It feels churlish to complain about a playwright being too ambitious. But Anchuli Felicia King doesn’t make it easy to resist the temptation with her new play receiving its American premiere courtesy of Manhattan Theatre Club. This convoluted effort interweaving corporate intrigue, legal machinations and family drama becomes further burdened with its explorations of the vagaries of the art of translation. Throughout the play, an onstage character known only as “The Translator” (Fang Du) attempts to translate what the characters are saying to each other and also what they’re not saying. If only he could have made what’s actually going on more coherent.
Resembling the artistic love child of David Mamet and Tom Stoppard, Golden Shield is loosely based on real-life events. The story, spanning a decade, takes place in a multiplicity of settings, including Washington, D.C., China, Dallas, Palo Alto and Melbourne. The action goes back and forth in time, and several of the actors confusingly play multiple roles. Forget a scorecard; this play requires a syllabus.
The plot revolves around a class action lawsuit filed against a multinational technology corporation by a group of Chinese dissidents. Taking advantage of an obscure law dating back to pirate days, co-lead counsel Julie Chen (Cindy Cheung) attempts to seek financial restitution from ONYS Systems, led by the overbearing Marshall (Max Gordon Moore). ONYS was hired by the Chinese government to increase the efficiency of its internet, and in the process created a system that made it easier to monitor and censor dissent.
Although Julie was born in China, her knowledge of Mandarin is scant. So she turns to her younger sister Eva (Ruibo Qian) to serve as her translator when dealing with the government authorities and a Chinese professor (Michael C. Liu) who was imprisoned for five years for his efforts to counter govenrment repression. The sisters’ relationship has been strained for years, and Julie is unaware of Eva’s making ends meet by being a sex worker. In the course of the legal machinations, Eva has a fling with the female Australian manager (Gillian Saker) of an organization devoted to internet freedom.
Got all that? Because there’s a lot more, including the fact that Julie’s law partner Richard (Daniel Jenkins) is one of Eva’s longtime clients. Indeed, there’s so much going on in this convoluted effort that none of its plot elements or themes are satisfactorily developed. You can see what the playwright, who displays a gift for sharp-edged comic dialogue, is going for, but it seems apparent that the material would have been better served in a novel. It doesn’t help that not one of the characters proves particularly likeable, with the endlessly expletive-shouting, obnoxious Marshall seeming to have wandered in from a production of Glengarry Glen Ross.
The play’s chief conceit is the Translator (played with impish charm by Fang Du), who serves as both narrator and occasional character while frequently reminding us of the subjectivity of his profession. But even that device becomes laborious, not only because much of the dialogue is delivered in both Chinese and English, resulting in long, drawn out stretches (you feel every minute of the production’s two-and-a-half hour running time), but also an excessive cutesiness that becomes grating. By the time he addresses the audience, “Don’t mind me, I’m just a translator” and gives us a big wink, you’ve long come to desperately wish for supertitles.
Director May Adrales ultimately proves unable to clarify the narrative complexity, while the hard-working performers struggle to provide depth to the thinly drawn characters. You can feel their efforts, and the strenuous effort of the writing, so vividly that by the end of the evening you’re the one left exhausted.
