 a professional theater journalist since about 1999 and worked about eight years full time as the managing editor of Theatermania.com. And right now I am, you know, I freelance and I write a blog on Asian American performance, so. Hi, my name's Jeremy Tiang. I'm a writer and translator originally from Singapore, lived in the UK for about 10 years, moved to the States about a year ago and got my green card about a month ago. So I'm kind of uniquely unqualified to talk about the state of Asian American theater. And a lot of this will be about me figuring out what that even means. Because, well, we'll come to that, but briefly, I'm not sure that I am American yet and therefore not that I'm not Asian American, so where does that leave me? And yet here I am. Welcome. My name is Jeanie Sokata and I started out as an actor in early 1980s with East West Players. Did a number of shows there and then branched out to doing regional theater. A lot of the Lord theaters up the coast, Berkeley Rap and ACT, some on the East Coast, a public and Lincoln Center Theater and some others in the Midwest, Chicago, the Northlight Theater. And in 2007, I was really honored to make my debut as a playwright at East West Players again. Thank you, East West Players. And I wrote a show about Gordon Hirabayashi, which Makoto Hirano performed an excerpt of. And it was about a young man, college student at the University of Washington in Seattle during World War II who decided to openly defy and legally challenge the government orders for forced removal of all people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast. So it debuted at East West Players in 2007. We did a couple of high school tours with a special theater for youth version. And then we had a separate New York production in 2012. And the actor there, Joel Del Fuente, got a drama desk nomination for outstanding solo performance. Since then, it's gone to Playmakers Rep in North Carolina and Honolulu. And we did four performances in Seattle earlier this year. And we're invited back for the main stage season for next year. Okay, so can I actually ask Jeannie to start us off? Maybe kind of come from that and then I'll speak last. Take about five minutes to talk about what you think is the state of Asian-American theater now. You can hear me? Can you hear me? Is that on? Yeah, I was on. You know, this conference has been such an eye-opener for me. And when I asked myself that question, what is the state of Asian-American theater? It raises maybe a dozen more questions. I think my answer to that would depend on, it's a many faceted question. So, for example, when I asked myself, what is the state of Asian-American theater in terms of the voices and the people writing and the energy and passion of people writing? Wow. I just had a conversation with someone about how I'm so thrilled at the number of young Asian-American female writers that are right now writing for the theater. And the diverse voices they have and the amazing diversity of stories that they're tackling. So if you ask me about the quality of the writing and the excitement I feel about that, it's just fantastic. If you say, I was having a conversation with Tim Dang about all my New York musical theater friends whenever they post on Facebook, hey, I've been cast in a show. It's one of three shows. It's Ms. Saigon, the King and I, or maybe Pacific Overtures. And so if you ask me that question, what is the state of Asian-American musical theater in terms of what is being produced? What is providing the jobs for my friends in New York? I would say, wow, we need a lot of work done there. So the one thing that I feel very encouraged by here in this conference is the number of conversations that I think are being initiated in our community. Tim was talking about his initiative to go around to different theaters and talk to them about employing women and people of color in 2042 as at a target date. And I think it's just great that conversations like these are being initiated. Sort of a schizophrenia, I think, that we experience as Asian-American artists, there's something that happens and you go, wow, that's fantastic. And then something else that happens, you go, oh, we gotta fight this battle all over again. And, but what I think is that, you know, as discouraging as that La Jolla thing was, you know, with the casting of, you know, the white actors, and you know, I couldn't help but think, talking to Cindy Chung, who was one of the people that was so forceful in representing our community at the conversations about that, that maybe one thing that came out of that was that Manu Narayan, who's a wonderful South Asian actor, had a key role in the David Mamet play that followed shortly after and got rave reviews and got some sort of award nomination in Sandy. And I thought, I have never heard of a South Asian actor being cast in a David Mamet play at a regional theater. So I don't know if that would have happened without that conversation that, you know. So that's my feeling. It's like, you know, you take two steps forward, one step back, or two steps back, two steps forward. It's, it used to be that, you know, I was a young actor and we protested Miss Saigon and all these other incidents that would come up. And I used to think that once people were educated about these things, you wouldn't have to deal with them any more naively. And I didn't realize that, you know, as each generation comes of age, there are all these stereotypical portrayals of Asians