Outside People

Vineyard Theatre

New York

(212) 353-0303

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

**

The rise of China and Westerners’ disorientation with the new world order have proved recently to be fertile topics for drama, said Adam Feldman in Time Out New York. Playwright Zayd Dohrn is the latest to explore this territory, inventing for his sometimes-intriguing new play a complicated Sino-American romance. Matt Dellapina plays Malcolm, a “schlubby, verbose” recent Stanford graduate who has accepted a job offer in Beijing and soon falls in love with Xiao Mei (Li Jun Li), the young woman who’s been hired as his translator. Outside People has some “smart ideas about surface and depth,” about how Malcolm’s “late-capitalist ease with individuality” might make him blind to the transactional mind-set of his new girlfriend. But the themes never coalesce.

It’s not just the big ideas that fail to hold together, said Marilyn Stasio in Variety. “Absurdities of plot and inanities of character” abound. Would a Stanford grad really move to Beijing without knowing one word of Mandarin? Would Malcolm’s former roommate, a crafty young Chinese sweatshop operator, really feel so grateful for a freshman friendship that he’d set Malcolm up in a cushy job? Would anybody, even naïve Malcolm, fail to notice that his friend was exploiting the workforce? “The depths of Malcolm’s political and cultural ignorance” prove to be “the opposite of endearing.”

Yet it’s not hard to understand how the “insularity of Chinese culture” might confound a young American, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. The fact that some dialogue is delivered in Mandarin “keeps the audience in Malcolm’s uncertain position,” and his encounters allow us to observe various “codified and coded behaviors” that are foreign to us but still common in modern China. Xiao Mei, a “seemingly gentle-spirited young woman,” turns out to be “driven by a tangle of motives,” and “assured performances” from Li and Dellapina add poignancy to their uneasy bond. Though parts of the story prove unsatisfying, this pair’s “search for an anchor in a disorienting new world” feels “achingly true.”