The actress they call the mainland's Meryl Streep

CHINESE movie critics have long described Xi Meijuan as the mainland version of Meryl Streep, a versatile actress able to skip almost effortlessly from comedy to drama to romance.

It's a comparison which was heartily endorsed this week by American Arvin Brown, who has directed both actresses during a distinguished career. Broadway veteran Brown was awestruck by Xi's lead performance in The Joy Luck Club, a play about Chinese-American women which had its world premiere in Shanghai.

''She has a tremendous inner confidence and stillness which is often the quality of a huge star,'' says Brown, 52. ''I could see that right away; there is a great connection between the mind and the heart.'' Brown, a personal friend of Oscar-winner Al Pacino, was hired by sponsors Northern Telecom to ensure the vignette-style US$500,000 (HK$3.9 million) production met his world-class theatrical standards.

It did. Despite the huge obstacles involved in putting on a play in Mandarin with an English-language director, The Joy Luck Club came across as a seamless theatrical exercise, thanks in no small measure to the natural elegance and quiet confidence of Xi Meijuan.

She plays Jing-mei, an American-born Chinese who is struggling to cope with the death of her mother, an anguish which causes a confusing cross-cultural trip down memory lane.

The actress has never been to the United States, or had that much contact with second-generation Chinese immigrants and their adaptation problems, but can nonetheless identify with the themes of cultural conflict and mother-daughter relationships.