The World of Extreme Happiness: Review by Helen Shaw
The little-known tenth Muse—my favorite one, actually—is Rage. She doesn't hang about twiddling a lyre; instead, she brandishes a whip, accelerating a play by lashing it from within. Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's black comedy The World of Extreme Happiness obeys that hectoring goddess: Its best moments roar with anger, which lets us overlook the few dramaturgically frustrating ones. The play has high points and low, but the final three scenes slam into place like heavy doors, turning the funny, brutal show into something red with real fury.
Somewhere in rural China, a heavily pregnant woman (Jo Mei) is standing in the doorway of her hut, cursing like a sailor and pushing like mad. The baby eventually emerges, but it's a girl, so the midwife (Sue Jin Song) dumps her into the pig-slop bucket to die. (The plunk of that little body into the pail is a hard noise to forget.) The infant does survive, but even long after her ugly baptism, young Sunny (Jennifer Lim) stays in the muck. Now a teenager cleaning toilets in a Shenzhen factory, Sunny must deal with her despicable father, Li Han (James Saito), brother Pete (Telly Leung), dizzy friend and self-help aficionado Ming Ming (Mei, doing great work again), and an unhelpful supervisor (Francis Jue). “Be glad you were born with a penis,” Sunny snaps at Pete as she heads off to clean another bathroom, hoping that a manager's recent suicide will open up some opportunity.
Cowhig crams events into her story. A quick kidnapping is never alluded to again; there's also a disconnected scene about government surveillance. The play teems with hints that there are other, unseen plots bearing on the fates of the factory owners, rich “city people” far from both Sunny's interest and, it sometimes seems, Cowhig's. Where playwright and production catch fire is when it tells Sunny's warped Cinderella story, in which the position of fairy godmother is filled by self-empowerment guru Mr. Destiny (Jue) and her little helpers toy with killing themselves.
Director Eric Ting and the designers do strong work at creating a world both real and mythic: Jenny Mannis makes the costumes a touchstone of believability, while Mimi Lien's set and Tyler Micoleau's lighting turn the theater into a mysterious concrete maze. At the center of it—a Minotaur trying to turn herself into a hero through positive thinking—is Lim. Her beautiful performance embraces opposites; her Sunny is vulnerable and tough-minded, gullible and nobody's fool. Cowhig is transparently furious about what is happening to girls like Sunny and our willful ignorance about the plight of workers in China. In Lim, her play has a magnificent cudgel; you cannot watch her bright, open face without feeling wounded, struck right to the heart.—Helen Shaw
Manhattan Theatre Club (see Off Broadway). By Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. Directed by Eric Ting. With ensemble cast. Running time: 1hr 35mins. No intermission.