King of the Yees

It's strange to think that Lauren Yee's quasi-autobiographical "King of the Yees" has previously played everywhere from LA to Baltimore, given how enmeshed the show is with San Francisco's Chinatown.

Granted, the real life scandal at the heart of the script–the 2014 arrest of political boss Leland Yee for gunrunning, alongside old school Chinatown gangster "Shrimp Boy" Chow–made national headlines. But how many other cities' audiences can still place the names five years later?

In the first half of this two-headed fantasia now running at SF Playhouse, Lauren (played by Krystle Piamonte) struggles to relate to her father Larry, who has dedicated his life to community organizing in Chinatown.

Francis Jue, who appeared in last year's baffling but brilliant "Soft Power" at the Curran, is Larry, here portrayed as superhumanly affable, a one-of-a-kind concoction of general savvy mixed with strategic naivety.

Jue speaks in sweeping terms about the humblest elements of the neighborhood, family history, his daughter, the audience, and the theater itself. He even dives into the aisles to hand out bottled water to patrons; you can't teach that kind of charm.

Piamonte makes a game straight woman for Jue, and the ungainly setup–Larry interrupts Lauren's play about his life and then never actually allows it to start–reflects Lauren's discomfort with her own alienation.

Lauren has no interest in Chinatown, organizing, her father's role as head of the local Yee Association, or even with learning to speak or read Chinese.

Bill English's minimal, barely-there set consists of almost nothing except a pair of gorgeously ornate doors. A doorway, of course, is supposed to be a passage, but also serves as a barrier–the doors, we're told, will always open for the Yee family, but they've never opened to Lauren.

This is rich stuff, as is the hook of Larry's unwitting involvement with real life political corruption.

Local treasure Jomar Tagatac even briefly portrays SF's own convicted gangster turned alleged gangster "Shrimp Boy" Chow, resplendent in fur coat and loud shirt, a casting decision which qualifies as a late Christmas present for audiences.

But the second half of the show pushes Jue almost entirely offstage–a loss the magnitude of which is hard to quantify–and kickstarts a second, radically different plot, in which Lauren quests for her lost father in a Lewis Carroll-like Chinatown dreamscape.

This borders on being a completely different play, and sadly a worse one. Divorced from Jue and the tension of their interaction, Piamonte seems less complete, and the show's emotional center becomes scattered.

Lauren stumbles from one obstacle to another, confronted by figures who represent Chinatown's past and present, mostly rendered as caricatures.

For as busy as the play becomes, all of the action adds little to our sense of how Lauren (the character or the playwright) feels about the city, her dad, or her heritage, and director Joshua Brody seems to have trouble teasing out the substance that is there.

The real story of Lauren and her father is on hold for so long that it becomes surprisingly easy to lose the thread. Their eventual resolution is authentic and stirring, but also brief.

Even Yee's talent for wordplay, which ran wild in her last Playhouse production "in a word" in 2015, only flares up briefly in this show.

Of course you want to love "King of the Yees" for its peculiar humor, self-effacing attitude, and courage to sometimes articulate uncomfortable truths.

But despite the freedom to do seemingly anything and everything, "King of the Yees" seems unwilling to do the one thing it really needs to: just sit still for long enough to tell the real story.

"King of the Yees" runs through March 2 at SF Playhouse, 450 Post Street, San Francisco, California. For tickets and information, call 415-677-9596 or visit https://www.sfplayhouse.org/sfph/