and Asian-Americans that are embedded in the media. And the next generation comes up and encounters those and we have to educate all over again. So I've kind of accepted the fact that, you know, that education has to constantly take place. So I'd like to start with the subtitle which here, there, where. And I'd like to think that within those ellipses and within that where is the acknowledgement that our options might not be limited to here and there. Because it's not really about the immigrant narrative which is what I read into that. And I think in answer to the question, what is the state of Asian-American theater? I would say, as far as I can tell, it's that we're moving away from the singular narrative and acknowledging that there are multiple Asian-American experiences and that even the term Asian-American doesn't capture the entirety of all the voices that are to be heard. And a lot of this comes out of my own questioning of my role and my presence here. I'm Asian, I'm a playwright, and I live in America. Does that make me an Asian-American playwright? Or can I exist outside of that label? What does it mean to be Asian, but not necessarily Asian-American? Why is that even that term? Which, you know, being fairly new to the country, I'm still struggling with. No one ever says white American. Are we insisting on nationality as a non-negotiable marker of belonging? And will there come a day when this becomes kata, the conference of Asian and Asian-American theater artists? A lot of what I've observed of Asian-American theater has been defined by not belonging, being between East or West, being between two states. Or to quote Vuthi in Michael Galamco's play, Extraordinary Chambers. I'm too Cambodian for the black and Latin kids and not Cambodian enough for the Cambodian kids. And is that where a lot of the tension comes from, this lack of belonging? Are we always in between? There is a playwright I've met in New York called Kyong Park, who is of Korean descent, but from Chile. And I always enjoy going to see one of Kyong's performances because his bio says Kyong is the first Korean playwright from Latin America to be produced in the United States. And I always think, yes, yes he is. That's nice. And then I think about why does that strike the ear as being so odd? And I'm sure Kyong is in part including that in his biography as a kind of joke of the ever smaller spaces of contested identity. The heiress relay claim too, within Asian-American-ness, we're starting to see Korean-American, Japanese-American, and so on. And the further debate of is it okay to cast a Korean-American in a Hmong-American part? And I don't actually hear Hmong-American that often. It seems to be within that identity as a contested label too. And there's very small demarcations of belonging that I find hard to negotiate as an outsider. And it feels very fractured and perhaps that's a necessary stage of further exploration, further fragmentation. Speaking for myself, whenever people ask where'd you come from for things like the census or whatever, I have to say well I'm from Singapore of Chinese-Malaysian and Sri Lankan Tamil descent and I studied in the UK and now I live in Brooklyn and people are like that doesn't fit in our box. And I'm like yeah, I'm sorry I don't fit into your box but that is my identity and it doesn't fit into the neat label of Asian-American. And I think Asian-American theater will have to grow out of the idea that it has to be entirely representational and perhaps define itself less as an opposition and more as just a loose collection of voices. What I mean about the theater being defining itself as not, I think is crystallized by something G. Hay Park writes in her play Hannah and the Dread Gazebo in which a family crisis pulls Hannah's family back to Korea from America and her brother, Dang, who complains that Seoul is so full of like Asian people, complains that he feels less special in Asia rather than America. He says, I walk down the street back home and I see white people, black people, fat people and I know I'm me because I'm not them. Here any one of these people could be me, some bizarro version of me and I think that sums up how I feel about the idea of definition by opposition. And the very term non-white makes me uncomfortable. So what I hope is to find a way to define Asian as an Asian-American is in terms of being rather than not to being. I have been teaching a course in Asian-American theater since 1999 and when I started, I've talked about 12 times since then and I've been thinking about the way that that course has evolved over the years and over a decade I guess now and part of that I think goes to one, the availability of scripts. As far as like when I first started teaching the class there were like four anthologies available and a very few print editions and now there's a lot more stuff available for us to look at and so the kind of stuff that was available to me when I first started teaching the course were a lot of times there were the stuff that would try to place Asian-Americans in the context of America. And what I mean by that is immigration narratives, the internment camp dramas that we were talking about earlier and a number of the things that are the history plays basically as far as like the way that Asian-Americans were trying to fit themselves within two narratives of history and for very specific reasons. So looking at like Denny Lim's Paper Angels or David Henry Wong's Dance of the Railroad or