Playwright: The Cast
At: Chicago Cultural Center Studio Theater
Phone: (847) 663-9257; $15
Runs through: Sept. 19
Stir-Friday Night bills itself as 'Chicago's premier Asian American comedy troupe.' As far as I know, it's the only one, so their claim is true enough. Even in the sketch comedy universe, power abhors a vacuum.
Directed at a lightning-fast pace by Ranjit Souri, the multi-ethnic cast of nine (Japanese/Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, East Indian and Filipina) zips through a compilation of short scenes and songs from past Stir-Friday Night (SFN) efforts. A few blackout bits went by so quickly I couldn't even get them, but most of the material was planted on solid ground. There's a sketch on Asians Gone Wild, in which a young man pours over an MCAT study guide with a center fold; a funny physical bit about a sumo circus; an Indian superfly preacher; some fun with haiku; a skit about abandoned Asian babies ('There are 3.5 billion more where that one came from.'). There's a sketch in which an Asian coach uses extreme measures to get an Asian kid to practice the piano; a blackout about church-going Asian babes; and a clever song, 'I've Got the I-Always-Gotta-Be-Perfect-Cause-I'm-Asian Blues.'
As funny as some of this material is—and it's generally well-delivered, too—it seems awfully familiar. After nine years, are skits about Asian over achievers, study wonks, marriage pressures from family and precocious children the best SFN can offer? The troupe itself proves that's not the case with several sketches that go deeper. Two of the best are universal, and not really Asian-specific: an extremely clever word-play sketch about pregnancy, and a scene in which three single guys at a wedding hit on a single woman and each one tries to sell her something.
The most trenchant sketch of all touches on racial conflict, with Indians likened to cockroaches, invading another Asian couple's apartment. 'I knew we shouldn't have moved so close to Devon,' one says. 'If you get two, you've got 2,000.' This is the only scene which recognizes that Asia is a continent, not a culture. The sometimes-deep divisions between the various Asian cultures should be fertile ground for comic exploration by SFN.
Other targets come to mind: sketches about Yao Ming and increasingly common Asian professional athletes in America; Asian traditional reticence to discuss sex despite plenty of erotic imagery in Asian arts; super-yuppie entrepreneurs such as publisher Michael Hong; Asian-inspired fusion cooking; the plethora of Asian female news anchors (where DO they all come from?); anime animation; and something about sitar rap, the featured pre-show music. There's nothing wrong with the current show—which is, after all, a representation of past efforts—but I don't want to see this energetic troupe settle into easy repetition of obvious topics. Comedy is too important.