Telling the Audience What It Wants to Hear

Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon

Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon is an ambitious evening of multi-genre theatre that semi-successfully combines a tall tale about two recently married, bumbling, small-time Chinese-American robbers with figurative and literal brain freeze; a somewhat serious and well-intentioned narrative about human trafficking; expertly timed rapid-fire comic dialogue; honky tonk musical interludes played by a live, onstage C&W combo; and pandering and patronizing messages about the stereotypes faced by Asian-Americans.  If you can manage to overlook that last element — and you should — you’ll have a great time at this world-premiere Lookinglass Theatre production in the theatre’s beautiful Water Tower venue.  

Matthew C. Yee wrote Honeymoon’s book and music and portrays Charlie, who literally suffers a case of Slurpee-induced brain freeze while attempting to rob a convenience store with his new wife, Lucy, played by the feisty and energetic Aurora Adachi-Winter.  The charismatic Yee, who gives off serious Johnny Depp vibes (and I mean that in a good way), also performs, as do the other leads, in the onstage musical ensemble.  It’s an exceptionally impressive performance almost all the way around. 

Unfortunately, the play’s central conceit seems to be based on the supposedly novel notion that Asians can be renegades, cowboys and robbers just like anyone else.  I didn’t find this to be all that much of a revelation.  The renegade and robber theme, in turn, seems to be motivated by a desire to subvert the stereotype that Asians are supposedly the “model minority,” though this subverting is itself subverted when Charlie and Lucy rescue a Chinese immigrant from a sex-trafficking ring, albeit in a semi-accidental way.  

The fate of another sex-trafficking victim is much darker; too dark, it could be argued, for a play that otherwise contains nearly non-stop laughs from beginning to end.  It’s also worth noting that the sex traffickers are white males; a perfectly plausible plot element, though it would have been at least as plausible, I would imagine, that the traffickers be Chinese American too.  Yee does make a glancing point about the way that some white males sexually fetishize Asian women, a message that could have been explored in more detail if the play were not juggling so many different elements.  But at the same time, the traffickers’ race seems the safest and easiest artistic choice, the one least likely to ruffle the feathers of an overwhelmingly white audience that doesn’t want to feel complicit in racial stereotyping yet is comfortable with being made to feel superficially guilty (though never personally responsible) by contemporary literary and artistic culture.  Oh, and one of the evil traffickers is a goldfish-killer, too.  

Yet the play’s themes would have been immeasurably richer, it seems to me, with a cast of characters that was entirely Chinese American — or, more to the point, if the play had not evidently been written with a nearly all-white audience in mind.  (The audience at the premiere I attended, not incidentally, was about 95% white.)

The comedy part of this ambitious mix, fluently directed by Amanda Dehnert, is the best part of the evening.  The “Grandma” character, played by Wai Ching Ho, assists in the efforts of the newlyweds to rescue the sex-trafficking victim; in the process, she gets some of the biggest laughs of the evening — her sense of comic timing is almost supernally good.  (She also appeared in Steppenwolf Theatre’s superb production of The Bald Sisters, a play that was almost wholly, and unapologetically, about Asian-American family dynamics.)  The newlyweds are also being chased by a pair of likeable “security officers,” one of whom happens to be Charlie’s brother, and this is the source of much humor as well.

But too much of the comedy is intended to teach the audience “lessons” about anti-Asian stereotypes.  Does any American in the year 2023 really need to be admonished that Asians should not be referred to as “Orientals”? Regardless, characters remind each other of this utterly unsurprising fact several times during the play.  Maybe it makes the audience feel good about themselves that they know better.  Another character points out — in a way that seems motivated less by character dynamics than by an opportunity to “teach” the audience something — that “Cantonese and Mandarin are two totally different languages.”  

There are a couple of self-conscious jokes about egg rolls that are as stale as a Jewish comic complaining about his mother’s kreplach.  And Charlie’s full name, I should mention, is Charlie Chan, ha ha.  The name is intended to be, I suppose, some sort of ironic commentary on the highly stereotypical and offensive Confucius-quoting Chinese movie detective popular in the 1930s and 40s.  According to IMDB, the portly gumshoe last appeared in a (very obscure) American movie 43 years ago.  For younger audiences in particular, that’s not combating a stereotype; it’s resurrecting one.  It doesn’t help the somewhat dated ambiance of this play that there are jokes about Nickelback (seriously?) and Chester A. Arthur, “the dick who signed the Asian exclusion act.”

The degree to which this play is about what Asian-Americans can and cannot be, and the degree to which the play lectures us about obvious stereotypes that we all should have learned to discount at least 25 years ago, is the degree to which this play falls flat.  As the white female security officer (played with maximum drollness by Mary Williamson) says at one point to her partner and Charlie’s brother, “I’m sorry I focused so hard on your Chinese-ness,” a line that’s both apposite and, in terms of Yee’s script, highly self-conscious.  Put another way, spending large portions of a play focused on refuting a stereotype puts you nearly as much in thrall to that stereotype as espousing it does. 

But to a greater degree, the play is about deeper matters connected to the characters’ humanness and — especially in the interplay between the newlyweds and Charlie’s grandparents — to more genuine-seeming, and less defensive, insights into the psychology of a Chinese-American family.  Most of all, it’s about good storytelling, lively music, and fallible but very funny human beings.  During these moments of the play, when the audience isn’t being told how to think, one can feel Yee really writing from his soul.  

Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

May 24 – July 26

Presented at Lookingglass Theatre Company, Water Tower Pumping Station, 821 N. Michigan Ave. (entrance on E. Pearson), Chicago.

Tickets are available by calling the box office at 312-337-0665 or by going to www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

Further information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.