'King of the Yees' Off-Broadway review — a father-daughter story with a surrealist spin

Read our review of King of the Yees off Broadway, a new semi-autobiographical comedy by Lauren Yee, directed by Joshua Kahan Brody for Signature Theatre.

Summary

• King of the Yees is a meta-theatrical show exploring playwright Lauren Yee's relationship with her father and their shared Chinese American identity
• The play does not follow a traditional plot but plays with form, characterization, and style to represent Yee's deepening understanding of her father and his cultural values
• The show is recommended to see with your parents, for fans of movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once, and for people interested in works about assimilation, identity, and generational differences

Will the real Larry and Lauren Yee please stand up? King of the Yees at Signature Theatre opens with David Shih and Maureen Sebastian performing as the father-daughter duo — but you'd be forgiven for being confused since the program lists Francis Jue as Larry and Kelly Marie Tran as Lauren. Turns out, Shih and Sebastian are actors playing the Yees, Jue and Tran are the "real" Yees, and then there's the real-real Lauren Yee, who isn't on stage but is the show's playwright. Got all that?

Yes, it's all quite convoluted — but so, too, is unpacking your relationship with your family history and culture. For Tran-as-Lauren (whom I will call Lauren from here on out), King of the Yees already has to cover enough without Jue-as-Larry (Larry, from here on) wandering onto the scene to offer up additional Yee lore. Lauren reacts to Larry's arrival like an embarrassed teenager, "my-dad-is-so-uncool" vibes radiating off her, and her exasperation reveals a deeper rift in her relationship with her well-meaning father.

Larry — the leader of a Yee-exclusive, male-run, nearly obsolete social club in San Francisco's Chinatown — champions community for its own sake, particularly among Yees regardless of relation. (Heaven forbid there are only Wongs left; this is a running joke in the play.) Lauren — who doesn't speak Chinese, lives in New York, married a Jewish man, might move to Berlin, and might not want kids — doesn't have the same instinct to unquestioningly shepherd a community and legacy she feels more removed from.

Larry's own point of view gets rocked when an unrelated Yee, a politician whom he tirelessly (and seemingly thanklessly) supported, is exposed as corrupt. Just before intermission, Larry disappears (and the ever-endearing Jue is much missed), pushing Lauren onto a fantastical Into the Woods-esque quest in Act 2: Collect three items, make an offering to the ancestors, and be granted passage to the place your father has gone. This second half almost feels like an entirely different play from the first as Lauren ventures into a series of undefined liminal spaces where she encounters various figures that represent Chinese cultural stereotypes, or else figures from Larry's own tales heard in the play's first half.

The whole thing clicked for me during a scene in which Lauren and a traditional Chinese lion dancer perform the Wobble, the Cotton Eye Joe, and the choreography from Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" music video. These American touchpoints serve as her inroads to better understand her father and the nuances of the culture he holds so dear, while her simplistic preconceptions — represented by Shih and Sebastian as the actors, whose "offstage" conversations are shallow mirrors of the ones Lauren and Larry have — fall away. (Luckily, the nimble and excellent Shih, Sebastian, and Jon Norman Schneider, rounding out the ensemble, continually reemerge in a variety of roles each.)

King of the Yees is less of a traditional family play and more of a formal experiment, one that's at times confounding but never boring, and sure to leave you with more questions than answers. It might also make you want to call your dad.

King of the Yees summary

In the meta-theatrical King of the Yees, playwright Lauren Yee explores her relationship to her father, Larry Yee, and where his and her relationships to their Chinese American identity differ.

Act 1 is set at the Yee-exclusive members' club her father runs, where the play is ostensibly being staged — until Larry arrives and hijacks the proceedings to Lauren's chagrin. When he mysteriously disappears from the club, Lauren goes on a surreal journey in Act 2 to find him, encountering various embodiments of Chinese culture, history, and stereotypes that shift her own worldview.

King of the Yees premiered in 2017 at Chicago's Goodman Theatre and was staged by Center Theatre Group in L.A. later that year.

What to expect at King of the Yees

It's best to go into King of the Yees without expectations of traditional plays or family dramas. Act 2 has more of a plot than Act 1, but even so, the whole thing is more of a psychic journey than a linear story. The best thing you can do is buckle up and enjoy the ride.

King of the Yees runs 2 hours and 10 minutes, including an intermission. If it helps to plan your day, that's pretty much exact: In her closing monologue, Tran's character names the current date and time. It was 4:10 for my 2 p.m. matinee.

What audiences are saying about King of the Yees

As of writing, King of the Yees has a 76% audience approval rating on Show-Score, averaged from 14 reviews. There and on other digital forums like Mezzanine, audiences praised the cast but shared mixed responses to the sprawling scope of Yee's writing.

• "A meta examination of a Chinese-American 30- year-old playwright's relationship with her 60- year-old father and what the past, present, and future means to each of them. It's funny, warm, and moving. Not at all didactic." - Show-Score user Supersleuth
• "A lot of promising material, but didn't quite work on a structural level [...] That being said, there's a lot of fun stuff in here, and Francis Jue really has developed a niche as Playwright's Semi-Fictional Father." - Mezzanine user Sara Hardwick
• "I loved Mother Russia, [Yee's] last play. This one is much more personal. I found it to be interesting and entertaining but felt that she dealt with too many issues so that ultimately it seemed scattered and unfocused. The acting was uniformly excellent particularly Francis Jue and Kelly Marie Tran. However the direction seemed sluggish." - Show-Score user David Cash
• "Lauren Yee really gets to let loose in act two, giving us increasingly absurd scenarios with idiosyncratic one-off characters played gamely by the three non-Yee cast members. This, as it turns out, is one of the most thrilling and hilarious sequence of scenes you can see anywhere in New York right now." - Mezzanine user Derek Kahle

Read more audience reviews of King of the Yees on Show-Score.

Who should see King of the Yees

• King of the Yees is a great show to see with your parents, especially if you don't always see eye to eye. You'll have something in common to talk about — and there's plenty to talk about — after watching Yee's play together.
• Fans of meta-theatre will enjoy unpacking the various layers of King of the Yees as it "goes off the rails" of what Yee's play is "supposed" to be.
• Fans of Everything Everywhere All at Once may enjoy King of the Yees, which also takes a surreal approach to exploring the complicated relationships between members of a Chinese American family.
• The show's exploration of assimilation, family history, and identity is particular to Chinese Americans and Yee's experience, but anyone who's experienced a conflict between their American-ness and their belonging to another immigrant culture and lineage may relate to Yee's grappling with her own identity.

Learn more about King of the Yees off Broadway

Learn more and get King of the Yees tickets on New York Theatre Guide. King of the Yees is at the Pershing Square Signature Center through November 15.

Photo credit: King of the Yees off Broadway. (Photos by HanJie Chow)