Cindy Cheung, Jon Norman Schneider, and Rob Yang in Catch as Catch Can. Photo: Joan Marcus

In the last scene of Mia Chung’s Catch as Catch Can, Tim Phelan (Rob Yang) asks his oldest friend, Robbie Lavecchia (Jon Norman Schneider)–a friend who’s shown up for him in some difficult times well beyond the efforts of Tim’s own brother–this question: “D’you know who you are?” Robbie’s stammering answer–”Uh, I mean, like yeah, uh sure… I think, I mean I think I do”–is still far more of a certainty than Tim can muster. 

Tim’s mother, Theresa (also played by Yang), and Robbie’s parents, Roberta (also played by Schneider) and Lon (Cindy Cheung, who doubles as Robbie’s sister, Daniela), would probably look at you like you had two heads if you asked them that question. They are deeply rooted, deeply certain of their place in the world: Irish or Italian. Catholic. Working-class. Neighbors, embedded in a network of cousins and co-workers and community that fills their New England town. But now their own certainties are cracking open, too. 

Theresa was widowed a while back, and now she’s wondering “if times had been different,” what would her life have been? Both of Theresa’s sons have moved to the other side of the country, though Tim is now staying with his mom on the East Coast while sorting out plans to move back with his new fiancee, who Theresa is worried will be a “fish out of water” on account of her being Korean American. (Theresa gets her name wrong in a different way almost every time she says it, and that’s just the beginning.)  Robbie served in the military in Korea and married, then divorced, a Korean woman (about whom Roberta’s opinions are even more blatantly racist than Theresa’s). Daniela is a career woman, not sure whether she wants to marry or have kids, and even less certain about whether she wants them with her current partner, Sam, who’s Jewish.

There’s so much love here–between the parents and children, yes, but also among the three children and perhaps most tangibly between the Lavecchia children and Theresa, and then between Tim and the Lavecchia parents, than between the parent-child pairs. At the same time,  the cracks between them widen with every scene; that unity is perhaps only achieved by the children’s willingness to pretend to be what their parents wish they were. Now that pretense begins to crumble–both through the actions of Daniela and Robbie to stake their own places and through Tim’s slow reveal of the lies that have comprised that pretense. By the end of the play, the unity among the families is shattered: Daniela has taken a promotion and moved away from her family; Robbie’s not speaking to Roberta; and Theresa is unable to understand the place in which Tim finds himself. And yet those bonds are literally written into their bodies–into the double casting, where each actor crosses gender and generation to play their own parent. 

It’s the play’s central conceit, and one that Chung and director Daniel Aukin build slowly: the first scene is Theresa and Roberta, positioned in the innermost of the three spaces, each with a progressively larger frame, that comprise Matt Saunders’s set. Only after we’ve had a good long scene to understand the disjunction between who these characters are–white New Englanders, parents of grown children, women with the ethos and prejudices and even the local accents of a different age–and who is playing them–Asian American actors, late thirties, men–do the rest of the characters come in. Only once we’ve had a chance to see the way these characters’ prejudices–in particular about the two never-seen Korean/Korean American women who are involved with their sons–butt up against our tangible awareness of the Asian female actress playing Lon do we step into a scene with the younger generation, into a more “natural” diction and physicality for these actors. 

Under Aukin’s direction, each character has a distinct way of holding their body, of using their voice: Schneider’s Roberta holds her hands differently than Schneider’s Tim; Yang’s Theresa has a sense of physical self-possession that’s very different from Yang’s Tim, who seems often to want to make himself smaller; Cheung’s Lon folds in on himself in the shoulders where her Daniela moves easily. This gets really tricky in a late scene where the actors are speaking as the parents while their physical bodies are playing the children–one of the (relatively few) places where the construct works perhaps better intellectually than emotionally. (It doesn’t help that Tim is sitting still for most of this, or that the scene is played in the interior upstage space, farthest from the audience.)  Despite the strong work the actors are doing, in scenes where all six characters are in play, it can be hard to keep up with who’s who, although that blurriness–the way you do sometimes turn into your own mother in a big family gathering, is no doubt part of the point. And on the other hand, in a scene that’s a two-character monologue, Tim and Theresa are instantly recognizable; it’s one of the show-stopping moments of the piece.

Chung’s script specifies that the characters, who are white New Englanders of a certain provincialism, should be played by an ensemble who is either all white or all East Asian. The first New York production (in 2018, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll) chose the opposite option, casting white actors, and the results felt fascinatingly different. (It is also true that the world is different in many ways from 2019.) 

In the first production, with white actors, the play felt like it was about generational change—how children both reify and reject the things they learn from their parents; how you embody your past even as you try to live in the sometimes terrifying present; what you can’t even talk about with your parents and still love them–and the loss of the certainties of the past. Theresa and Roberta’s unthinking, unexamined racism seemed like character traits, attitudes their children were moving away from. There was something uncanny in the way that the performers seemed almost more comfortable embodying their cross-gender parents, a sense of rootedness living in those characters that their children didn’t possess, even as the children had the weight of mimetic realism on their side.

Here, the whole experience feels more about alienation, about the experience of dislocation—from one’s family, from what you thought you knew about the world, and ultimately from yourself. Even when not crossing age and gender, there’s that gap between the acting body we see and the character they play, There’s that physical reminder that the simplicity of the small-town white community that the Phelans and Lavecchias inhabit was never as simple as it seemed; that the consequences of that unthinking, unexamined racism are borne by the people who are disparaged and by the next generation–borne by the literally invisible Cindy and Minjung, Robbie’s ex-wife and Tim’s much-discussed fiancee, neither of whom appears in the play. Do you know who you are? Answering yes, here, feels like a lie.