The exclamation point in the title of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s latest production, Mike Lew’s “Tiger Style!” implies a rollicking comedy. And so it is — but not until the second act of the two-hour play about the unfulfilled expectations of two high-achieving, second-generation Asian-American siblings.
The five-actor ensemble (three play multiple roles to good effect) work diligently in Act 1 to convince us that this is indeed a hilarious satire. However, there’s such a thing as performing with too much antic energy to be funny, or relatable and real, and this is the case here in Act 1.
But then there’s the terrific Act 2, when all the actors shine.
Squabbling brother and sister Albert Chen (William Dao) and Jennifer Chen (Jenny Nguyen Nelson) were raised to excel, and so they did. Albert’s a tech wiz at a big corporation, Jennifer’s a doctor—but neither feels they’ve reached the career heights for which their “tiger-tyrant” parents programmed them.
Jennifer’s just been dumped by her feckless boyfriend (Jeremy Kahn) and hasn’t achieved the acclaim she’d hoped for at work. Albert, who has peptic ulcer due to anxiety, doesn’t get the promotion he deserves. His boss, who’s Asian-American (beloved TheatreWorks regular Francis Jue), promotes a white worker (Kahn) instead.
Surely most of us, whatever our ethnicity, can identify with such problems, especially if we ourselves had versions of helicopter parents. But here, exaggerated for comic effect, it’s hard to take those problems seriously.
Frustrated, the siblings agree to have a reckoning with the parents who let them down. “I’m gonna yell at Mom like a white girl!” shrieks Albert. Confronting placid Mom and Dad (Emily Kuroda and Jue), he howls, “I don’t want the American dream! I want to be the [entitled] American idiot!”
There are a few funny lines amid the general Act 1 hysteria and concerning issues for sure.
On the other hand, earnest efforts to impart Chinese-American history prove awkwardly didactic: Dad lectures about paper sons and Chinese immigration, worthy topics that have been explored in depth in other locally produced plays (for one, Lloyd Suh’s “The Far Country,” which recently closed at Berkeley Repertory Theatre), but they feel off-key here.
When the kids, in a rebellious snit, decide to visit their ancestral homeland (they imagine themselves as freewheeling Bonnie and Clyde, throwing aside their rigid background), everything inevitably changes—for the worse for them, of course, but for the better for us.
Now playwright Lew is in full, self-confident satirical mode, as is director Jeffrey Lo (himself a fine playwright).
Albert is immediately assigned by the government to be a computer hacker. “All my years of being a nerd led to this!” exults Albert.
The pair disrupts everything in their path with their American innocence.
Jennifer signs up for an arranged marriage; their Chinese relative, Cousin Chen (Kuroda), shows up to alternately slap them around and hug them; they’re thrown in jail (don’t ask) and rescued by a government official wearing a fanny pack (witty costumes by Becky Bodurtha) with the head of a tiger protruding from his crotch (again, don’t ask); and the play’s final scene is wonderfully Kafka-esque.
What feels like two different plays cobbled into a tonally disjointed one is, at the end, a delight.
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s “Tiger Style!” continues through April 28 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $27 to $100 at (877) 662-8978 or theatreworks.org.