BD Wong to Star in A.C.T.'s THE GREAT LEAP

Following rave reviews and audience acclaim at off-Broadway's Atlantic Theater Company this past spring, American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon announced today that Tony Award winner and San Francisco native BD Wong will reprise his role as 'Wen Chang' in award-winning Bay Area playwright Lauren Yee's The Great Leap, performing at A.C.T.'s Geary Theater (415 Geary St., San Francisco) from Wednesday, March 6, through Sunday, March 31, 2019. Additional casting will be announced at a later date.

Says Wong: "I'm always looking for the rare work that's as moving as it is funny, that has characters who are people you've never met before but whom you somehow immediately feel familiar with. This play, kind of miraculously, gives me all of it. I love Lauren Yee's insightful vantage point that looks over family relationships and the unsettled scores such relationships keep, all wrapped up in a fresh athletic metaphor. It's a play that is so specifically Chinese American, yet somehow all-embracing-and that isn't an easy feat for a playwright. It is a gift of an opportunity to perform Lauren's play on one of the great regional stages in the country."

Adds MacKinnon: "The Great Leap was already going to be a celebration of San Francisco-a story set here, by a playwright from here, about a sport vital to here. We now add to that a homecoming for San Francisco's own BD Wong. I cannot wait!"

When a college basketball team from San Francisco is invited to China for an exhibition game in 1989, a smack-talking American coach prepares to take on his protégé-now grown and bent on crushing the Westerners. But after a public high school star from Chinatown joins the American team, his actions in Beijing become the accidental focus of attention, escalating the fractured history between the coaches. Funny, urgent, and contemporary, this slam dunk of a sports drama from Yee-developed at A.C.T.'s New Strands Festival in 2017-explores cultural identity, global politics, and the collision of cultures and generations. Under the direction of two-time Obie Award winner Lisa Peterson, The Great Leap soars through time and leaps across continents from the hardball courts of San Francisco's Chinatown to a Beijing on the brink of a revolution, building tension right up to the buzzer.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Wong is the only actor ever to have received all five major New York Theater awards for a single role-namely his performance in M. Butterfly (his Broadway debut): the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Theater World Award, the Clarence Derwent Award, and the Tony Award.

Wong gained notice on HBO's critically acclaimed series Oz as the resilient prison priest (Father Ray) for the show's six-season run. Then, for 11 seasons on the top-rated NBC series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, he played George Huang, an FBI forensic psychiatrist and expert on the criminal mind. Other television credits include NBC's Awake, ABC's All-American Girl, HBO's telefilms And the Band Played On and The Normal Heart, as well as guest-starring roles on Sesame Street, The X-Files, Madam Secretary, Nurse Jackie, and NCIS: New Orleans. He most recently has been seen in two drastically different television roles simultaneously: as the nefarious Hugo Strange on Gotham and as the mysterious trans-female hacker Whiterose on Mr. Robot. For his work on the latter, he received an Emmy, Gold Derby, and a Critic's Choice Award nominations.

Wong has appeared in more than 20 feature films, including Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Jurassic World, Focus, The Space Between Us, Stay, The Salton Sea,Executive Decision, Seven Years in Tibet, Jurassic Park, Father of the Bride (1 & 2), and The Freshman. He can also be heard as the voice of Shang in the Disney animated films Mulan and Mulan II. He will next be seen in Birdbox.

Wong's additional New York theater credits include The Great Leap at The Atlantic Theatre Company, The Tempest, A Language of Their Own, As Thousands Cheer,Shanghai Moon, and the Broadway revivals of the musicals You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Sondheim's Pacific Overtures (the latter for which he received a Drama League nomination for distinguished performance). He recently starred regionally in The Orphan of Zhao at La Jolla Playhouse and San Francisco's A.C.T. In addition, he has starred in five productions of the one-man musical Herringbone, a project dear to his heart.

Wong holds an honorary M.F.A. from American Conservatory Theater.

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