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The results of that experiment, in the play's world (which has been chillingly rendered by director Eric Ting), are—spoiler alert—not good. But the journey there has much to recommend it in the broader view, even when the evening is not as speedbump-free as it could be. The opening scene sets the unyielding tone for what's to follow: In rural China in 1992, a mother and father give birth to yet another daughter, their fifth, and promptly dump her in the pig slop bucket. Upon discovering she doesn't die instantly, they have a change of heart and decide to raise her, only to sell her once she comes of age. Fast-forward 18 years. The girl, Sunny (Jennifer Lim), has lived up to being unwanted, and has a dim view of what's possible, an outlook that's made more grey still by moving to the big city and working as a janitor to support her father, Li Han (James Saito), and younger brother, Pete (Telly Leung), back home. (Mother died giving birth to Pete.) Sunny's boss at the factory, Old Lao (Francis Jue), is a sarcastic realist who's survived many reforms (most notably Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward), and squelches within seconds any ambitions the girl may conjure. Ming-Ming (Jo Mei), Sunny's friend and equally low-level coworker, is not so easily swayed, however. She's been dazzled by a self-help superstar named Mr. Destiny who promises people can have whatever they want if only the change their perspectives from negative to positive. And when Ming-Ming drags Sunny to meet Mr. Destiny (Jue again), she's pulled up onstage in front of hundreds of people and made to envision, state, and commit to not merely the life wants to live, but changing her past to make it a reality in the present. Cowhig lets us see the tangible benefits this has in the short term, as Sunny develops the confidence to stand up to and "persuade" Old Lao to promote her to a supervisory position that came open when its previous holder committed suicide. And she smartly sets Sunny and Ming-Ming's quests for betterment against the standard of Artemis Chang (Sue Jin Song), a high-ranking government official who reportedly rose from poverty to the upper echelons of power, just as they hope to, letting neither her gender nor institutional strictures stand in her way. That example, in fact, further leads the girls to believe they can do anything, and that they ought to try—and Cowhig spins that fantasy and its outcome just as well. The World of Extreme Happiness thrives on the contrast, largely unstated, between capitalist and communist thinking, and Cowhig doesn't shy from depicting some of the psychological and physical brutalities inherent in both. She can, at times, take on too much; this 95-minute, intermissionless play is packed with subplots, which include the factory owner's attempts to revitalize his plant's image, Artemis's run-ins with shadowy Party operatives, the woes of a family friend's good-for-nothing son, Pete's pursuing an opera career, and more, and these tend to detract from more than support the underlying themes. The acting, too, is patchy. Lim is outstanding as Sunny, piling on each new layer of confusion and delusion with gusto while not abandoning the terror and hopelessness beneath them; she makes a few major transformations along the way, each of them stunning with its completeness. (Her last one is probably her most impressive, but they're all good.) Saito finds two different but compelling forms of despondency in his characters, and Jue convinces as men who disagree violently on what can and should be. But Leung, Mei, and Song push their roles into caricature, an approach that seems at odds with the otherwise prevailing gritty realism. That's reflected in everything from Mimi Lien's sets, which draw eerie parallels between gleaming offices, totalitarian back rooms, thriving cities, and desolate farms, Jenny Mannis's appropriately dehumanizing costumes, Tyler Micoleau's piercing lighting, and Mikhail Fiksel's haunting sound design. And Ting pulls no punches, unlocking both the optimism and the harshness that drive everyone here for one reason or another. He ensures that, at every step along the way, you buy into the same dreams Sunny does—no small achievement. Yes, those dreams eventually turn into nightmares, and those are just as central to The World of Extreme Happiness—perhaps even more so, as they represent the status quo from which everyone, whether they'll admit as much or not, hopes to escape. Cowhig captures at once the allure of that freedom and its unattainability, reminding us that however we may be unleashed by liberty of the mind, our bodies are forever controlled by those who see power—not potential—as the only force worth wielding.
The World of Extreme Happiness
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