By my count, Outside People is the third theatre piece about a white American in contemporary China to hit town this season. On the tails of Mike Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs and David Henry Hwang's Chinglish, Zayd Dohrn's dark comedy deals with Yankee naiveté regarding cultural differences when it comes to sex and business overseas.
Geeky filmmaker Malcolm (Matt Dellapina), drowning in his own neuroses, arrives in Beijing at the urging of his old college roommate, Chinese-born Da Wei, a/k/a David (Nelson Lee), who wants to set him up with a job. David is a hotshot in some unspecified business and before his pal has even had a chance to rest up from his flight he has him in a hip lounge sharing drinks with a beautiful local, Xiao Mei (Li Jun Li). With their limited knowledge of each other's language, the two can barely hold a conversation, but at the end of the evening Xiao Mei makes it crystal clear to the surprised American that she intends spend the night in his bed.
Xiao Mei works for David; not exactly as a prostitute but technically as Malcolm's language instructor. (This, after the first two scenes have established their difficulty communicating.) As David explains to his bud, being an American with the ability to take a woman away from China through marriage pushes him up a few points on the dating scale and makes him a more attractive assignment to women like Xiao Mei.
While Malcolm has convinced himself that he has fallen in love with a woman whose motives he doesn't trust, David has his own issues with his moneyed Cameroonian girlfriend Samanya (Sonequa Martin-Green), who resents being thought of as foreign after being raised in China.
While the setup has promise, as well as the theme of how each character is seen as an outsider, the men are scripted in such unrealistic extremes that the story turns to fluff. Lee is appropriately slick and self-centered as David, but the character's disregard for women is so broadly written that the actor might as well be twirling a greasy moustache between his fingers. Malcolm's innocence in the way he accepts being thought of as a prize in China after seeing himself as a loser in the states borders on stupidity.
Despite its flaws, the script has some solid moments and clever exchanges. There's a sweetly comic scene where Malcolm tries telling Xiao Mei before they have sex that he has herpes. But quite a bit of the play is spoken in Mandarin without the use of subtitles and unfortunately those moments are not scripted in a manner that lets an English-speaking audience in on what's being said.
Still, director Evan Cabnet's slick and sexy production, played by a capable cast, is suitably entertaining for much of the play's ninety minutes. It's just when you're looking for something beneath the shiny surface that Outside People loses its attractiveness.
Photos by Carol Rosegg: Top: Li Jun Li and Matthew Dellapina; Bottom: Li Jun Li, Nelson Lee, Sonequa Martin-Green and Matthew Dellapina.
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