Last month I went to see Ch’ing-lish, at the Longacre Theatre. The show is about an American sign maker named Daniel Cavanaugh, played by Gary Wilmes, who goes over to China to try and secure contracts for his company Ohio Signage. From the very beginning it is obvious that Wilmes is lost in the Chinese culture. He hires an English “business consultant” named Peter, played by Stephen Pucci, who in the end is nothing but a schoolteacher to try and help secure him the contracts. The decision of who gets the contract will fall heavily on the shoulders of the vice minster of culture Xi Yan, played by Jennifer Lim. Although Xi Yan speaks almost no English her relationship quickly turns into an affair with Cavanaugh. Both Lim and Wilmes were excellent at creating a relationship while not really understanding each other, which makes for some very comic pillow talk. The play is very funny, but by the end you are starring at a huge difference in the morals of these very different cultures.
Scene designer David Korins deserves a lot of the credit for putting together the set. Every room is put together by sliding walls and chairs; this makes the transition from scene to scene very smooth and quick. It adds a little excitement in that you always get to see what scene idea is a couple of seconds before the scene actually begins. Also the music played in-between scenes was Chinese and only adds to the fact that you feel like you are in China.
Wilmes had a difficult task in playing a character who was the lead of the show yet had to spend scenes looking confused and staying away. Most notably a scene where Cavanaugh just lets his “business consultant” Peter do all the talking because he has no clue what was going on. In that scene, I thought Wilmes did a great job of shifting his weight and looking like someone who wanted to be involved but just couldn’t.
The play is a comedy, yet at the end it gets to a very serious issue of what to with Cavanaugh and Yan who are having an affair. At the end Cavanaugh declares his love for Yan and tells her that he is ready to divorce his wife and start over with her. This disgusts Yan who immediately gets concerned and calls this a problem. Cavanuagh and Yan go on to have a whole discussion, in which they can barley understand each other, about the relationship. Yan explains how she has no interest in leaving her husband and that she can only be Cavanaugh as long as it is only physical, she sees it as an escape as a way to save her marriage. Because of the language barrier it takes Cavanaugh a while to understand what is going on, Yan must go around and around explaining it many times. The audience, who has the good fortune of subtitles understands immediately. This makes for an interesting scene in which the audience can see Cavanaugh shrinking and finally coming to grips with reality
Through out the entire play Lim does a great job of portraying someone who is barely understands English. She always puts on the right faces and seemed to draw connections between words out of nowhere. Lim also portrays this hard-nosed Chinese women who can flirt and yet seem totally at ease doing it.
All in all, the play is funny and even the fact that you are reading half of the lines off a screen only seem to add to the oddness of it all. The differences between American and Chinese cultures are very out there and are highlighted by the huge difference in thinking about the affair by Yan and Cavanaugh.
