'Grey's Anatomy' Star Shines In Play
"Chocolate skin, almond eyes ... she's the best of both of us," coos the mother, a woman of Korean descent talking about her newborn daughter to her husband who is black.
It's one of the few moments of tranquility in "Satellites," Diana Son's agitated play about an agitated woman coming to terms with her own racial identity, not to mention marriage, motherhood, career and brownstone renovation.
That covers a lot of territory and for quite a while "Satellites," which opened off-Broadway in New York on Sunday at the Public Theater, marks time as it sets up its characters and situations. Fortunately, we are in the presence of Sandra Oh, a vivid actress best known these days for her portrayal of Dr. Cristina Yang on ABC's "Grey's Anatomy." The woman knows how to make anger gut-punching visceral.
In "Satellites," Oh plays Nina, a Korean-American architect, juggling a life that suddenly has become way too crowded. Hubby Miles, portrayed by Kevin Carroll, is a dot-com executive between jobs. Together, they are coping with their most recent purchase; an old building in a rundown section of Brooklyn on the cusp of gentrifying.
The twosome needed space for their new baby who becomes a reminder for Nina that her own Korean heritage is something she never learned to appreciate. To compensate, she hires a Korean nanny (Satya Lee) to give her daughter what she never had; a sense of past, where she came from.
That loss also afflicts Nina's husband, whose birth mother was a heroin addict and who was raised in Indiana by a white family. To further complicate the household, his white brother (Clarke Thorell) — a shady entrepreneur — also makes an appearance.
And we haven't even gotten to Nina's problems as an architect, working with her business partner (a fine, funny and sarcastic Johanna Day) on their entry for a big design competition. Or the married couple's dealings with Reggie (Ron Cephas Jones), an opportunistic, street-wise resident of the changing neighborhood who knows how to take advantage of newcomers.
Son, best known for another domestic drama called "Stop Kiss," has stuffed her play with so many plots that it threatens, like its heroine, to spin out of control. A theatergoer could get dizzy. And not just from the story. That perpetual motion extends to designer Mark Wendland's set, the inside of a Brooklyn brownstone — living room, kitchen, office — that never seems to stop moving.
Yet the playwright writes pithy, emotionally charged dialogue that makes you want to hold on for the haphazard ride. And director Michael Greif doesn't let things get off track as the play literally builds to a glass-shattering, yet hopeful ending, a finale that defuses the explosive husband-wife relationship.
The two have been thrown by the new addition to their lives. Still, in a special way, Son seems to be saying, it is this little creature who will bring them together again.