Lauren Yee is having a pretty remarkable moment in Bay Area theater.

The Bay Area-bred playwright’s sports drama “The Great Leap” is playing at American Conservatory Theater, starring Tony Award winner BD Wong, while her comedy “King of the Yees” recently closed a couple blocks away at San Francisco Playhouse starring another Broadway veteran and San Francisco native, Francis Jue.

“In addition to the fact that like all three of us were (Wong, Jue and Yee) born and raised in San Francisco, also all three of our families have had deep roots in San Francisco,” says Yee, now based in New York. “And because for a long time if you were Chinese-American you couldn’t live outside of Chinatown, everyone knows each other. My grandmother went to school with BD Wong’s mother and Francis Jue’s father.”

Yee made her professional debut in her early 20s when Impact Theatre produced her hilarious comedy “Ching Chong Chinaman” in a Berkeley pizza parlor basement in 2008. The director of that first show, Desdemona Chiang, just helmed a different production of “The Great Leap” at the Guthrie in Minneapolis this January.

“It’s kind of fun that ‘King of the Yees’ and ‘The Great Leap’ are both running in San Francisco at roughly the same time, because they’re both plays that are at least partially set in San Francisco and where the jumping-off point is my father,” Yee says.

“My father was born and raised in San Francisco, and basically the only thing he did before having kids was basketball. Growing up, I always remember hearing about the time he played basketball in China, and I never really asked beyond that. It was just something in the family lore.”

BD Wong starred in “The Great Leap” in a completely different production off-Broadway last year, in a much smaller space, and now returns to ACT where he was previously seen in “The Orphan of Zhao.”

“This is really great for me, because creatively it forces you to kind of re-evaluate certain choices that you’ve already made as an actor,” Wong says. “Every day of rehearsal you kind of go, ‘Oh wow, OK. This doesn’t have to be what I thought it had to be.’”

Set in 1989, “The Great Leap” is about a college basketball team from San Francisco invited to China for an exhibition game. Wong plays the coach of the Chinese team, who has a history with the American coach.

“It’s going to resonate very differently than it did in New York, simply by the fact that the play takes place in San Francisco and San Franciscans will be coming to see it,” Wong says. “There’s something special about that. We’ve taken field trips to watch a Chinatown basketball team, we’ve gone to USF and been coached by the USF basketball coach. And USF is the basketball team that’s in the play.”

ACT holds a special place in Wong’s heart from way back.

“My drama teacher, who was extremely influential to me in high school, was an avid ACT subscriber and took us to ACT many times,” he recalls.

“My mom is really enlivened by these visits where I perform at ACT,” Wong adds. “She’s kind of the unofficial mascot of the theater. If she wants to see the second act of a play because she’s shopping in Chinatown or something like that, she’ll say, ‘I think I’m going to come by the theater today.’ She doesn’t like to brag or anything like that, so these opportunities are great ways for her to express her pride without overdoing it.”

For Yee’s parents, there’s the added wrinkle to this homecoming that both plays are inspired, however loosely, by her father’s life.

“I think there’s obviously something very vulnerable about seeing aspects of your life represented on stage, not controlled by you,” Yee says. “But he’s taken it very well. I think he views himself as kind of an ambassador for these shows and these stories.”

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

IF YOU GO

What: “The Great Leap” by Lauren Yee, presented by American Conservatory Theater

When: Through March 31

Where: ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco

Admission: $15 to $110

Information: 415-749-2228, www.act-sf.org