By Kent Straith

NORTHVILLE, MI–As you enter the performance space in the Northville’s Tipping Point Theater in for their production of Lloyd Suh’s play The Chinese Lady, you (the patron) will first notice that the 143 seats of this intimate, in-the-round experience are wrapped around what appears to be a room in traditional, imperial China.

The room is decorated with vases, silks, and art from unnamed dynasties, and there are two chairs. One is ornate and throne-like in the very center of the stage, and the other a simple stool, off to the side. This dichotomy subconsciously begins to prepare you for the display about to unfold…and I use the word “display” intentionally. What you’re about to see is not really a story, for there’s very little plot. It’s an expression of two characters: The eponymous Chinese lady Afong Moy (in real life, the first Chinese woman to live in America), and her friend/companion/foil/interpreter Atung, who serves the audience as a narrator as well as a participant.

History records Afong Moy as being sent (rented/sold) by her father in 1834 when she was in her mid-teens. Her American “employers” were American businessmen who put her on display in an exhibition where she simply sat in native dress and…was Chinese, which was endlessly fascinating to the Americans who paid 25 cents to see her in what can be best described as a human zoo exhibit. She would use chopsticks, talk through Atung about customs in China, and walk around the room and show how this simple act was affected by the ancient practice of foot-binding, which had reduced her own feet to four inch long appendages resembling hooves.

The story presented is a series of monologues, most by Afong Moy, and a few by Atung, presenting a deceptively simple and terribly complicated story, which will likely open the eyes of the audience. The story of the African slave trade is well known to Americans of all ages, and has been immortalized in literally countless movies, books, mini-series, etc. But ask almost any American about what the experience of the Chinese immigrant in the 1800s was, and their response would likely be “um….bad?”

The spirit of Afong Moy is effectively and movingly given a body by Ann Arbor native Josie Mi, while Don Castro, a Filipino born New York actor, and a veteran of stage and many feature films, brings Atung to life, first as Afong’s somewhat curt and annoyed interpreter, and later a confidante and friend who realizes as an old man that she has been his entire life and struggles with the choice that realization sets before him.

Miss Mi’s ability to portray Afong as she slowly ages and adapts to western culture is admirable as her diction and accent softens from the brittle crispness of someone speaking phonetically a language they don’t know to the more comfortable ease of someone who, against her will, has spent her entire adult life as a stranger in a strange land and literally forgotten her native tongue.

As I said above, there aren’t many twists and turns of a plot in this narrative. It’s a character study of a person who embodies an entire people and at the end, becomes a metaphor. Both actors and the production crew that assists them each night should be proud of their effort here, and The Chinese Lady is the first production I have written about here that I will be returning and paying my own money to make sure the teenagers in my life get a chance to experience. You, dear reader, should do the same.

(The Chinese Lady is playing at Tipping Point Theatre at 361 E. Cady St in Northville, now through March 3^rd. Tickets are available at www.tippingpointtheatre.com, calling the box office at 248-347-0003, or writing ‘tix@tippingpointtheatre.com’)