Call it murder on the Orientalism express.
When well-rounded Asian-American twins M (Francesca Dawis) and L (Isabella Dawis) are denied early admission to their first-choice school, they hatch a plan to get in using people's preconceptions — both favorable and unfavorable.
The twins, who complete each other's thoughts and sentences, may even kill the perceived competition.
M and L are the center of "Peerless," Jiehae Park's comic caper that opened Saturday in St. Paul under the aegis of Theater Mu.
In ways sharp and shallow, clever and messy, the 90-minute one-act plays with stereotype. It's a dark comedy full of ambition that's inspired, structurally, by "Macbeth." But it's set in a high school stirring with hormones, and with irrational, all-or-nothing behavior as kids dramatically plot out their lives.
Playwright Park's cutesy naming convention suggests that even though we think we know these characters, think again. They are ciphers and are, perhaps, ultimately unknowable.
"Peerless" premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2015 on an evergreen subject that's been much in the news. Scads of Hollywood stars and business moguls have recently been caught up in a college admissions scam, paying bribes to get their mediocre kids admitted to top schools.
And there's a court case alleging that Harvard's admission process puts Asian-Americans at a disadvantage.