Waka Kako Yamiguchi's 12.1A. And so things like that that were looking at documenting specific moments in history as a way of showing that Asian-Americans fit into American history somehow. And it also came out of a very specific kind of construction of Asian-America that had to do with the way Asian-Americans came into a political identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s which was through this kind of activist movement oftentimes student led that consolidated an American identity, an Asian-American identity from people who are identifying as Chinese-American or Japanese-American or Filipino-American but who are coming together for the first time and trying to see the continuities between the way they experienced issues of race within America and also connected to a very political identity influenced by the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement specifically and how that particular American identity that Asian-American identity in the late 60s and 70s was all about showing how that experience was grounded in the history of being in America. And then now right at the time that they were consolidating an American identity the immigration law changed in 1965 and that had extreme significance to the way Asian-American identity then formed for the next decade or so afterwards. But a lot of the early Asian-American work that was being done in both literature, in novels, in literature, in plays was all with this perspective of how are we relating to our history in America? And I think now because so much of the Asian-American population in the United States is actually either foreign born and coming over or newly second generation, right? As far as like my parents immigrated in 1966. So I'm second generation or however you want to define that as far as like that quick question as far as it's first generation who comes over or you know what I'm talking about, right? So there's that idea that Asian-American we wanted to prove a longevity in the United States and that was, and so that's why there was so much about immigration narratives and putting ourselves within the American context. But now because there is a lot more diverse experience and a lot of different ways that people come to America as Jeremy indicates that we're looking at a much more transnational situation that the voices are writing not just about how do you locate yourself within America but how do you locate yourself in relation to Asia? How do you locate yourself in terms of it was something that came up in the last home session is the idea of global identity and global citizenship if you want to call it that. And so how do you locate that kind of an, and I think there's a number of playwrights who are starting to write towards an identity that's not just based in America anymore or trying to incorporate a more complex position in relation to how they are treating that. I'm thinking of say Jessica Haganorn's Doggaters which is based upon her novel that she adapted for the stage but which is set in the Philippines and looks at a particular moment in Filipino history through a somewhat fictional lens but also has the character of Rio who is Balakmayan returning to the Philippines and kind of like looking like she was, she started there as far as she grew up there and then moved to America at a young age and coming back and seeing political corruption as far as how her father has taken care of her customs so that she didn't actually have to go through customs like how is that even possible as far as like shouldn't I be like everyone else and go through all these things and so looking at a changing political situation in the Philippines because of that or I'm looking at things like key wins the inexplicable redemption of agent G which is about Vietnam and this person returning to Vietnam after having escaped as a young boy and his own subject position as a playwright also layered into that as he is performed by an African-American actor because that's the way he sees himself as opposed to someone of Vietnamese descent and how his version of Vietnam is all about pop culture right like influenced by movies and films and like creating a very different kind of way that you experience ideas of Asia in an age of globalization so those are the kind of the things that I think Asian America and maybe the state of Asian American theater is moving towards and perhaps again not just in opposition to but trying to figure out where people fit within a global identity that's not really all that defined in a certain sense if you look at the very first anthology of Asian American drama between worlds edited by Misha Burson and you read the introduction that each playwright wrote they all define themselves as cosmopolitan citizens these are Ping Chong, Jessica Hagedorn, David Henry Wong all of them define themselves as not particularly as Asian American but they don't belong anywhere and they belong everywhere so this idea has existed for a long time but at the same time I think there are dictates of how American theater is structured I'm talking about funding structure of season selections and things like that that actually dictate how the labels are used so for example Signature Theater in New York City did a whole season of David Henry Wong's plays and he was selected as the first Asian American playwright and he's as you know the only Asian American playwright to have even produced some Broadway so and he's celebrated as representing the entire community