Nobody translates Chinese culture for clueless Yankees better than Lauren Yee, even if doing so demands a certain level of mythologizing. The most obvious of these may be the Hollywood myth of the pure-in-heart athlete overcoming obstacles to triumph in the Big Final Game, but we also tap into older sagas recounting the search of a young man born in mysterious circumstances to discover his true lineage, before we finish with our hero forever lost to the mists of unrecorded history. Nobody writes better feisty-old-men roles than Yee, either. Here we have two of them: Saul, the city-bred basketball team coach at the University of San Francisco, and Wen Chang, the state-appointed basketball team coach at Beijing University. In 1971, the men met at an exhibition match organized by their respective governments, where the former proposed that, since the length of an average player's career was 18 years, they play a rematch in 1989. When the date arrives, Wen's team boasts titans recruited from the Mongolian regions of the Communist empire, while Saul must rely on an undersized ringer from the streets of SanFran's Chinatown to defend America's title. Beijing is currently undergoing unrest arising from student protests in Tiananmen Square, however, making any suspicion of dissent dangerous, to its own citizens and foreign visitors alike. The complexities of only four actors representing warring nations, ideologies and two generations of filial strife are mitigated by Steppenwolf's dazzling tech-coordination—stage magic encompassing vintage news footage, digital scoreboard displays, video-game light-painting, period sports-arena playlists and pivot-on-a-dime footwork—but what ultimately gets our blood pumping and eyes dripping is the likewise tightly-coordinated verbal delivery of Glenn Obrero as the questing adolescent rebel, Deanna Myers as his cautious brainy cousin, and James Seol and Kieth Kupferer as weary survivors of gladiatorial combat bestowing temporal glory on its contestants in exchange for all-too-permanent sacrifices.
