If you're in Chicago, you should check out the latest production of David Henry Hwang's The Golden Child. This Obie Award-winning play, loosely based on the experiences of the playwright's own family in turn-of-the-century China, recounts the fateful decision of a village patriarch to turn from Chinese traditions and embrace Western, Christian ways. Seeing it reminded me of Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, set in colonial-era Nigeria. In telling their stories of cultural change, neither work romanticizes the past or its dying traditions. In fact, certain practices — foot-binding in the Chinese context, abandoning children in the Nigerian one — come up for especially harsh criticism, put forward as immoral and destructive outgrowths of unthinking adherence to old ways. At the same time, both works describe in tragic detail the consequences of upending an age-old social order, and the price paid by all — powerful and powerless alike. The eponymous "golden child," in fact, who escapes foot-binding thanks to her father's intervention, nonetheless learns to rue her mother's words: "Daughter, you don't know what a terrible gift is freedom."

Fortunately, Hwang's play offers plentiful comedic interludes to soften its Lear-like final blow, and the strong Chicago cast succeeds in making each character believable and sympathetic — even the conniving second wife, played with delightful malevolence by InTheFray Contributor Kimberlee Soo.

The company responsible for this production, Silk Road Theatre Project, has made crosscultural understanding its mission; founded in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, Silk Road seeks to "heal rifts through the transformative power of theatre." The choice of Hwang's play seems appropriate, speaking as it does to all-too-current events. The violent divide between tradition and modernity, order and progress, fundamentalism and reason — these conflicts continue to confront us, just as they did in an earlier time, and their resolution will likely be no kinder.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen