'Ch'inglish' gets lost in translation

"Ch'inglish," by David Henry Hwang, is a lightweight comedy-of-misunderstanding about an American businessman trying to clinch a contract in China. He speaks no Mandarin and knows nothing about the culture. The Chinese characters understand selective snatches of English and believe they know more about Americans than they do.

The laughs -- OK, the mild chuckles -- come from ludicrous mistranslations by the Chinese and even more clueless misinterpretations of Chinese behavior by the American. When the Chinese talk among themselves or think out loud, the English appears in supertitles on the back wall.

If this sounds like a letdown, you're onto something. Yes, the fish-out-of-water crises have resonance as we process seismic power shifts in the world economy. Sure, the wrongheadedness of the miscommunication ("I love you" comes out "dirty sea maid") contains the lovely ridiculousness of truth.

But the play, which arrives on Broadway after a celebrated premiere in Chicago, is thematically smaller than we anticipate from the form-busting playwright of the 1988 Tony-winning "M Butterfly" and the 2008 Pulitzer finalist "Yellow Face." The lost-in-translation humor soon feels like a one-joke collection we could find in a novelty book.

On the other hand, the actors -- all but one bilingual -- are first-rate. The production, directed by Leigh Silverman ("Well") zips along with a confident commercial sheen, its turntable sets by David Korins moving us from Chinese restaurant to offices to the lobby of a luxe hotel to, fatefully, a room upstairs.

Gary Wilmes toys deftly with both the duplicity and the openhearted naiveté of Daniel, the Cleveland businessman who wants to sell signage for a cultural center in a growing Chinese city. Jennifer Lim is wonderful as the strict-seeming Vice-Minister of Culture, a supremely competent woman with her own agenda and, we soon learn, black push-up bra and bikini panties under her beyond-the-Cultural Revolution suit (designed by Anita Yavich.)

The plot, complete with a love affair of mixed-signal mastery, is told as Daniel's flashback while preparing American salespeople to meet Mao's former masses -- "or as we call them today, consumers." Daniel's Western translator (Stephen Pucci) tells him that the Chinese love big gamblers. A no-star English/Mandarin comedy on Broadway is a gamble, too. Too bad Hwang didn't raise the stakes.

WHAT "Ch'inglish"

WHERE Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St.

INFO $36.50-$121.50; 212-239- 6200; chinglishbroadway.com

BOTTOM LINE Mild culture-clash comedy with one joke, told well