David Henry Hwang, the Chinese-American author of M. Butterfly, launches his new Broadway play with a joke too: the frequently nutty Chinese mistranslations of American colloquialisms. “We’re a small family firm,” explains an American businessman from Cleveland, trying to win a contract for his sign company in a mid-size Chinese city. “His company is tiny and insignificant,” relates the translator. These linguistic mishaps, however, aren’t just laugh lines; they’re an apt symbol of the impossibility of bridging the chasm between two cultures that are still, for all their business and political links, largely mystified by each other.
Hwang has fashioned an intricate story, involving the businessman (Gary Wilmes), a British expatriate (Stephen Pucci) he hires to help facilitate the deal, and a forbidding deputy minister (Jennifer Lim) who may or may not be his ace in the hole. Nearly every scene reveals new layers of deception, on both sides. Hwang is admirably even-handed: this is no screed against Ugly Americans, or an easy spoof of Chinese bureaucratic rigidity. It’s a perfect game of Chinese checkers: shrewd, stimulating, and over before it gets too boring. Extra credit for the best use of subtitles in Broadway history.