By Lucy Komisar
Alex Lin’s new play, “Chinese Republicans,” presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company, is ambitious, aiming to dissect the generational fissures within Chinese-American identity while simultaneously taking a sledgehammer to the glass ceiling of late-stage capitalism.
The ingredients are potent: we have Phyllis (a formidable, vinegar-sharp Jodi Long), a tough-as-nails investment bank managing director who fought her way into the boys’ club only to find the furniture was bolted to the floor. And for men only. She wears her spike heels like weapons and her bitterness like a shroud. She mentored Ellen (Jennifer Ikeda), a woman who has streamlined her life so ruthlessly for success that she divorced to avoid the distraction of a child.
Into this pressure cooker comes Katie (Anna Zevelson), a 24-year-old eager beaver, thrilled to be hired and dreaming of a corner office, though you assume it means trading her flowered jacket and jeans for the required corporate uniform.
These women gather monthly around a dining table (the economical set by Wilson Chin) to check in on their progress. The conversations, meant to be sisterly strategy sessions, quickly devolve into sparring matches over authenticity.
Iris (Jully Lee), a woman born in China and hungry for a green card, delivers a brutal verdict on Ellen’s Cantonese, dismissing it as sounding like “pigs drowning in the river.” There’s a Mandarin teacher in an exotic red gown. The subtext is clear: being Chinese in America is not a monolith, and the “sisters” inflict wounds on each other.
And what of the system? It is, as expected, a rigged game. Phyllis, for all her deal-closing prowess, was never made partner at Friedman-Wallace. A less-qualified man gets a promotion over Katie, and another, who once sexually harassed Ellen, ascends to the partnership ranks. It’s 2019, and the ledger of grievances is long.
Enter the play’s most intriguing, and most problematic, element: Katie’s radicalization, not on politics but on how this happens in the story. A trip to a Greenwich Village bookstore unearths Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,“ other leftist books and a new vocabulary. Suddenly, our former corporate striver is “on strike,” declaring capitalists “bloodsuckers” and inflating the famous giant union rat on the sidewalk. In her rebellion, Katie is contemplating a run for the City Council on a “new party” ticket (DSA?), having seemingly shed her desire to join the machine she now seeks to dismantle.
While Zevelson brings a compelling earnestness to the role, Katie’s transformation from eager initiate to class warrior feels less like a political awakening and more like a plot point with no starting point.
The problem with “Chinese Republicans” is that its parts are running on different tracks. The extended debates over language and cultural lineage, while interesting, exist in a separate sphere from the office politics. We are told these women are struggling to climb the corporate ladder, but we rarely feel the specific ways their Chinese identity informs that struggle. Is the sexism they face compounded by racism? The play gestures at the idea but never commits to an answer, leaving the two central conflicts—one of identity, one of labor—to run on parallel tracks that never intersect.
Director Chay Yew’s staging is limited by the action confined mostly to that dining table. (That may be a money problem: sets cost.) Long imbues Phyllis with a lifetime of compromised ideals, and Ikeda’s Ellen is a masterclass in repressed disappointment. But their stories remain stubbornly disconnected from Katie’s cartoonish uprising.
The ideas are sprawling and relevant. Lin, a young playwright of clear intelligence, has a sharp eye for the hypocrisies of the workplace and the painful hierarchies within diaspora communities. But in “Chinese Republicans,” she hasn’t yet found the dramatic crucible to forge them together. The result is a play of interesting intentions, waiting for a plot strong enough to carry them.
“Chinese Republicans.” Written by Alex Lin, directed by Chay Yew. Roundabout Theatre Company at Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46 St, NYC. Tkts 212-719-1300. Runtime 1hr35min. Opened Feb 25 2026, closes April 5, 2026.