Lauren Yee has developed a knack for a kind of pop culture-fueled comedy that explodes the format of traditional playwriting and leans into an almost improvisational wackiness. It’s a unique style that she’s honed in ambitious works like Cambodian Rock Band, which explored the atrocities of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime with jarringly sardonic humor, and this year’s Mother Russia, which reimagined perestroika-era Russia as a Tarantino-esque dark comedy. Now Signature Theatre is revisiting her semiautobiographical 2015 play King of the Yees, which includes her signature mix of serious ideas wrapped in a loopy plot with absurdist elements.
Under the stop-and-go direction of Joshua Kahan Brody, the play feels like an early work where Yee hasn’t yet sharpened her sense of timing or the flow between comedic set pieces and the more serious explorations of her themes. In the opening minutes, we meet a version of Lauren (Maureen Sebastian) and her father, Larry Yee (David Shih), a proud member of the Yee Fung Toy Family Association. This is one of many clubs for Chinese American men that have faded into near obsolescence after 150 years of supporting a San Francisco immigrant community that long faced discrimination and rejection. In moments, though, the “real” Larry (Francis Jue) arrives to correct the record, with the “real” Lauren (Kelly Marie Tran) following in hopes of preserving her vision of the work in progress with the actors hired to play her dad and her.
Their reunion is postponed when Larry learns that a California state senator named Leland Yee has been arrested on corruption charges (which really did happen). Spooked because he’s been putting up campaign posters for the pol all over town, Larry goes into hiding. And Lauren begins a long and winding search through a Chinatown that has elements of folklore, stereotype, and fairy tale. The goal: to find her father and, not coincidentally, reconnect with her Chinese heritage.
Yee the playwright packs a lot of whimsy into this material, and there are many genuine laugh-out-loud moments as Sebastian, Shih, and Jon Norman Schneider assume multiple outsize roles. My favorite may be Schneider’s Model Ancestor, an ancient Yee who appears to have strutted over straight from the set of RuPaul’s Drag Race, complete with six-inch stiletto heels and finger snaps. (Michelle J. Li deserves big props for her costumes, which include a full-size dancing dragon ready for the next Chinese New Year parade.)
There are also a good many lulls between the jokes, and sequences that seem more clever in conception than execution. Do we really need multiple slo-mo action scenes? Or the repeated appearance of the faux-fur-wearing mobster Shrimp Boy (again based on a real person caught up in that Leland Yee case) whose very name elicits an audible thunder-clap by way of introduction? (Sound design by Fan Zhang.)
Another shortcoming here is Tran, an actress best known for her work in films like the third Star Wars trilogy and Raya and the Last Dragon. Here, she sometimes seems to get lost in the passivity of her role as a straight woman surrounded by a dim-sum platter’s worth of antic mayhem. But when she reconnects with her dad, there’s a sense of genuine achievement — a satisfying conclusion to an offbeat, haphazard journey. ★★★☆☆
KING OF THE YEES
Signature Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 15 for $56 to $167