of Asian American theater so but that's the only way I think mainstream American theater can understand the significance of what David's doing and what everybody else is doing so I think that Sencha has always existed and Kyung Park's play one of his plays is in my anthology and I title my anthology as Korean Diaspora plays so I deliberately did not use the Korean American plays but again that could signal many different things so I'm questioning you know because that was included in Duke University Press's Asian collection catalog so and I wonder there's these structures in our society and how do you fit what's Asian American or whatever it's trying to challenge that label gets then categorized I think that goes on I'm gonna talk specifically about the academia because that's the world I've been in for many, many years and I have some good news because 1999, 2010 and I were graduate students there are only four of us teaching Asian American theater and all four of us are here actually Julie, that's Julie, Karen Shimakami and Dan 2009, 2009, 2000 that we were the only four people in the entire world teaching Asian American theater in higher education and I made a list of universities that now teach Asian American theater and it's now over 13 campuses teaching Asian American drama and a number of our colleagues, friends now have tenure jobs, tenure track jobs and if you just calculate say 15 student per class taught once a year for 13 faculty members that's a lot of people who know Asian American theater and that's your potential audience members and your performers and artists and your directors so it's hopeful I think and that our books are being published so this kind of sense that oh you know we fought Miss Saigon so now we shouldn't have yellow face and you know that if you, that's the sense I had when I wrote my book, A History of Asian American Theater if everybody read my book, you know the world would be a better place for you we won't have to repeat this, you know tired discussions about racism in American theater but you know, I think like only 50 people read it so I don't know what, no, no, no but another interesting kind of turn of events is that I was recently contacted by a director of entertainment at a luxury cruise line and it's the most random thing I thought it was a joke by a friend but you know he wanted to invite me on one of the cruises because my book was selected as a recommended reading of this cruise that seemed to be catering to really rich white people so I thought this was the most random thing what is going on and then things made sense slowly when he gave me the details that we're gonna be talking about a flower drum song and we're gonna be talking about the golden in the time of Hollywood when they had Asian theme films and so he wanted me to do a lecture on flower drum song and have one of the performers who was in David Huang's revival to be there to teach them how to do fanfare, you know that dance with these people who are on the cruise so I am just like my jaws are dropping and then but then it's free, I should go right so I know exactly so I thought okay if they're gonna read my book they may completely misunderstand what they're reading but it is time for me to go and I said you know can I put a historical context to do a flower drum song you know and he said oh that sounds great so I will try to educate these people on my cruise I'll tell you what happens this next May we're going but small steps it may be misunderstood it may not be completely digested and I think we are making changes slowly whether it's in classrooms or in kind of you know in the rest of the world out there so let's cut then can we spend about seven minutes to talk amongst ourselves and then we'll open up to the floor does that sound good so do we have any questions for each other? I just had a response to you know you said about term Asian American being in opposition but I do remember when I went to college and you know this was in the 1970s and UCLA had the Asian American Study Center that was you know I'm so encouraged to hear what you said because back then Asian American Studies was a very new kind of concept you know Gordon Hirabayashi's brother James Hirabayashi was one of the first Dean of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco fighting for Asian American Studies programs and I always took the term Asian American to be actually inclusive in the sense that we you know as an ethnic group we're not accepted as Americans especially well my background being Japanese American I was very aware that you know during World War II we were not accepted as Americans even though the Nisei were born here and they believed in promises of constitution they were shocked when the government sent them away to the camps as well as their Japanese born parents so I remember then that Asian American was a sense the term was a sense of pride and inclusion that we are part of this country too and that our history is part of this country it could be that you know times have evolved to the point where you know it might be worth a look to see how that term is used it could be that it is maybe oppositional in the times we are in now but I just wanted to say about the origins of the term you know we're very positive as I remember myself as a student you know back then I'm dating myself but I'm very encouraged too because I feel like you know all these progressive moves are interrelated whether it's academic and theater and film