Bearing the weight of a humongous nation’s conflicted identity on your shoulders is surely no easy task for an actor. Yet a graceful BD Wong manages it with barely a stoop of self-consciousness in “The Great Leap,” Lauren Yee’s global-vision variation on a by-the-numbers sports soap opera. Mr. Wong portrays Wen Chang, a Beijing university basketball coach of the 1970s and ’80s, in this congested tale of two countries, which opened on Monday night at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage II. Wen Chang’s job has given him unexpected material comforts and, more distressing, a visibility he never asked nor hoped for. A rehabilitated product of the Cultural Revolution, Wen Chang explains that “growing up, you did not want to be someone”: “You wanted to be the person three people behind someone.

Source: New York Times June 05, 2018 01:45 UTC