The Newlywed Game: It’s All Fun and Games until the Turkey Gets Burnt.
The award-winning new comedy at B Street Theater runs through July 14th.
(This review contains spoilers.)
Since I was a child growing up in Sacramento, summer meant visitors. Coming from a family made up of teachers, we generally saw family on academic breaks and despite summer being positively toasty in the summer months, it was a wonderful time to visit with family and take them to see the sights.
In my childhood, it usually meant visiting the Capitol, The Railroad Museum, and Old Sacramento. These days, one of my favorite places to bring visitors is the Sofia Tsakopoulos Center for the Arts, also known as The Sofia. The Sofia boasts three performance spaces, hosting musicians, comedy troupes, family programming and is home to the B Street Theatre. B Street Theatre is a professional theater company founded in 1986 by actor Timothy Busfield and others, it focuses on producing contemporary plays, educational programming, and classics with a modern twist. But what B Street does best in my opinion is support the development of new plays, providing a consistent platform for playwrights to present their work to an audience, including industry professionals. One of the ways that they make that possible is by hosting The B Street New Comedies Festival.
The B Street New Comedies Festival is an annual event hosted by B Street Theatre. It celebrates new comedic plays and aims to discover and showcase emerging comedic playwrights. The festival typically features a selection of new, unproduced comedic plays that are performed in staged readings or full productions. The festival also includes various events such as receptions and talkbacks, where audiences can engage with the playwrights, directors, and actors. The New Comedies Festival is a highlight of B Street Theatre's season and is part of its broader mission to support new works and contemporary theater.
The most recent production on the Mainstage of B Street is the winner of the 2023 New Comedies Festival: The Newlywed Game by Alyssa Haddad-Chin. I had the opportunity to see the reading of The Newlywed Game last year and I was thrilled to be able to attend the first performances of The Newlywed Game earlier this month.
From the program provided by B Street: When a young couple host their traditional families for Thanksgiving, they accidentally drop the bomb that they are engaged. Their parents do everything to prove that they’re not ready, creating a clash of cultures that begs the question: how do you create a future with someone from an entirely different past?
When I attended the festival last year, I had been struck by the nearly nonstop laughter that this script elicited from the audience. I had several moments of laughter that felt uncontrollable, almost struggling to catch my breath through laughing so hard. Alyssa Haddad-Chin is a skilled playwright and her technical abilities are well showcased in this play. (Any writer can attest that it is much easier to make someone cry than laugh - comedy is hard.) But as I watched the fully staged production, I was pleased to feel how much I related to this script on an emotional level and how deeply the themes resonated with me. This show presents itself as a comedy, but like life itself, it is not all belly laughs and zingy one liners and this playwright has something to say about it.
The show opens with a couple, Sarah (the luminous Fatemeh Mehraban) and Jack (the affable and adorable Alec Silver), anxiously awaiting the arrival of their Thanksgiving Guests. Sarah, coming from a Lebanese-Italian family, is busy making a culturally blended feast while Jack has gone out to brave the last-minute Thanksgiving shoppers. As the couple has been so concerned with the side dishes representing the many parts of their backgrounds that they have forgotten the main event: the turkey.
Jack arrives just in time to help assemble the turkey and throw it in a comedically hot oven as his parents arrive 20 minutes early.
Enter Lan (the cantankerously charismatic Rinabeth Apostol) and Bo (the acerbic and ravenous Ron Domingo): Jack’s parents. The duo come bearing two things: a serving dish full of rice and a whole lot of judgment. The apartment is dusty, the food isn’t ready, and Sarah’s parents are late. Woven through the litany of complaints, there is an underlying complaint of something missing in Sarah, the fact that Sarah is not Chinese. Spoiler: And it just so happens, along with the judgemental rice, they have brought something else with them for Thanksgiving: a girl named Joy (the cheerily clueless Nona Truong) and Joy is (what are the odds) Chinese!
Spoiler: Shortly after Joy’s arrival, we recieve the whirlwind arrival of Sarah’s mother and father, Norma (the effervescent Elizabeth Nunsiato) and Shaker (the vigorous and mildy scary Damien Seperi) and (surprise!) along with a tremendous amount of cross cultural cusine, they have brought a young member of their congregation, George.
Yes. Both parents brought a date for their respetive children who have just (secretly) gotten engaged.
While this sounds like a wonderful set up for a sitcom, and truly the show does feel like one with broad comedy and an absolutely gorgeous set (Sam Reno) that looks inspired by the sitcom Friends, The Newlywed Game proves itself to be both funny and poignent. Upon hearing the news of the engagement, both Jack’s mother, Lo and Sarah’s father, Shaker, are not just angry to be hearing the news of the engagement weeks after it happened, they are genuinely concerned about the welfare of the couple. At first, this can be dismissed by an audience member as controlling parental figures, as the show progesses, the cracks in the facade of the seemingly happy relationships begin to show. As Sarah becomes more agitated and Jack becomes even more anxious to smooth feathers, the more tense the atmosphere becomes and the couple digs in their heels. Suddenly, a gambit: If their family isn’t supportive of the wedding, they don’t have to attend. Unable to back down, Shaker issues a challenge: let’s play for it. Win the game, we support you and pay for the wedding. Lose the game, let’s never talk about this silly wedding nonsense ever again.
And what better game to play to decide if a couple knows each other well enough to spend their lives together? Why The Newlywed Game of course!
Playwright Haddad-Chin’s use of the game as an entry point brings the audience together to root for the couple is clever and engaging for the audience. As the couple plays the game, the audience begins asking themselves if this will be a happily ever after story. What if the forgotten turkey in the beginning signaled a deeper meaning: Are Sarah and Jack are so concerned with embattled parts of their relationship, how their families perceive their readiness for matrimony and adulthood, that they forgotten to ask the main (dish) question required for marital happiness: are they really compatible in the first place?
The layered and dynamic performances of Apostol (Lan), Mehraban (Sarah), Silver (Jack), and Seperi (Shaker) bring the show to a strong conclusion. Through the deft hand of director Tara Sissom-Pittaro, the entire cast’s comedic prowess and the serious, poignment moments from these strong actors, The Newlywed Game is a show, like a homecooked meal, that both nourishes and stays with you.
The Newlywed Game runs through July 14th at the B Street Theatre. Tickets can be purchased here.
Cast of The Newlywed Game Photo Credit: Rudy Meyers
