Stage Review - Li (Seattle Public Theater / SIS Productions / YUN Theatre)

Stage Review - Li
Presented By: Seattle Public Theater, SIS Productions, YUN Theatre - Seattle, WA
Show Run: January 16 - February 08 2026
Date Reviewed: Saturday, January 31, 2026
Run Time: 2 Hours (including a 15 minute intermission)
Reviewed by: Sameer Arshad

What do you do when the familiar social environment around you starts failing you, and you start failing it in return? How can you understand that the place you have always thought you belonged to is really not helping you grow after all? What is your next step when you realize that you can and should be thriving elsewhere? When you’ve over-learned your entire existence and have outgrown every aspect of your life, what becomes your next move?

In Li, the exciting new comedy by Wei He, these are the questions that Li, the main character, is subtly asked by the world around her.

Most of the story occurs in the city of Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region in China, which shares a national border with the country of Mongolia. In this bustling busy city of 3 million people, speaking English, Mandarin and Mongolian, Li is a neurodiverse young woman with a plethora of odd skills who finds herself bonding only with peculiar folks outside her age group: her emotional-rollercoaster of a mom who was never the same after once being struck by lightning, her eccentric best-friend with a large lipoma on his head who runs a general store with his cute pet chicken, a sweet old lady with cataracts who Li befriends while sneaking into her home to “look around”. Li lives among them while also missing her twin brother dearly, a Math genius who moved to New York City to be a professor.

Adele Lim delivers a nuanced, layered and touchingly heart-warming performance as Li, on a remarkable transformation from a bewildered wayward youth to a principled socially-aware young adult who starts to take more ownership of her life. Adele has really located the soul of this character, bringing forth her hopes, dreams and insecurities for us to examine, understand and even reflect upon when it comes to our own lives. This is excellent actor-craft that gives us a chance to relate to someone living in a part of the world that is rarely represented in media.

Serin Ngai delivers a sharply inspiring and cleverly powerful performance as Li’s mother, portraying an abrasive no-nonsense character who has fought hard to bring her family thus far, at the cost of alienating her children.

Owen Yen, plays Li’s best friend with a dazzlingly warm performance that really delivers the idiosyncrasies of life in Hohhot. This is vital because it paints a social picture of the charismatic magnetism of Li’s hometown, helping us understand why she never left. Sometimes we imprint upon these lovely strange anchors of our community that become such cornerstones of our lives, such that being away from them just feels wrong to us. For me, Owen really brought forth feelings of nostalgia about the bizarre characters from my own hometown. It was a gift to me to have those feelings back, swimming under the surface while watching his scenes.

Jacob Chung, plays Li’s brother with beautifully aching pathos and determined charm, a character who struggles with fitting in as an immigrant in America. We mostly see him through hilarious squabbles in phone-calls with Li and various flashback sequences depicting their rambunctious childhood together.

Kathy Hsieh plays the old lady that Li befriends, giving us a picture of the socioeconomic reality of Hohhot, where some people still fall through the cracks of a social safety net that was supposed to protect everyone. She plays a substitute maternal figure to Li, even though Li isn’t fully honest with her. Kathy brings an enveloping allure of warmth to this character. There is compelling desire from the audience to sit with her and share a bowl of delicious soup, absorbing the waves of loving energy radiating from her on stage. We can see the effect this character has on Li, embodying a pathway to kindness and self-appreciation that helps develop Li’s own sense of compassion and community-mindedness, which gets her to the next step of her journey to self-actualization.

Michael Latham, in an outlandishly satisfying stand-out performance, brings a musical element into the play, by stepping out from various corners of the set to deliver these bombastic rock songs that underline the key emotional moments of the story. Wearing a ridiculously attractive black hat alongside a rockstar outfit, he skillfully blends rock vocals with Mongolian throat singing, in a mind-blowing performance that roots this story into its core idea: modern Chinese-Mongolians trying to find themselves in a confusing world that is running off without them.

With a strong ensemble like this, director Christie Zhao has delivered to us a world that we often don’t think about, what pop-singer Lorde would call “cities you’ll never see on screen”. We are brought into this loveably quirky community and made to understand that the alienation and struggle that we ourselves are facing out here in Seattle is not that much different from what all these folks in Hohhot are going through. There is this common existential thread of being aware of your own awkwardness, where you try clumsily to show up for the people around you while also confusedly trying to show up for yourself. Many parts of this play’s comedy lean into absurdism, and these are played out expertly by Christie, landing with waves of laughter from the audience.

Even as Li stumbles through her life, helping and hurting people, we find ourselves growing alongside her, rooting for her and wondering what she will do next. And, ironically, we start to recognize that the community around her that we thought wasn’t doing right by her was all-along exactly the kind of community she needed to help her grow, when she was ready to do so. The production team brings these elements together expertly in sound, light, music, fog and bizarre props, including a live chicken, that I will likely never forget.

I fucking loved that chicken.

A neurodiverse young woman in Inner Mongolia, a best friend with a pet chicken, Mongolian throat singing meets rock vocals — Li is a wonderfully weird comedy about outgrowing everything you know and discovering that the quirky community you thought was holding you back was exactly what you needed all along.

Li, a co-production from Seattle Public Theater SIS Productions, and YUN Theatre, runs at the Theatre on Green Lake through February 8. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://www.seattlepublictheater.org.

Photo credit: Rick Wong