Chimerica. The weird title of Lucy Kirkwood’s hit play conjoins the names of the eastern and western superpowers and promises to offer a snapshot of both nations just as the baton of economic primacy passes from America’s wizened youth to China’s reborn antiquity. The script has an unusually complex set of creative ambitions. It takes the formula of the romantic comedy, gives it a bittersweet twist, and plants it in the arid terrain of international politics. And it starts as a whodunnit.
Joe Schofield, a fêted American photo-journalist, was in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when he shot a few frames of the unknown citizen who halted a Chinese tank in its tracks. Scroll forward 23 years and Joe believes Tank Man is living undercover in America. Joe’s editor orders him to trace and interview the elusive humbler of China’s military might. A few scenes later, as in all good cop stories, Joe is warned to drop the story or face the sack. His hunger to find Tank Man is instantly redoubled. Many of the character details here seem improbable. Joe is strangely idealistic for a war reporter. Most of them are adrenalin junkies who have the same wish list as rock stars: chicks, excitement and fame. What makes Joe believable is that he’s an emotional shambles, in his mid-40s, beset by the growing need to form a stable relationship and start a family. His quest for Tank Man is a displacement for his thwarted emotional longings. We can see this. He can’t. This triggers our sympathy for him.
On a flight to China he’s seduced by a corporate exec who (unlike most corporate execs) is witty and self-knowing, and committed to the same enlightened liberal values as Joe.
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