli Cadel Photography
       As was demonstrated in La Jolla Playhouse's production last fall of Lauren Yee's "Cambodian Rock Band," the extraordinarily gifted playwright, an MFA graduate of UCSD, possesses the ability to confront intricate political issues by humanizing in startling and intimate ways those in their sphere of influence. Her characters are genuine and vulnerable, her dialogue sharp and incisive.
       Yee's "The Great Leap" was first heard locally two years ago in a Powers New Voices Festival reading at the Old Globe. It premiered shortly after at the Ricketson Theatre in Denver and later in 2018 appeared Off Broadway. Its arrival at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town is noteworthy and the production itself, it turns out, reason for celebration. "The Great Leap" is a nuanced and cerebral work that at Cygnet under Rob Lutfy's direction receives an exquisite staging.
       The play's title is a reference to the so-called "Great Leap Forward," the People's Republic of China's socioeconomic campaign to embed a Communist society in the late '50s/early '60s. Yee's fictional story, however, begins in 1971 when a visiting American college basketball coach boasts that no Chinese team would ever beat one from the USA. This hubris has ridden the passage of time to 1989, the year of the play's principal setting (and a benchmark in China's recent history), when that same coach (Manny Fernandes) is invited to return to China with his struggling (an 8-20 won/less record) University of San Francisco basketball team to play a squad from the University of Beijing. Enter 17-year-old Manford Lum (Scott Keiji Takeda), a Chinatown hoops legend who begs coach Saul to add him to his roster. The third key figure is Wen Chang (Edward Chen), whose friendship Saul cultivated while visiting China the first time and who at his pushy-American urging became a basketball coach himself. He is the coach of the team that Saul's boys will confront.
       What secrets await revealing both on American and Chinese soil are central to the soul and backbone of "The Great Leap," which it should be said is only nominally about basketball (though the game carries the story and furnishes metaphorical reminders throughout its telling). Without giving away more than I should, "The Great Leap" is about family, about personal accountability and seizing opportunities, about how loving from afar is sometimes the best that one can do, and about courage. The last 10 minutes of the play will -- and should -- leave you breathless.
       Chen is remarkable as the play's most conflicted character, a man in whom to some extent all the story's internal strife resides. Fernandes, who is a Cygnet resident artist, gets the plum job of spewing coach-speak profanity, and his green-and-gold USF garb gives him the appearance of a gruff but likable toon. The passion and impatience of youth are personified ably in Takeda's Manford, slight but lionhearted.
       "The Great Leap" literally plays out on a basketball court of a stage designed by Yi-Chien Lee. Projections by Blake McCarty carry us back and forth in time, from here to there in history, from a Bay Area gym to Tiananmen Square.
       The first unmissable production of 2020 on San Diego stages, "The Great Leap" is urgent, profoundly felt theater.
          "The Great Leap" runs through Feb. 16 at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    David L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic.

    Archives

    July 2025
    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    August 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    January 2016
    January 2015
    December 2014
    January 2014
    January 2013
    January 2012
    January 2011

    Categories

    All
    Theatre Review

David Coddon

About 
David Coddon Fiction
Theatre Reviews

Support

Contact
FAQ
Terms of Use
© COPYRIGHT 2017. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About David
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Theatre Reviews
  • New Page