THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 87
not have the plumpness that Williams’s
script calls for. (At fifty-four, she is also
fifteen or twenty years older than Ser-
afina would be, though you’d never guess
her age.) But she gives Serafina the body
she needs, one that speaks on its own
behalf. A comically flung arm, the sharp,
dismissive flick of a wrist, a round, swiv-
elling hip: this is Italian that we can all
understand. To Serafina, the sensuous
is holy. “They make the life without
glory,” she says, spitefully, of the dried-up
women who mock her. “To me the big
bed was beautiful like a religion.” You
can hear Williams, who was so repressed
by his upbringing that he didn’t so much
as masturbate until he was well into his
twenties, sweeping away years of wasted
chastity with one line.
Tomei’s exceptionally physical per-
formance is so fine-tuned in its expres-
siveness that it verges on dance, but it
doesn’t become a pas de deux until the
play’s third act, when another banana-
truck driver, Alvaro Mangiacavallo
(Emun Elliott, buffo and pheromonal),
appears on her doorstep. He gets into a
fight with a nasty local—xenophobia
bristles here—and, afterward, has a good
cry. In this surprising moment, we see
how Williams, using a man and a woman
to explore his own love for a man, does
heterosexuals a favor, too, by planting the
seed of satisfaction in the unconven-
tional. Alvaro, younger than Serafina and
penniless, is passionate but unheroic, and
Serafina, used to a blunter kind of mas-
culinity, can’t make up her mind about
him. He embarrasses and excites her.
“My husband’s body, with the head of a
clown!” she marvels. That is what this
centaur of a play is like, too: a tragic torso
from which comedy sprouts, ungainly
and irrepressible, singing a song of hope.
“
S
oft Power,” a metafictional fever
dream by David Henry Hwang,
directed with flair by Leigh Silverman
(at the Public), is a hybrid of a zanier
kind. In New York, just before the 2016
election, a playwright called David
Henry Hwang (Francis Jue) takes a
meeting with Xue Xing (Conrad Ri-
camora), a slick film producer from
Shanghai, who wants him to write a
musical, for Chinese audiences, about a
married couple who are tempted to stray.
(The title: “Stick with Your Mistake.”)
Hwang, the deracinated son of Chinese
immigrants—his Mandarin pronunci-
ation is a catastrophe—isn’t sure he can
oblige. He likes American stuff: happy
endings, personal fulfillment, represen-
tative democracy. Then comes the shock
of Trump’s win, followed by personal
disaster, when Hwang is attacked in the
street by a man wielding a knife.
The real Hwang was himself the vic-
tim of a vicious stabbing. His vertebral
artery was severed; police deemed the at-
tack a possible hate crime. The moment
onstage is horrible to watch. What fol-
lows, though, is a woozy delight. Lying
insensible in the hospital, Hwang imag-
ines a big, brash, classic American-style
musical, replete with high-kicking cho-
rus lines and bright harmonies. (The go-
for-broke choreography is by Sam Pin-
kleton, the music and some lyrics by
Jeanine Tesori; Clint Ramos designed
the splashy set, with its lamé curtains and
red lacquered stage.) The catch: the ac-
tors are ethnically Asian. The story, about
a Chinese film producer’s trip to Amer-
ica—cue bedazzled Golden Arches—is,
in part, a cheeky inversion of “The King
and I,” that touching tale of a lone Brit-
ish woman’s efforts to modernize the
Kingdom of Siam. Here, the King is none
other than a disappointed Hillary Clin-
ton (Alyse Alan Louis, the one white cast
member, who looks like she could be
Chelsea’s sister); her salvation, and Amer-
ica’s, depends on Xue Xing, who just might
have something to teach us about the
pragmatic, unwavering Chinese way. If
we don’t learn his lessons, it’s our loss: as
America stumbles on the world stage,
China is waiting in the wings.
Not everything in “Soft Power” feels
fresh; there are fair but worn observa-
tions about the spectacle of American
politics, though I much prefer Hwang’s
antic Hillary, who struts her stuff like a
showgirl when she’d rather be poring
over policy, to the embittered shrew in
Lucas Hnath’s recent “Hillary and Clin-
ton.” But the show is bighearted, goofy,
and something more. American theatre-
goers these days are used to having their
noses rubbed in their greed and tribal-
ism, but Hwang ends on a different note,
affirming the things that could make
America good again: care, compassion,
mutual respect. In Chinese, he tells us,
there’s an expression used by those who
suffer calamity: “Good fortune will fol-
low. If we somehow survive.” ♦
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