Gre*t title, shame about the pl*y. New Yorker Kimber Lee’s satire is an angry shout against the racist and sexist portrayal of Asians in Madama Butterfly, South Pacific, Miss Saigon and beyond. It won the UK’s Bruntwood Prize for playwriting and Roy Alexander Weise’s energetic co-production received warm reviews on its Manchester premiere. But despite the verve of his staging and a compelling central performance from Mei Mac it’s a gruelling watch, hitting us repeatedly over the head with the central issue in the most obvious way.
It begins with brisk recaps of Puccini’s opera and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical, then a speeded-up medley of other fictions, sardonically described by Rochelle Rose’s narrator and cartoonishly acted by the cast. The stories are blurred and homogenised to illustrate recurring clichés: an Asian heroine is submissive but “a natural at the exotic sexy-sexy stuff”; she surrenders to the lure of the west, romantically and economically; and she sacrifices herself while her child is taken away for a “better life” in America.
Lee coarsens the material for furious comic effect. Whether her character is Japanese, Vietnamese or a Pacific islander, Mei Mac’s character is invariably called Kim (even though, as she later points out, that’s a Korean surname). The American officer (Tom Weston-Jones) who seduces her then abandons her to marry a white wife is always called Clark, and spouts random words (“Kyoto, dojo, katana”) to indicate his disregard for indigenous culture.
There’s always a doofus fisherman fiancé in the background, and a wicked schemer – usually her mother – pimping Kim out. Expert stage managers dress a series of quaint huts where transcendent sex and gaping cultural misunderstandings take place.
The way Lee nails these damaging stereotypes and the fetishistic colonial fantasies that underly them is savagely funny the first time round. But the repetitions and the relentlessly acid tone soon show diminishing returns. Kim’s characters start to show signs of rebellion but are always impelled to suicide. Suddenly we’re in an affluently beige New York apartment where athleisure-wearing Kim and her brother, a fishy fast food entrepreneur, have white partners and economic clout. Of course, she is still trapped.
This laborious segment illustrates the current boxes Western culture puts Asians into: striving immigrant, ancient sage (these two represented by supermarket workers) or yuppies who have transcended race. Kim’s mum (Lourdes Faberes) delivers a long lecture about how today’s youth are too sensitive and how much she loved The World of Suzie Wong, actually. Kim repeatedly tries to escape. As the play ticked, interval-less, past the 100-minute mark, I knew how she felt.
I can’t really fault Weise’s production, Khadija Raja’s inventive design, or most of the cast. Mei Mac, so joyful in My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican in March, gives a visceral, grippingly physical performance here. But Lee’s play is emblematic of a certain kind of American drama which uses sledgehammer emphasis to make historically marginalised communities feel ‘seen’ while allowing white theatregoers to feel comfortably guilty.
