In InterAct’s “Professor Qui,” art imitates true-life events

Temple University physics professor Xiaoxing Xi was at home with his family in Penn Valley when armed federal agents knocked on his door and arrested him — in front of his children — accusing him of seeking prestigious appointments in China in return for sensitive defense technological information.

Temple put him on paid leave. Xi, who had been up for the job of department chair, ended up remaining on Temple’s faculty, but losing that position.

That was May 14, 2015. Four months later, without explanation, prosecutors dropped the case.

Now, nearly a decade later, Xi will tell his story after a performance of the “Quixotic Professor Qui,” a world premiere about a professor accused of being a spy, written by New York playwright Damon Chua and staged by InterAct Theatre Company in Center City.

“People who work on writing plays and putting on plays know better how to communicate with the general audience than we scientists,” said Xi, who read the script before agreeing to speak at one of InterAct’s postshow talkbacks.

“It’s reasonably close to what happened to many Chinese professors. It’s a good example. I think it’s a positive thing to do, to have the general public gain more understanding of what’s going on,” said Xi, a naturalized citizen and an international expert in semiconductors.

The irony is that when Seth Rozin, InterAct’s producing artistic director, chose the play in 2023, he had no idea that art was imitating life so close to home. By the time he found out about Professor Xi’s story recently, the play was already deep into final production stages — too late for any input from Xi.

Even so, Chua had plenty of material to draw on.

Chinese-American scientists around the nation had been arrested and accused of spying for China. However, high-profile cases against four Chinese scientists were withdrawn in the 10 months prior to Xi’s case being dropped, according to reporting in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Rozin describes Chua’s writing as “smart and funny. It has a lot of humor.” In Chua’s play, the professor is a mathematician whose strictly academic research into prime numbers could be used to decode sensitive messages. The professor, played by Justin Jain, is being scrutinized by the FBI and suspicious colleagues, while, at the same time, navigating a delicate relationship with a childhood friend in China.

“He’s a little bit clueless,” Rozin said. “He gets targeted by the FBI for alleged espionage, sharing secrets with China. It is about how he navigates the personal and political things that come up. It’s both geopolitical, a little bit, and very personal.”

Xi said the play is right on the money about targeting Chinese professors, although he said that his colleagues at Temple were incredibly supportive, unlike the professor’s colleagues in the play.

For Rozin, the play continues InterAct’s long tradition of staging Asian-themed works and casting Asian actors. “There are many groups of people who have been underrepresented in the theater world, both as makers as well as audiences,” he said.

Even though Rozin and Xi have never met, both see the play and the topic as important at this point in time.

“What does it mean to be American now?” Rozin asked. “Is it where you are born? Is it how well you speak the language? Is it how you self-identify? And can all those things be eliminated because you are born somewhere else?

“I’ve always believed that playwrights are the true chroniclers of our time. They ask the best questions,” he said.

Xi said his situation has been and continues to be stressful. A lawsuit he filed against the U.S. Justice Department is still making its way through the courts.

“My family, we are traumatized by this experience,” Xi said. “And nowadays, among Chinese scientists, people are talking about this fear factor and people are fearful. It has an impact on us, on my family, on myself. Everything we do, we are kind of afraid. It makes our work very stressful, makes our lives very stressful.

“It’s going to get worse for sure,” he said. “Whether China is an enemy or not, that’s a national security judgment, it’s a geopolitics problem. What we don’t want is we don’t want internment camps like the Japanese experience in World War II. You cannot treat us like spies just because we came from China, or we are Chinese. It’s racial profiling. That’s what we are fighting against.

“If we don’t fight it, we don’t know how bad it is going to get,” Xi said, explaining why he takes every opportunity to talk about the situation to any audience who will hear him.

“If we appeal to all the fair-minded people for solidarity, for sympathy, we can reduce the severity and we hope it does not get to that point.”

Xi will speak to InterAct’s audience after the Feb. 23 Sunday matinee, the show’s last performance. There will be other talkbacks as well.

Following a Feb. 9 matinee, Carol Rollie Flynn, a 30-year veteran of the CIA who also worked as a undercover clandestine operations officer in Southeast Asia and later held the title of Associate Deputy Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, will speak.

Up after the Feb. 16 matinee is Penn Chinese law and politics professor Jacques deLisle, director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, co-director of the Center for Asian Law, and director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. 

Actors will talk to audiences after Saturday matinees. Playwright Chua, who was born and raised in Singapore, will speak after the Feb. 22 matinee. 

FYI

“Quixotic Professor Qui,” through Feb. 23, InterAct Theatre Co., Proscenium Theatre at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks St., Phila. 215-568-8079.

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