Three high-powered Asian American businesswomen meet for their monthly power lunch to discuss their latest career triumphs. When a bright-eyed 24-year-old named Katie joins the table, the older women’s attempts to mentor her force them to confront the grueling compromises and sacrifices they’ve made to climb the corporate ladder.

I just wanted to know what a play called Chinese Republicans was about. It has this whiff of ironic provocation to it, right? The premise is solid: three ambitious Chinese American women working at an investment bank—with about twenty years’ age gap from Phyllis to Ellen, then Ellen to Katie—form a corporate affinity group, counterpointed by a fourth member, Iris, a recent Chinese immigrant on a work visa. We get to know the group as they meet for lunches. Katie, the new blood, finds her stock rising as the others realize how they’ve hit their respective ceilings, and over the course of the play we come to understand what they endured to get there. This setup provides a lot of opportunities for witty zingers.

There’s a nice throughline underpinning this about a temporal dimension of assimilation. Participating in a majority-dominated space as a member of a minority group necessitates the development of certain survival skills, but the exact nature of those skills changes over time, in no small part because successive generations are building on foundations laid by their forebears. The young owe the old a debt that they can only theoretically grasp and never repay. Playwright Alex Lin develops this idea against a backdrop of cultural diffusion (recently satirized in last year’s memorable Meet the Cartozians) to explore how people of a shared background—in theory, natural allies—move through the world in different ways and come to harbor opposing viewpoints on fundamental topics.

So the foundation of the show is solid; it took me a second to put my finger on why I found it so grating in the moment. I don’t know if there’s a punchy term for this, but one of the more frustrating tropes in the broader tribalistic discourse is a prevailing assumption that goes beyond “the other team holds an immoral point of view” all the way to “the other team agrees with me that this point of view is immoral and has actively decided to embrace it.” While there are surely some bona fide Machiavellians out there, in practice, very few of us are the villains of our own stories.

To get a little more concrete with respect to the play: when the ingénue, Katie, is passed over for a promotion in favor of her white male peer, she is so affected by the experience that she wanders into a bookstore, discovers feminism and Marxism, starts protesting with a megaphone outside the building, launches a MeToo campaign on behalf of her unwilling mentor, and exits the finance industry to become a labor organizer and run for public office. The play becomes dreary as it descends into her rattling off all these moralistic talking points; meanwhile, her more conservative peers are written like cartoons, throwing around slurs, “I don’t care about those people—they might as well die,” and, “We’re gonna make a lotta money! (Mwahaha!)” It reads like a reductive failure of imagination.

Like, irrespective of the exact merits of the position, is it so difficult to believe that people who choose a career working in financial markets tend to believe in the positive power of market forces? Or that workers who find themselves climbing the ladder don’t readily buy that it’s impossible to replicate the feat? (I’m not saying these are my beliefs—I’m just saying I can see how you could arrive at them without being shoved to the extremes of a political binary.) Even setting aside the winking title, the play never gives the impression that it was written by anyone other than a young person on the far left, and it reeks of speculation about a world that that person doesn’t know. In this last regard, it doesn’t help that the script is flush with generic business-speak: we’ve got to Close a Big Deal in a Major Region to bring in Massive Profits and Make Partner.

A lot of what makes these spaces so difficult to penetrate is not active malice but inertial structural prejudice—someone was there first, and they don’t have any particular incentive to give up their power other than sheer altruism. You’re trying to extract empathy from someone to whom you don’t extend the common courtesy of viewing with a human mind, and it rings hollow. Sometimes you don’t get a major promotion at 24 because you’re 24 and there are only so many of them to go around, and understanding that is table stakes for being in the room. Katie would have gotten right back on the horse with the support of her mentors who have been there and done that, but the script is so determined to fire its political salvo that it undermines its own generational dynamic.