Review: Lauren Yee's King of the Yees, an Exploration of What It Means to Be a Yee

There are two characters named Lauren Yee in Yee’s play King of the Yees, having its New York premiere at the Pershing Square Signature Center. One Lauren (Kelly Marie Tran) has written a play about “Lauren” (Maureen Sebastian) and her father “Larry.” Meanwhile, Francis Jue, endearing as ever, plays real-life Lauren’s father Larry, while David Shih portrays the version of him in “Lauren”’s play.

Complicating things further, Larry is a passionate leader of the Yee Fung Toy Family Association, “a men’s club for Chinese people named Yee.” Larry interrupts Lauren’s play, hopeful that the audience will be filled with Yees, but Lauren looks skeptically out into the Signature Theatre crowd: “How could they be Yees? They’re all white.” Lauren’s not even sure of her own Yee-ness since she’s planning to take her husband’s last name, Zwillinger, and doesn’t fully grasp her father’s decadeslong relationship with San Francisco’s Chinatown. Dipping into metaphor by way of magical realism, the “Yee doors” that “only open for Yees” won’t open for her anymore

The allure of the actual Lauren Yee’s most popular work has sometimes evaded me, especially her sense of humor, which often veers towards sophomoric gags or silly slapstick that can distract from credible character development. Some of the playwright’s bumpier comedy is on display here, but King of the Yees is both more moving than Cambodian Rock Band and funnier than this spring’s dull-edged satire Mother Russia, both of which also ran at Signature.

Yee smartly sets aside her loopiest moments for the terrifically well-paired Sebastian and Shih, playing versions of themselves as the actors cast as Lauren and Larry. Sidelined once the real Larry shows up, Maureen and David pass the time together. In the play’s best comedic bit, Maureen confesses that she’s actually Korean and David trains her to say the word “Chinese” with a Chinese accent.

At its most literal, King of the Yees focuses on Larry’s reaction to the epic fall of State Senator Leland Yee. He bears no relation to the playwright, but Larry, always eager to help another Yee, had dedicated himself to feverishly supporting the senator’s campaigns at the time he was arrested for public corruption in 2014. (In real life, Leland Yee actually officiated the playwright’s 2012 wedding, though the play doesn’t mention that.)

Structurally, it feels a bit like the real Yee is writing her way into the play, discovering what it’s really meant to be about. She treats the first act as a bit of a metatheatrical playground, interrupting scenes from the more traditional autobiographical play she’s written with a staged audience Q&A and a Lion Dance. “What do you want to do now?” David asks Lauren at one point, and it seems like the playwright isn’t totally sure.

Stepping away from the play-within-a-play framework in the second act, Yee sends her avatar on a rather delightful quest to find her father through the Chinatown she’s never really gotten to know. Shih, Sebastian, and Jon Norman Schneider bring to life fantasy versions of the neighborhood legends that Larry’s told his daughter so much about.

Shih is especially fun here as Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, the organized crime leader brought down in Senator Yee’s fraud sting, and then as a Sichuan shapeshifter, practicing the impressive art of face-changing. There’s quite a lot of physical comedy, and some of it, like a slow-motion action sequence, comes off awkwardly in Joshua Kahan Brody’s otherwise engaging staging. But the lift-off into fantasy is mainly charming, especially a lion dancer lip-synching to “All That Jazz” and the reveal of the Yee family’s “model ancestor,” vogueing in the hereafter. (Michelle J. Yee’s costumes are fabulous.)

With echoes of Ryan J. Haddad’s Good TIme Charlie, another metatheatrical family memoir play currently playing at the Public, Yee poses a bunch of questions about her responsibility as a storyteller, fictionalizing conversations with her father about how she might put their lives, and her relationship to her heritage and Chinatown community, onstage. But when playwrights question their own writing practice within their work, it’s usually less interesting than the actual ideas they’re struggling to express.

Fortunately, King of the Yees eventually finds itself as the playwright and cast render the second act’s fable-like discoveries of identity with tenderness. By trying to understand Chinatown, even a fantastical version of the place, through her father’s eyes, Lauren feelingly confronts her own desperation to know him and understand what it means to be a Yee.