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There’s Upton (a hilarious Devin Kotani), a World of Warcraft addicted teenager fond of quoting historical texts to justify the need to employ an indentured servant. (He hopes to qualify for a huge gamer competition in South Korea, where gaming is accorded the respect he is certain it deserves, and he needs a hand with his homework and household chores).

There’s Ed (Ben Wong), the family patriarch, who wants J to caddy for him as he attempts to master golf, a white man’s game Ed is certain will pave his pathway into the American corporate elite.

And most of all, there’s Grace (Grace Wong), Desdemona and Upton’s mom, a desperate housewife trying to get pregnant to fill her increasingly lonely, empty days.

Photo by Elizabeth Cameron / Calgary Herald

Yee has taken the dysfunctional family drama — an American staple — and in Ching, Chong Chinaman, given it a marvellously satirical spin.

Director John Iglesias has his cast — apart from J — made up in a kind of stylized white face, suggesting that they inhabit a world (America) where whiteness is the idealized state of being, where upward mobility starts when people of colour put aside their diverse backstories and get with the program of moving on up the economic ladder that is America.

It all unfolds, in rather claustrophobic fashion, in Motel, where J.P. Thibodeau’s innovative, but ill-fitting white set suggests a kind of generic, suburban America where every home looks just like the one next door.

The cast — particularly Mah’s Desdemona, who alternates between being an unbearably entitled, preening teenage girl and a young woman on what turns out to be a comedic quest for self-identity — deliver excellent performances, and maybe in a larger theatre, with a little more breathing room between the play and the audience, the laughs would have landed even louder (they were still pretty loud at the Halloween performance, though).