Howard (Francis Jue) pays a surprise visit to his daughter (Geena Quintos) and her unexpected roommate (Ryan Spahn) in Good Enemy (photo by Joan Marcus)
GOOD ENEMY
Audible Theater’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 26, $69.95
www.audible.com
goodenemyplay.com
In 2018, Audible, which produces audiobooks, audio plays, and podcasts, began staging solo shows at the Minetta Lane Theatre that would also be available as Audible Originals. They got off to a terrific start with Billy Crudup in David Cale’s Harry Clarke, Carey Mulligan in Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys, and Lili Taylor in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever as well as Jade Anouka’s Heart, Faith Salie’s Approval Junkie, and Aasif Mandvi’s Sakina’s Restaurant.
The Amazon company has now turned to works with full casts, and the results have not been as successful. Earlier this year Robert O’Hara reimagined Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night as a streamlined Covid story clocking in at a mere 110 mostly disappointing minutes, and now comes the world premiere of Yilong Liu’s hackneyed Good Enemy, which opened tonight and runs through November 26. The play, originally scheduled as two hours with intermission, has been trimmed to 105 minutes without a break but could use more cutting.
In the spring of 2021, Chinese-born Howard (Francis Jue) has enlisted the scraggly Dave (Alec Silver), who sells drugs to school kids, to drive him cross-country so he can pay a surprise visit to his daughter, Momo (Geena Quintos), who is going to college in New York City. Along the way, Dave tries to get Howard to tell him the story of how he escaped Mainland China, hoping that it will be an exciting tale he can turn into a blockbuster Hollywood movie. But Howard refuses to say anything about his past to Dave, or to Momo, who is none too happy about her father’s unannounced arrival at her doorstep. While she had not told him that she was living with Jeff, her white maybe-boyfriend (Ryan Spahn), she lets Howard know that she’s upset that he never talks to her about her mother, who has recently passed. Howard gets riled up whenever anyone brings up his life in China, and it eventually becomes apparent why.
Jiahua (Jeena Yi) tempts Hao (Tim Liu) with the prospect of freedom in Audible Original play (photo by Joan Marcus)
The narrative goes back and forth between 2021 New York and the summer of 1984 in Southern China, where Hao (Tim Liu) — Howard’s Chinese name — a rookie officer for the PRC, is assigned by his superior, Xiong (Ron Domingo), to infiltrate a group of youths experimenting with Western-style freedoms. Hao wants to do his duty, but it becomes complicated when he falls for Jiahua (Jeena Yi), a would-be revolutionary who titillates him and begins teaching him how to swim, perhaps so they can make their way together across the sea to Hong Kong. But Xiong holds something over Hao and Hao knows a secret about Xiong, both of which could ruin the other. Howard watches his earlier self, remembering everything but unwilling to face it all four decades later.
Directed by Obie winner Chay Yew (Cambodian Rock Band, Mojada) Good Enemy is a frustrating play that dangles a carrot that remains confoundingly out of reach. Junghyun Georgia Lee’s set consists of three large, rectangular sections in the back, lit in different colors by Reza Behjat, and with several large white blocks that serve as couches, car seats, desks, and other furniture. Part of the floor occasionally opens up to reveal a river below, where Hao finds peace as he washes his clothes, until Jiahua discovers him there. While touching, the scenes that take place in the river are hard to see for most audience members, since the characters’ heads are so low. Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design often features the ripple of water, particularly at the beginning and the end, but it can get overly loud, applying a metaphor — water as freedom or death, river as an ever-changing living body and a place to wash away one’s sins — with too much force.
Xiong (Ron Domingo) places Hao (Tim Liu) in a difficult position in Good Enemy (photo by Joan Marcus)
The language barrier also gets confusing; everyone speaks in English, but Howard/Hao, Momo, Jiahua, and Dave are actually communicating in Chinese, while Jeff has to use Google Translate to understand the others. In addition, far too many line readings were out of rhythm, with the actors stopping at the wrong moment in sentences, furthering the disorientation of the choppy narrative.
The heart of the play has an important story to tell about the continuing ramifications of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966 that tore families apart, but Chinese native Liu (The Book of Mountains and Seas, Joker) tries to stuff too much in, eventually making us not care enough about the carrot, no matter how hungry we might be.