Review: A Hard Look at How Chinese Republicans Survive in Corporate America

Those who saw the Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross last year will feel some déjà vu upon entering the theater for Alex Lin’s new play Chinese Republicans, now at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels Theatre. In both cases, we’re greeted to a Chinese restaurant (designed here by Wilson Chin and meant to represent the Golden Unicorn restaurant in New York City’s Chinatown). As Chinese Republicans unfolds, though, that Glengarry Glen Ross connection reveals itself to be more than coincidence. Just as Lin’s Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear drew inspiration from Shakespeare, Chinese Republicans aims for a profanity-laced, bared-fangs brute force that occasionally recalls David Mamet’s brand of gutter poetry. At its best, Lin’s play matches the Mamet classic in provocative thrust, if not always in dark human insight.

The Chinese restaurant in which Chinese Republicans opens is where a quartet of female investment bankers converges for monthly “affinity group” meetings outside their place of employment, Friedman Wallace. The four characters vary widely in age, experience, and personalities. Phyllis (Jodi Long) is the oldest and most jaded, a former head of investments who is now an executive consultant. By contrast, the youngest, Katie (Anna Zavelson), a recently promoted senior research associate, blooms with idealism. In the middle are Iris (Jully Lee), a Chinese immigrant working as a lead software engineer, and Ellen (Jennifer Ikeda), the managing director of South American trading.

Though its first two scenes suggest the play will focus on Katie’s possible further rise in the company ranks, a sudden swerve into dream territory recenters the narrative around Ellen. With this extended bit of surreality—featuring Ellen participating in a game show called Say It in Mandarin—plus a couple later flashbacks (skillfully indicated in Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting design), a rough characterization emerges of an American-born Chinese woman whose difficult upbringing has led her to fully buy into the capitalistic notion that money is all she needs to survive. Her quietly conniving nature comes to the fore in the fourth scene, in which Ellen lays out to Katie her plan of ascension up the corporate ladder, one that she believes will bring both of them to the same level as the two white men after whom the firm is named.

That belief in rugged individualism marks Ellen and her mentor Phyllis as classic Republicans, as do jokes about political correctness and positive references to Ronald Reagan. But Lin is less interested in scoring easy political points for liberal applause than exploring how belief systems are formed over time and how flexible political ideologies can be amid personal and historical forces. At one point, Katie delivers a speech to her colleagues in which she points out how even Republicans like Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower passed reforms that could be seen as socialist. Even more pointed are brief mentions of how Ellen used to be a Democrat before her own experiences and observations soured her on the party and led her to the monstrous selfishness she now espouses.

One could quibble with gaps in characterization and world-building here and there. Katie’s midpoint transformation into a unionizing “libertarian-socialist conservative” might have come off more organically had Lin explicitly shown the kind of exploitative working conditions that led her to veer so far to the left. The bridge between Ellen’s former idealistic and current egocentric selves similarly feels more talked-about than dramatized, even with the brief glimpses we get of her past. And yet, even if her dramatic framework is wobbly, Lin’s welcome willingness to dig into complicated truths about how Asian-Americans negotiate living and maintaining their cultural identities within a society that, for all its outward forward progress, still discriminates against them, shines through.

Director Chay Yew gives the show fast screwball-comedy pacing, with Chin’s turntable set executing quick transitions between scenes. Sound designer Fabian Obispo’s jittery electronic music immerses us in the backroom intrigue, while Anita Yavich draws sharp class and cultural contrasts in her costume design.

Above all, Yew’s excellent ensemble makes the most out of Lin’s cutting dialogue. Zavelson radiates protean youthfulness as Katie, while Long exudes imperial strength as Phyllis. As Iris, Lee shows relish jabbing at other characters’ faulty Chinese in her heavily accented English. (A fifth character, a white waiter played by Ben Langhorst, pops up in one scene and briefly steals it spouting better-sounding Chinese than most of the main cast.)

But Ikeda is the wounded heart and challenging soul of the cast, portraying a hard, practical woman whose absorption of what she considers unmistakable truths of American society has prevented her from imagining a future beyond her present. In that sense, Chinese Republicans could be seen as a tragedy beneath the ribald laughs.