The title of Minna Lee’s new play, a world premiere at San Francisco Playhouse, is intriguing: “My Home on the Moon.” It begs a lot of questions, such as, whose home, and why the moon?
Tanya Orellana’s set design, with the Playhouse’s trademark rotating set, and the elaborate and colorful lighting design (by Michael Oesch), take us from place to place smoothly enough: from the kitchen and seating area of a small Vietnamese restaurant in America to a lush vision of the moon, with a verdant landscape that perhaps also conjures Southeast Asia.
And despite one case of egregious overacting (in a misguided effort to be cartoonishly funny and perhaps at least partly due to Mei Ann Teo’s otherwise sensitive direction), the actors—Sharon Omi, Jenny Nguyen Nelson, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart and especially Rinabeth Apostol as (quasi-spoiler alert) an artificial intelligence humanoid—do a good job.
When affable restaurateur Lan (Omi), who’s hoping her prayers to her ancestors will help keep the struggling restaurant afloat, and her chef, loner Mai (Nelson), receive a small-business grant from a mysterious corporation, and are visited by a preternaturally enthusiastic rep, Vera (Apostol in an immaculate white pantsuit, hair in a tidy topknot), they’re surprised. Lan is excited; cautious Mai is suspicious.
But when Vera gives the restaurant a makeover (orange walls! plants!) and organizes a high-tech marketing campaign, they’re delighted to see their fortunes are changing for the better.
A buoyant Vietnamese New Year celebration, complete with a traditional lion dance and Lan, in a sparkly gown, singing at a mic, makes for a charming interlude.
Things do strike Lan and Mai as odd: a gift basket that includes oversized biscotti, dire warnings from a former employee, Beau (Will Dao), who tells Mai, “None of this is real!” and other telltale signs.
But Vera asks Mai, “Why does that have to be the real world?” She means their formerly declining restaurant, but playwright Lee certainly presents the concept as food for thought in our increasingly artificially generated world. What if you get to decide what’s real? Vera adds. She offers a world free of pain and full of love.
“They won’t be real feelings or love,” cautions Beau.
But the ideas Lee plays with in this futuristic and at times entertaining sci-fi love story of sorts are ideas that have been around for a long time. And despite Lee’s fanciful approach—a life-sized, illuminated rice noodle that offers comfort and understanding; Vietnamese dishes, including pho, that taste radically different to different people perhaps depending upon how in touch with reality they are; human-bot romantic attraction and more—the play meanders along through its AI-generated world in often hard-to-follow ways.
The issues at stake are existential, but Lee’s exploration of them, meant to be magical and theatrical, fail to cohere.
And the title turns out to not really fit, after all.
“My Home on the Moon” continues through Feb. 24 at SF Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$75 at sfplayhouse.org.