Renowned actor and San Francisco native BD Wong returns to his hometown from March 6-31 to star in Lauren Yee's "The Great Leap," a new play at American Conservatory Theater. The play is about the relationship between two basketball coaches, one American and the other Chinese. The plot is driven by a young Asian American boy in San Francisco's Chinatown who desperately wants to be on the team. He talks the American coach into letting him play so he can go and play in China. The show is partly about the boy learning about himself.
"My character is thrust into basketball by accident," Wong tells the B.A.R. "He's originally intended to be the translator for the American coach when the coach comes to teach the Chinese how to play basketball in 1971. He grows to love basketball a great deal, and eventually becomes the Chinese basketball coach. Eighteen years later, the two coaches are rematched against each other in this game."
Wong said that a basketball game is played on stage "in a very theatrical way. The main characters in the play struggle with making choices in their lives that can make them happy. We all struggle with how far to go when it comes to making ourselves happy, and what it will take for us to become happy. Some people have a much easier time going for their bliss, while others struggle tremendously with it. Using basketball as a metaphor, one of the themes of the play is whether you run or stand still."
Wong is well-known for his roles on stage, screen and TV. Early in his career the openly gay actor won a Tony Award for his work in "M. Butterfly." Based on Puccini's "Madame Butterfly," the show told the story of Song Liling (Wong), a Chinese opera singer who has an affair with a French diplomat. The diplomat has no idea that the woman he loves is actually a man.
Wong's profile was raised higher when he was cast as Dr. Henry Wu in Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park," a role he repeated in two later films of the popular franchise. TV audiences know Wong for his portrayal of Dr. George Huang in "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," and as Professor Hugo Strange in "Gotham." Wong said there are challenges in being an openly gay Asian actor in Hollywood.
"It is a struggle to be a minority of one sort or another, or a gay person, in this country in general," he said. "Struggle is a very strong word. Struggle is not a constant, beaten-down kind of feeling, but it does manifest itself in real ways in one's career as an actor. None of us will ever completely eradicate racism and homophobia, and there's always going to be challenges along the way. If you've been doing it for as long as I have, you understand how to circumvent those challenges."
Wong feels things can get better through the authentic telling of people's stories. "When we understand other people's situations and understand how close they are to our own, we can be open to them and embrace them," he said.
The actor has never been afraid to take a public stand for the authentic portrayal of Asian characters in popular entertainment. In 1990 he filed a complaint with Actor's Equity when it was announced that Jonathan Pryce, a Caucasian actor, would be portraying The Engineer, a Eurasian character, in the Broadway production of the musical "Miss Saigon," a role Pryce had already played in London. Wong felt the casting of Pryce would take away work from Asian performers. At first Equity agreed to remove Pryce from the production, but Pryce was reinstated after Cameron Mackintosh, the show's creator, threatened to close down the production.
Wong is a strong advocate for the LGBT community, and a supporter of the Ali Fortney Center, a community center in New York for LGBT homeless youth. "A lot of people shelter themselves and are perfectly happy being sheltered, not learning about others," he said. "To use the gay example, they're perfectly happy not having gayness demystified for them. When I say demystified, I mean understanding that their schoolteachers, their cops and their firefighters are gay. That's a very simple thing to spell out for people, that it's really quite normal to be gay. I think we're inching towards that, but right now you feel people wanting to shut their windows. They're almost willfully not wanting to learn how normal being gay actually is."
He points toward the current TV landscape, which offers hundreds of channels and streaming services where a diverse array of programming is offered. "That content can be a window to understanding all different kinds of people," he said. "So as an actor I feel it's important to choose work that's responsible and to do work that is authentic, to spread the word about the binding qualities of humanity."
Wong is excited to be returning to his hometown in "The Great Leap." It's his second go-round with the play, having previously performed it in New York. "I don't usually want to do something again," he said, "but I wanted to do this show again. I wanted to give my mom that hometown experience that she loves so much when I come to perform. I love the resonance of the play and the audience's reaction. It's a very funny, entertaining and quite powerful play. That's a very rare thing."
He hopes that audiences who come see "The Great Leap" will learn a little bit about Chinese and American relations in 1971 and 1989, the play's two time periods. "One of the things that Lauren Yee is going for is showing that one person's actions can resonate in the world in these divisive times," Wong said. "It's more and more essential for us to choose to take a stand."
Ticket information: www.act-sf.org