Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear
Written by Alex Lin; Directed by Joshua Kahan Brody
59E59 | 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
November 1 - December 14, 2025
In Laowang, Alex Lin does not so much adapt King Lear as she does alchemize it—filtering Shakespeare’s monumental study of pride, madness, and filial rupture through the kinetic, polyglot tapestry of New York’s Chinatown, producing a drama at once unmistakably lineage-bound and gloriously its own creature. The subtitle, A Chinatown King Lear, announces the inspiration with almost comically forthright candor, and yet this new work—receiving its world premiere under the aegis of Primary Stages—resists the deadening weight of homage. It breathes, mutters, jokes, harangues, and aches in a distinctly contemporary register, tapping into the particularities of diasporic identity, gentrification’s merciless march, and the jagged intimacies of intergenerational disappointment.
At its storm-tossed center stands Margaret Choy, known to all as A-Poh—played with august ferocity and a flickering vulnerability by Wai Ching Ho. A-Poh, our Chinatown Lear, presides over the shuttered remains of her life’s work, the China Bull & Bear restaurant, a stalwart neighborhood institution now languishing behind a darkened façade as real-estate suitors circle. Enter Wesley Chiu (the slyly understated Daisuke Tsuji), a developer whose boyhood stint as a dishwasher gives him a sentimental alibi for what is essentially a classic bid to transform memory into marketable artifact. His pitch—condos with an attached museum honoring the restaurant—has the oily shine of contemporary benevolence, the kind that hides its rapacity under the veil of “heritage.”
But A-Poh, regal even in decline, plays the negotiation like an emperor dispatching emissaries from a faltering throne, countering Wesley’s offer with imperious bravado. This moment, early in the play, has the delicious exhilaration of watching an aging monarch discover she can still rattle the foundations of her would-be usurpers.
The vultures circling from within her own family, however, prove harder to fend off. A-Poh’s grandchildren—Amy (Cindy Cheung), Steven (Jon Norman Schneider), and the steadfastly loyal Lai-Fa (Amy Keum)—arrive with a welter of old grudges and unresolved rivalries. Amy and Steven, both expatriates of New York and of the emotional terrain of their childhood, fix their gaze on the restaurant’s potential windfall with barely disguised hunger. Lai-Fa, who remained close, both geographically and emotionally, is dismissed by her siblings as A-Poh’s pampered favorite, the Cordelia of this modern retelling—though a Cordelia with more bite, sharper elbows, and a New Yorker’s impatience for self-pity.
Lin makes no secret of the Lear parallels—Amy and Steven as a kind of Goneril and Regan duo with smartphones, Wesley as a smirking, millennial Edmund. But where Shakespeare relished the cosmic cruelty of fate, Lin turns her attention to something more intimate: the crushing emotional calculus of immigrant survival. A-Poh’s dementia, the play’s more literalized echo of Lear’s madness, becomes a narrative portal through which we glimpse the raw, unvarnished beginnings of her American life—her arrival from Hong Kong, her scrappy entrepreneurial ascent, and the ruthlessness born of scarcity and fear. These flashbacks, rendered with fluid theatricality through Wilson Chin’s curtain-partitioned scenic design and Reza Behjat’s delicately shifting lightscapes, illuminate the cultural compromises that haunt her: the dilution of Chinese culinary traditions to appease American palates, the unforgivable yet understandable choice to exploit her own children as unpaid labor.
Lin threads these revelations with a welcome seam of raucous humor—some of Wesley’s attempts at psychological manipulation veer into the gleefully bawdy, startling the audience into the kind of laughter that feels dangerously close to recognition. And the ensemble, doubling nimbly across time and character, keeps the proceedings nimble rather than portentous.
Cheung and Schneider, as the scheming siblings, attack Lin’s acerbic lines with a kind of screwball acidity, their pettiness rendered almost balletic in its precision. Keum’s Lai-Fa radiates a clear-eyed warmth that never lapses into saintliness; she is devoted, yes, but not blind. Tsuji resists the easy path of villainy, allowing Wesley’s opportunism to register as one more symptom of a city where everything—including memory—is for sale. And Ho’s A-Poh is a marvel: imperious, wounded, sly, self-mythologizing, and in her lucidity or confusion always deeply, stubbornly alive.
Under the assured direction of Joshua Kahan Brody, the play teeters with deliberate elegance between comedy and tragedy, never letting one flatten the other. Tina McCartney’s costumes subtly trace generational and cultural fault lines, while Nicholas Drashner’s sound design—particularly a chorus of whispering voices evoking the fractured interior of A-Poh’s mind—adds a spectral note to the proceedings.
With Laowang, Lin inaugurates a season that will soon include her Chinese Republicans at Roundabout Theatre Company, and if this Chinatown Lear is any indication, she is poised to become one of the theater’s most incisive chroniclers of the Asian-American experience. Her voice—wry, wise, compassionate, unsentimental—cuts through the noise with something rarer than originality: clarity.
Laowang does not merely retell King Lear; it refracts it, reframes it, and ultimately reclaims it, transforming the old king’s howl into something recognizably, wrenchingly modern.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 23, 2025 All rights reserved.