Wai Ching Ho, Daisuke Tsuji, and Amy Keum in Laowang, A Chinatown King Lear. Photo: James Leynse

I have a confession: It took me a long time to warm up to King Lear. It’s considered by many to be Shakespeare’s finest play, and perhaps even the greatest play in the English language play, but it wasn’t until I read Jane Smiley’s brilliant adaptation, the novel A Thousand Acres, that I started to appreciate the original. Good adaptations can do that, make you better understand the source material. So, too, as it turns out, can mediocre ones.

Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear declares itself in the title, so no surprise that the storyline, an elderly person wrestling with how best to divide their estate between two undeserving heirs and one worthy one while slowly devolving into madness while those heirs scheme to disempower them, sounds familiar.

But this retelling by Alex Lin has made significant changes. For one thing, there are the obvious gender updates: Lear is steely Chinese grandmother A-Poh (Wai Ching Ho) and one of the heirs (grandchildren, not children) is a man. For another, though older siblings Amy (Cindy Cheung) and Stephen (Jon Norman Schneider) scheme, they are unambitious and unimaginative in their plotting. Their (in this retelling understandable) distaste for their grandmother doesn’t translate into action against her. Instead, their materialism merely inspires them to agree to another character’s plan to try and disinherit their siblings. And since the plot is unrealized, they never actually do anything bad. In any case, their monomaniacal focus on money is hard to fault when A-Poh has the same attitude from the first scene.

Other alterations are similarly unsatisfying. Younger sister and Cordelia-substitute Lai-Fa (Amy Keum) is kinder to her grandmother but offers no real support to the ailing A-Poh, nor does she provide a believable alternative to cashing out. Laowang’s antagonist, Wesley (Daisuke Tsuji), a combination of two Lear roles, brothers do-gooder Edgar and evil counterpart Edmund, gets a backstory that justifies his anger and makes A-Poh the villain. But this is at the expense of the rest of the play. By show’s end, there is no one and nothing to root for.

It’s a shame; conceptually, I like Lin’s update. I want to look at Lear’s madness through modern eyes. I want to understand sibling dynamics in this partly assimilated fourth generation Chinese American family. I want to know how immigration and resettlement have affected not just A-Poh but the generations who came after. I want to embrace the New York references in this retelling of an English classic. In practice, though, the production fails to live up to the premise or offer any real insight into these characters. Yes, A-Poh has dementia, but to what end? And making her so unlikeable steals thunder from the other characters. Even basic plot dynamics are nonsensical. The grandchildren, searching for A-Poh, keep finding then losing her. Why? Beats me.

One might think modern sensibilities prevent the embrace of Elizabethan drama’s strict good and evil archetypes, but Lin’s script and the over-the-top direction by Joshua Kahan Brody seem willing to go there, especially in scenes with Tsuji’s Wesley, when the acting style shifts from realism to the exaggerated villainy one might find in commedia dell’arte or high melodrama. Rather than bringing us closer to understanding something about aging or family dynamics, the inconsistent tone muddles the action. When the play returns to realism for its emotional conclusion, I found myself skeptical; sincere moments feel out of place .

It’s hard to lay this at the feet of the actors; they are merely doing what is asked. They do a fine job shifting characters and acting styles, and pull off the sometimes physically demanding staging with aplomb. Cindy Cheung as Amy and Daisuke Tsuji as Wesley have a nice stage presence and are fun to watch. Wai Ching Ho, playing Lear equivalent A-Poh, displays a broad range and hits her anger convincingly, but because she kept going up on her lines in the first scene, I found myself worrying about the actor for the first half of the show.

Also distracting: the stage-left ladder built into Wilson Chin’s barebones set. It’s prominent and I kept waiting for it to be used. Why is it there? I appreciate Tina McCartney’s costumes, which help us distinguish between eras in the show’s otherwise fluid timescape. Lighting and sound, by Reza Behjat and Nicholas Drashner respectively, are competent, though neither contributes much beyond basic functionality.

Rewriting King Lear (or any canonical text) is a high-risk, high-reward strategy. When it succeeds, when you get an old dog to perform new tricks, it is thrilling. But when it doesn’t work (and I fear Laowang falls into this category), it’s a real letdown. Whenever it strays from the source material, the play demonstrates why Shakespeare’s classic works so well. And that’s a shame, because there’s so much in the four-hundred-year-old play that would benefit from a fresh coat of paint.