The spine of the story in Lucy Kirkwood’s award-winning 2013 play Chimerica is relatively simple: an American photographer who captured the iconic image of an unknown man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989 comes to believe, 23 years later, that “tank man” is alive and living in New York, and the photographer embarks on a hunt to find him so that he can tell his story. But nothing is simple when it comes to China – and particularly US relations with China, particularly as China emerged as an economic juggernaut in the late 20th century – and Kirkwood’s ambitious play seeks to capture, through the multiple tendrils attached to that spine of a story, the complicated and sometimes contradictory forces that have shaped lives and fortunes both in China and the US over the past three decades.
– Wendy Arons, The Pittsburgh Tatler
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