Playwright: Will Cooper At: Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago. Phone: 312-633-0630; $25-$30. Runs through: May 30
Will Cooper likes to see women cry. Or maybe just the two women at the center of his latest play, making its world premiere at Chicago Dramatists. To be sure, one of the lachrymose ladies is foreign-born Chinese, and western literature boasts a long tradition of suffering orientals, from Madame Butterfly to Miss Saigon. But the other weeper is a full-blooded Yankeelineage venerated for its resiliencywhose waterworks nevertheless flow like the mighty Yangtze.
First some historical background: In 1979, the People's Republic of China ( aka our enemy, the communist mainland ) , sought to resolve a Malthusian crisis by imposing legal penalties on families producing too many offspring. Since boys are valued over girls almost universally, this led to a surplus of unwanted female infants consigned to orphanages or simply left to die of neglect. The baby named "Little Jade" by her American adoptive mother ( and don'tcha just love those cute exotic object-based names? ) was found, abandoned, in a rural marketplace, the only clue to her progenitors a pendant cut to match its mirror half should the wearers someday reunite.
Real-life Chinese-American citizens might wonder why a young adult, raised in the comfort of a middle-class home in the U.S., should pine for a cultural heritage so ill-disposed toward her welfare, even granting the nature of youngsters blessed with plenty of contemplative time to question their genealogy. But in order for long-lost Jade to continue speculating on the circumstances of her birth, her rescuer must persist in withholding that informationin this case, out of a perverted notion of parenthood that rejects the inevitability of children ultimately growing up and leaving home. Cooper did not intend for his play to be about a controlling guardian's attempt to imprison her forlorn charge, however, and so these disturbing themes are softened by flashbacks and fantasy-soliloquies, Peking-opera pageantry, Brechtian masks and the aforementioned floods of tears.
Christine Bunuan and Ginger Lee McDermott march through their 90 minutes of sudsy chronologically-muddled paces with heroic stamina, while Eliza Shin, Gordon Chow and Melissa Canciller lend refreshing individuality to the variousand far more interestingauxiliary personnel, all displaying pristine Mandarin pronunciation contributed by dialect coach Cleo Ngiam. But while audiences eager to join the playwright in sentimentalizing the ( yawn ) Mysterious East will find Jade Heart a satisfying three-hankie blubber, ultimately its overwrought emotional tone eclipses whatever discoveries may have once lay in its premise.