Relationships with your in-laws can be difficult; this is something that Andrew (Ephraim Birney) is finding out the hard way when confronted with a wacky plan by his late boyfriend’s father, Raymond (Eric Elizaga).
Raymond has a week booked in New York City and wants to spend it visiting every single bar and restaurant that his dead son, Archie (Charles Hsu), reviewed on the web site Yelp. What follows is a sometimes funny, sometimes heart-wrenching exploration of what we leave behind and how much we own the impressions that we make.
Yilong Liu’s new play is really quite something special. It’s funny right out of the gate, pitching the audience into the path of the trio of personalities and divides that are milked for just enough comedy without ever seeming trite. Although the mainstay of the piece is taken up with the awkward interactions of Raymond and Andrew, Archie’s periodic appearances, bitchily scathing some restaurant with a delicious fury, are an occasional highlight.
It’s also a story that delves into aspects of immigrant culture without ever falling into easy traps or maudlin messaging, marrying wistfulness at the beauty of Chinese culture, as well as praising the relative freedoms of American queer culture, without ever becoming laborious or feeling preachy. Instead, this is a story of disparate people, places and experiences, something echoed in the title, which references the book, 山 海 经 or, Classic of Mountains and Seas. Just as the book holds a series of mythological stories and tales of strange creatures, the play is the meeting point of myriad differences. Years, experiences, outlooks and beliefs all clash, but in ways that are more full of hope than of ire.
Credit also has to go to the simple ingenuity of the staging, set up to resemble a photoshoot, with a simple light stand that the cast adjusts by hand during each scene change. It gives the whole thing a simplicity as well as a thematic resonance toward both Andrew’s job as a photographer and the contextless, frozen moments of time that a camera takes.
It’s a genuinely beautiful and strangely fragile play, a meditation on the loss and the emptiness that comes after death rather than grief itself, as two very different men try to find a way to relate to each other, like pieces of a jigsaw, bending to fit over the hole made by a lost fragment. Anyone who has known grief will understand the sentiments here, and it’s a testament to all involved that they have captured such a rare quintessence of perfection.