The Supreme Leader @ Dallas Theater Center
Photo credit Imani Taylor
—Jan Farrington
An awkward, aimless teen from a powerful family is shipped away to boarding school. Dad dotes on an older brother, but still hopes that a change of scenery will turn up something, anything worthwhile in son Number Two.
No, it isn’t the Young Donald Trump Story—but you’re close.
Playwright Don X. Nguyen’s The Supreme Leader, a world-premiere for the Dallas Theater Center, is a flight of fancy that takes off from the few featherweight details (and rumors) about North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s time at Liebefeld, a posh Swiss boarding school with an international roster of students.
Given so little to go on, Nguyen’s imagination is free to soar—he invents a girlfriend, a rival, a stinky cheese festival, and a poker-faced Minder (aka babysitter) who’d like to help Un get Dad’s respect.
It’s classic coming of age comedy, of course, but hung from a high wire: after all, this is the same dude who now has his finger on one of the world’s red buttons. Is it okay to like him?
Oscar Seung, a very tall cherub with floppy hair, makes it okay, and hilarious, and just a bit scary for us too. His Oony is a lonely kid who sits on a bench sketching portraits of his ultimate hero, NBA star Michael Jordan. He treasures the yearly postcards his absent mother sends him, until she stops forever. He seems gentle, but touch his stuff and you might just trigger an international incident.
Into his solitude bursts Sophie (McKenna Marmolejo), a smart and mischievous fellow student with a “soft spot,” she says, for people who are “different, surprising…abnormal.” Between Sophie and her (ex?) boyfriend Roger (Garrett Weir, amusingly preppy), Oony gets a taste of Americans and their thinking: so confident and open, with an answer for absolutely everything.
He doesn’t understand them one bit.
“Feelings are like weeds,” he grouses to Sophie. If she’s through with Roger, why doesn’t she dig him out of her life? Seung is a study in comic contrasts: one minute he’s mooning over Sophie, the next exploding over life not granting his every wish. Meanwhile, his Minder (Albert Park is delightfully poker-faced and resourceful) wants to help Oony seize the moment: Oony’s favored older half-brother is in trouble (caught sneaking around the world’s fun spots on a fake passport), and there’s a sudden opening for a Future Dictator. To impress his father, the Minder thinks Oony should spy on Sophie and Roger to uncover state “secrets” carelessly mentioned by their well-connected parents.
Ignoring Oony’s plot, Sophie insists “shopping is the answer” to his moodiness. She drags him through the hell that is IKEA, meatballs and all. Un’s romantic rivalry with Roger takes a political turn (and pulls no punches) as they argue about a devastating famine in North Korea. They both know the truth, but their truths don’t match. Oony comes ever closer to making the decision to go home. “You can be someone else,” Sophie tells him. “”Why have friends when I can have a country that obeys?” he says.
Director Kevin Moriarty makes terrific use of his small cast and Nguyen’s sharp script: each actor develops a distinct and engaging personality from the first lines. The set by designer Yu-Hsuan Chen (lit by Clifton Taylor) is sunny and Swiss-cheerful, the space layered with vibrant travel posters brought in by the actors and plastered at odd angles. Melanie Chen Cole’s amusing music choices keep scene changes lively. The play might benefit in future productions from a smaller, more intimate space—some of Nguyen’s best laugh lines get a bit lost in the acreage of the Kalita Humphreys Theater, though Equity rules about actors’ distance from the audience (and less crowded seating) may have entered into the choice of this venue.
Nguyen, a playwright/director/actor born in Vietnam and raised in Nebraska, handles this serio-comic story with an admirable sense of fun and balance. (As an aside, Nguyen reportedly has been working on a musical called The Golden Spike, collaborating with the folk-rock band The Lobbyists.) The story of Oony’s adventures in Switzerland keeps the action just light-hearted enough to amuse, without ever taking the edge off our realization that there’s a real dictator and a real country at the end of this rom-com rainbow. It’s a good trick to pull off—a comedy with a twist at the end that hurts…just enough to keep us thinking.
Running from October 28th through November 21st.
More info here: https://www.dallastheatercenter.org/show/the-supreme-leader/
Jan Farrington is an arts journalist, a former contributor to TheaterJones.com, and a member of the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA).
