Biting satire ‘Tiger Style’ roars into South Bay — with an old friend

Francis Jue returns to Bay Area to star in TheatreWorks' production of 'Tiger Style!' a spoof on the debate over tiger parenting.

When Francis Jue takes the stage in TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s “Tiger Style!,” it’s like coming home.

A San Francisco native, the Obie Award-winning actor has performed on Broadway in “Pacific Overtures,” “M. Butterfly” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” But he’s also performed in more than a dozen TheatreWorks productions over the years, from “Pacific Overtures” in 1988 to “The Language Archive” in 2019.

“Back before many people were talking about non-traditional casting, back before I even had an expectation of being cast in substantial roles or even to make a career out of this, Robert Kelley and TheatreWorks were already doing it,” Jue says. (Kelley, TheatreWorks’ founding artistic director, ran the company for 50 years.)

“I think that their first production of ‘Pacific Overtures’ in 1988 was a bit of a watershed,” Jue continues. “I was their first Equity contract, along with Randy Nakano, and it was their first foray into producing as an Equity theater. And Kelley followed that up pretty quickly with an offer to play Peter Pan. The fact that he asked me to audition for it even was a huge deal, and the fact that audiences at TheatreWorks were so ready and willing to embrace an Asian guy playing Peter Pan was huge back in 1988.”

TheatreWorks didn’t quite give Jue his start, but it gave him an early taste of the possibilities of the profession. He got his Actors Equity card while he was still in college, when he was cast in the 1984 off-Broadway revival of “Pacific Overtures.”

“I had gone to Yale as an English major, because my parents told me that they would disown me if I studied theater,” Jue says. “So I always did it extra-curricularly. And then I got hired to do ‘Pacific Overtures’ in New York and was commuting between New Haven and New York. And then I went back to school, because I never thought I’d do it for a living.”

After graduating, Jue came back to the Bay Area and was working as an administrative assistant at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation when he started performing at TheatreWorks. Not long after that, he was cast as an understudy in Broadway’s “M. Butterfly,” a play that he would go on to star in at TheatreWorks twice. As his New York career took off, Jue continued performing with TheatreWorks, starring in shows as varied as “Cabaret,” “Amadeus” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Although based in New York, Jue often returns to perform at a variety of Bay Area theaters. Recently he appeared in “Cambodian Rock Band” at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, “King of the Yees” at San Francisco Playhouse, “Dream of the Red Chamber” at San Francisco Opera and “Soft Power” at the Curran Theatre, as well as in the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s radio play “Tales of the Resistance Volume 2.”

His latest TheatreWorks show is a hilarious satire by Mike Lew about the kind of strict, success-oriented “tiger parenting” exemplified by Amy Chua’s controversial memoir “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”

“Tiger Style!” follows two adult siblings, both obsessively overachieving Ivy League grads, who blame their parents for their difficulty handling life’s disappointments. They decide to run away to China in a dramatic act of spite.

Jue and Emily Koruda, of “Gilmore Girls” fame, play the parents, as well as several other roles that they originated in the play’s 2015 world premiere at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre.

“I think Mike Lew is incredibly smart, and incredibly brave because he is dealing not just with external pressures on Asian Americans, but he is also dealing with internal struggles within the Asian American community, within families, that have to do with generational trauma, generational evolution of expectations, each generation defining what it means to be an American, to be an adult, to be a son or a daughter or a parent,” Jue says.

Directed by Jeffrey Lo, who also directed Jue and Koruda in “The Language Archive,” the TheatreWorks production also stars local favorites Jenny Nguyen Nelson, Will Dao and Jeremy Kahn.

“Subscriber audiences at the Alliance were very affectionate and they loved the play, and they told us repeatedly that they hadn’t realized that Asian people experienced racism too,” Jue says. “And then we did it in Boston at the Huntington, where we got a lot of Northeast intellectual audiences who at talkbacks would say, ‘This does not actually comport with what I understand the Asian American experience is. Let me tell you what I believe the Asian American experience is.’”

Jue says he’s keenly interested in seeing what Bay Area audiences make of “Tiger Style!”

“In my experience, what I get from audiences here in California are people who see Asians as people,” he says. “When I’ve done Asian-themed or Asian American-themed stories here in the Bay Area, it hasn’t felt like audiences have thought of it as an exotic adventure, as much as an exploration of the human experience, like with any other play.”

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘TIGER STYLE!’

By Mike Lew, presented by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley

When: April 6-28

Where: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro Street, Mountain View

Tickets: $27-$100; 877-662-8978, www.theatreworks.org

—