Qing (Kim Wuan) battles Sun Ce (David Lee Hunyh) for a place in the military.
The Qiao sisters, Qing and Wan, have not been well known outside Chinese history. They first appeared as minor characters in the 14th-century Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Since then, they have turned up as supporting characters in the Chinese opera Fenghuang Er Qiao and, most recently, as protagonists of movies like John Woo’s Red Cliff (2008) and the video game Dynasty Warriors. For Warrior Sisters of Wu, Damon Chu draws on their shared mythology but also on Much Ado About Nothing and Pride and Prejudice. While Chua’s writing doesn’t reach the literary heights of Shakespeare or Austen, his acknowledgment of the rich cultural heritage and archetypes ranging from ancient China to 19th-century England root Warrior Sisters in dramatic material that promises the best that hundreds of years of storytelling have to offer.
The play begins in the late 1st century A.D: the end of the Han dynasty is near, and the Qiao sisters, Qing and Wan, practice kung fu, but they can’t fight because they’re women. Their father, Lord Qiao, wants both of his daughters to be married, so Wan and general Zhou Yu, her fiancé, try to pair Qing with Sun Ce, the general who is Zhou’s superior.
Zhou Yu (Vin Kridakorn) flirts with his fiancée Wan (Nancy Ma).
What ensues has a mostly dry and theatrical tone, but there’s a beauty to it. There are brief moments of colloquialism, but mostly Chua’s text is stately and pronounced:
Wan: When he sees your talent …
Qing: Please.
Wan: He’s a great admirer. According to Zhou Yu.
Qing: I don’t think so. I’ll let you in on a secret. He’s a total chauvinist.
The relationship between Qing and Wan is believable, but the chemistry between Nancy Ma and Vin Kridakorn is so weak that it’s almost nonexistent, with Wuan and David Lee Hunyh, as Qing and Sun Ce, respectively, close behind. The show tries and fails to play both relationships with sentimentality. Chua and the actors deliver the rest of the story straight, much appreciated in today’s landscape of stories that commit to nothing in particular.
Qing (Wuan) and Sun Ce (Hunyh) see one another eye-to-eye.
Michael C. Liu as the kindhearted Lord Qiao, and Dinh James Doan as Xie, a cousin and suitor hungry to inherit the Qiao house, offer some comic relief, as do Zhou Yu and Qing. But all the performances are of a similar quality, torn between being the beating heart of the show or the comic relief; they all work as the straight man.
Under Jeff Liu’s direction, the play oscillates between well-paced and oddly slow. The rare scene that features five or six actors onstage is brisk, but when the number on the stage dips, so does the show’s energy. At times, the performers (particularly Kim Wuan as Qing) try to compensate for this by playing to the back of the house, which feels appropriate for the production’s often heightened style.
Michael G. Chin’s sword-fighting choreography tries to evoke martial-arts cinema and the intricacies of combat, but the sword-fighting appears half-committed, almost accidental. By contrast, when the performers drop the swords and engage in hand-to-hand struggles, the fight scenes become direct and more exciting.
Wan (Ma) and Qing (Wuan) comfort their ailing faither, Lord Qiao (Michael C. Liu). Photographs by Russ Rowland.
The political subplot of Warrior Sisters is also underutilized, which wouldn’t be a problem if it had been just used just as a flourish. Instead, the characters treat the end of an empire with a reverence that the audience never shares, because the end of the empire never comes. Both acts feel like they end too soon: Act I, just as the story is beginning, and Act II, in a rush to pick up the slack. The play also tackles the parallel between Confucianism and Taoism with conservatism and progressivism.
With all this on its mind, Warrior Sisters in the end feels unfocused. While there’s too much subject matter, the subject matter is often interesting; the performances are decent, yet there’s a lack of chemistry among the leading couples.
Certainly, the production is beautiful: Sheryl Liu’s set design encompasses shoji screens that divide the perimeter of the theater-in-the-round, forming its wings; tall plants and art adorn the stage. The lighting design by Ayumu Poe Saegusa offers radiant, projected paintings (by Gregory Casparian) and Chinese figures, and these elements together infuse the play with a classical energy, as though it were to being stage in a teahouse.
Still, there’s an huge aesthetic risk taken at the end that doesn’t altogether pay off. It’s a story about Chinese history, but it’s also an amalgamation of two literary classics. Although it doesn’t fulfill the promises of its sources, Warrior Sisters makes for a respectable try.
Warrior Sisters of Wu runs through March 10 at A.R.T/NY Mezzanine Theater (502 W 53rd St.). Evening performances are 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are available by visiting panasianrep.org/wsw.
Playwright: Damon Chua
Director: Jeff Liu
Sets: Sheryl Liu
Costumes: Karen Boyer
Lighting: Poe Saegusa
Sound Design: Da Xu
Fight Choreography: Michael G. Chin
Projections & Video Design: Gregory Casparian
