About the Play

by Rachel Ropella

It’s 1989 and Chinese American high schooler, Manford Lum, is desperate to play on the University of San Francisco's basketball team and travel for their friendship game in China next month. Saul Slezac, USF's washed-up basketball coach, at first dismisses Manford because he's 5'5", but is later convinced against his better judgment to let Manford join. Back in 1971, Slezac’s claim to fame was bringing basketball to China on a diplomatic visit. While there, he struck up a tentative friendship with his assigned translator, Wen Chang, who became the Beijing University’s coach. With Wen Chang ready for a rematch against USF, Saul and Manford arrive in a China that’s in the throes of the post-Cultural Revolution era. As the protests in Tiananmen Square grow in intensity and with the eyes of two governments on this highly anticipated game, Manford must navigate tensions as he learns more about his heritage and prepares to play the game of his life. With flashes between 1971 and 1989, The Great Leap examines the cross-cultural collision of politics and identity as well as the courage it takes to defy expectations.

The Great Leap was first developed and produced by the Denver Center and had a New York premiere with the Atlantic Theatre Company in 2018. This production was co-produced with the Hangar Theatre, who hosted this show this August at their theater in New York’s Finger Lakes region. A 2018 finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, it has been produced at numerous regional theaters, being praised for its dynamic characters and quick wit. Margaret Gray for the LA Times wrote: “The Great Leap lures us in with its humorous focus on ordinary characters— basketball coaches and players—then pans out to locate them in a cataclysmic moment in history, the Tiananmen Square uprising. The effect is dizzying.”

Jim sHankman (aea) and norman garCy yaP (aea) in the great leap, at tHe Hangar tHeatre and Portland stage ComPany, 2022. PHoto By raCHel PHilliPson.