Lauren Yee's 'The Great Leap,' about a basketball game during the Tiananmen uprising, finds power in characters' emotional journeys, steered by director BD Wong.
Is it OK to use a historical atrocity like this? I wondered, through tears, at the end of both plays. I still don’t have an answer. But I now feel personally connected to tragedies that once seemed safely distant, unrelated to me.
Next Yee takes us to the moment of that photograph: Beijing in 1971. Saul is there at the request of the government to whip Beijing University’s team into shape. His appointment comes with a translator/assistant coach/watchdog, Wen Chang , a low-level Communist Party member chosen for his English skills.Or at least, his formal English skills: Wen Chang, who also narrates the story, is panicked by Saul’s idiomatic profanity, which he tries to translate word for word.
Still the men bond, endearingly. Saul teaches Wen Chang to trash-talk, teases him about his crush on a girl from school — and so 18 years later, when Wen Chang invites Saul and his SFU team back for a “friendship match,” Saul assumes it’s going to be a friendship match. He has no idea the Chinese have been seething all these years over the remark he made upon leaving Beijing: “No Chinese team will ever beat an American team.” And plotting their revenge.
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