INTERVIEW: Father-daughter relationship is focus of new play ‘Good Enemy’
Photo: Good Enemy stars Francis Jue and Geena Quintos. Performances continue through Nov. 27 at off-Broadway’s Minetta Lane Theatre. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by BBB with permission.
Good Enemy, the new play by Yilong Liu, is currently being presented by Audible Theater at the Minetta Lane Theatre in the West Village of Manhattan. Performances for the show, which is directed by Chay Yew, continue through Sunday, Nov. 27.
In Good Enemy, celebrated actor Francis Jue plays Howard, a father who decides to head out across the country to see his daughter, Momo, played by Geena Quintos. The two characters have been separated for some time, and Howard needs to understand why there’s this gulf between them. The only way he’ll arrive at answers is to explore his own past, as a young man in China, according to press notes.
“In 2020, when everything shut down, and I was in the middle of doing Cambodian Rock Band, and that was shut down in the middle of one of its extension weeks, everyone was told to stay at home and to quarantine,” Jue said in a recent phone interview about Good Enemy’s development process. “Out of the blue, I got a message from Chay Yew, who had directed Cambodian Rock Band, a fabulous play by Lauren Yee, and he said, ‘I’ve got this other play reading. We can’t get together, so we’re going to do it on Zoom.’ So it became one of those plays that people helped develop remotely from wherever they were quarantining, and we did a number of them over the time of the shutdown.”
Jue, who has appeared on Broadway in Pacific Overtures, Thoroughly Modern Millie and M. Butterfly, didn’t know the status of the show after those initial readings, so he was happily surprised when he received a phone call approximately one year ago. Theaters were starting to reopen, and the director told Jue that Audible Theater would produce the premiere. Audible has quickly been gaining traction in the off-Broadway scene, producing a number of stellar shows at the Minetta Lane Theatre and then recording the audio for their millions of subscribers.
“I think Yilong has done an amazing job of writing a really ambitious play that plays with memory and three different timelines in the show and two different actors representing the same person,” said Jue, also known for TV’s Madam Secretary, Hightown and Law & Order: SVU. “The first thing that struck me was how is this even possible, to have multiple locations, cars on stage, a river on stage, people swimming in the river, cars crashing, and all these different timelines in the show all at once. Honestly, the first thing that struck me was, how is this even possible to do on stage?”
Another interesting part of the script, for Jue, was this central father-daughter relationship. He found that connection (or disconnection) relatable, and likely that aspect will prove relatable for others who experience Good Enemy.
“Whether you’re an immigrant, like my character is, or not, we all wonder what do we tell our children about who we are,” he said. “And likewise, what do we tell our parents about who we are? We all keep secrets, and we all have the kind of person that we want to be for our parents or for our children. And then there’s who we really are. I think it’s astounding that Yilong, as such a young playwright, has been able to tap into a parent’s point of view.”
In order to make this central stage relationship believable and authentic, Jue found it necessary to work closely during the rehearsal process with his fellow actors and ensure they are all understanding one another’s characters and trajectories.
“Like a lot of different shows, you have to get really intimate really, really quickly with people that sometimes you don’t know very well,” Jue said about the process. “I had the advantage of knowing Geena Quintos, who plays my daughter Momo in the show because we did Soft Power. She and I were in on developing that musical within a play and then performing it both in L.A. and here in New York. We already had a relationship that we could rely on and one that I think lent itself to a father-daughter relationship.”
Jue added: “She’s much younger than I am, and I really admire her as a new, up-and-coming actress, singer, dancer. I think she can do anything. She has often asked me about my experience having been a professional actor for many, many years now, and so that really lent itself to us having a relationship on stage that both is intimate where we know each other really well, but also one where we have very different experiences that we don’t know. So all of that really helped, and Chay, our director, has an amazing shorthand for how to get a company to get to know each other and get to know the script really, really intimately and really quickly. I really enjoy working with Chay because on the one hand we’re up on our feet and staging the entire show within a week, and at the same time, very quickly, getting to know the script really well and asking great questions about the script really, really early so that we all are on the same page.”‘
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Good Enemy, written by Yilong Liu and directed by Chay Yew, stars Francis Jue and Geena Quintos. Performances continue through Sunday, Nov. 27. Click here for more information and tickets.
