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The World of Extreme Happiness Directed by Eric Ting Written by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig Manhattan Theatre Club - NYC Center Stage February 3-March 29, 2015

A boy is a child. A girl is a thing. These words greet the birth of Sunny Li in The World of Extreme Happiness, the new play from award-winning Playwright-in-Residence at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig. Sunny’s arrival into the world in 1992 rural China puts her place in her father’s heart somewhere below the female racing pigeon about whom he rhapsodizes and dreams. Accordingly, it is not even clear at first that he is talking about a pigeon and not a woman, while the newborn girl is quickly, albeit temporarily, consigned to a slop bucket to die. When we next meet Sunny (Jennifer Lim), she is 18 and part of the janitorial staff in an urban factory with a PR problem due to employee suicides.

Beijing is home to 23 million residents. But underneath the city, in a series of bomb shelters built during Maoist China's 1969 border conflict with the then-Soviet Union, there's another million or more migrant workers who have developed residences there. They're known as "the rat tribe." Photographer Sim Chi Yin spent five years photographing and interviewing members of the "tribe" in collaboration with Al Jazeera America.Most of the occupied "apartments" are technically illegal per a government decree, but where there's a will, there's a way - and a gray area to be exploited. After the government formalized a law mandating bomb...

Despite the title, there isn't much in the way of forward momentum in "Fleeing by Night", a very theatrical 1930s-era Chinese story of unrequited love among a theater owner's daughter, her cello-playing intended and the male opera star who becomes the focus of their secret and not-so-secret desires.

In actuality, the name refers to the opera that is performed extensively throughout the film -- about a sorrowful military leader who has been forced to take flight after being slandered by rivals -- and is linked inextricably to the anguished lives of the three principal characters.

While there may not be a lot of actual fleeing involved, there is a whole pile of pining from the young, love-struck leads, who embrace their collective fates with all the ardor of death row inmates.

Consumed with the life-imitating-art angle, co-directors Li-kong Hsu (who produced several of Ang Lee's earlier films) and Chi Yin make sure that plot wrinkle is bathed in purposeful significance, and while it's all quite tasteful to look at, the attention process tends to do a little fleeing of its own.