the progress we make I mean back then I thought it was going into library and information science and I was I had a job as a part time job in a children's progressive children's library at UCLA and there was talk about stereotypes in Asian American children's literature you know and it just strikes me how you know whether it's the political realm theatrical in film, academics you know it's all the same challenges we're facing so anyway I just wanted to make comment I've got question for the academics and I think this is something I've been wondering for a while the term Asian American theater is something that's bandied about a lot but not often defined in a kind of we'll know what it is when we see it but in the academic world is there a more formal definition of the term what are the parameters? I don't think there's a formal parameters other than the fact I mean it's interesting because what I teach in my Asian American theater class is whatever I feel counts as Asian American theater so some of it is the thing that everyone would recognize as far as like you know Frank Chin's Chicken Coop Chinaman is Asian American theater but then I also teach Diana Sun's Stop Kiss which doesn't necessarily have an identifiable Asian American character in it even though Sandra Oh was in the original production but in the following year when it was being done all across the country most casts were either all white or did not have any Asian Americans in it even though Diana Sun says very specifically in her introduction to the play that she wants to reflect the diversity of New York City right so but script wise there's no clues within the context of the play to say this is an Asian character and so people can cast it however they want to and then other things are things that are not written by Asian Americans but I also teach you know so I teach oh what is the one about the robot, the female robot? Jenny Chow, yes as far as like the intelligent design of Jenny Chow which is written by as a self-proclaimed white dude from California right but it involves you know transnational adoption issues and so that's something that I also teach there but even going back further from the 1960s kind of moment where Asian American identity came into being then I also want to talk about the Chapsui circuit right and so in the 1940s and 1950s and looking at that moment where a bunch of actors of Asian descent before there was such a thing as Asian American identity were performing in all Chinese reviews right as far as like but they were Filipino they were Japanese they were you know multi-racial kind of configurations and again these were people who were doing this before there was such a thing as Asian American identity so I tell my students up front that we're studying whatever I want to study with you and that's what Asian American theater is Right I think it's an evolving term in the academia too I know that say UC Berkeley program changed their Asian American studies program to Asian diaspora studies right and I think the other programs are following that trend and you know the way I use it in my research is how artists have used it if they identify themselves Asian American then that's what I'm going to use if you look at East West players or Pan-Asian rep they didn't initially start with the Asian American theme when they began but it became so so that kind of that phenomenon that kind of history is really what interests me but that term still is useful in many ways but like I said it's evolving and it's changing it needs to be changed. One other thing I didn't mean to be flipping at that last thing but what I really meant was what I also asked my students to do is to question exactly how we're actually defining it so the course is designed to say these are the texts that we're going to look at but as we look at them we're also going to question how does this how is this genre constructed? How do we perceive stop kiss as an Asian American play? Do we perceive Jenny Chow as an Asian American play? So interrogating the way that we look at something in addition to actually looking at the work. I think this is a good time to open up to the floor and Joey's going to pass the mic around. This has been live streamed so my daughters might be watching me. Oh yeah, no, sorry, and you look great. I just wanted to, before I share the mic I'm going to take the floor for just a minute and respond to Esther's cruise ship story that some years ago when I was still pretty new in my career and pretty optimistic about going to audiences. I was asked by the Minnesota Opera to talk about Madame Butterfly which as many of you know along with the Mikado one of the evil triumvirate but I think you know and this was before I started doing work on the Mikado which I eventually wrote into a scholarly project but I went and along with some other scholars who were talking about women female characters in 19th century opera anyway. So I thought oh I'll talk about Madame Butterfly and it came with a PowerPoint and I had all the stuff that was about stereotypes and the origins of the story and how David Balasco actually changed the ending so that you have the tragic suicide and then the conflation of sort of the suicide with beautiful music and what that does to your mind and it was delivered to one of the most hostile audiences I've ever encountered. I mean I had opera fans and they were aghast. I mean they were really upset by what I said about this opera that they treasure. It was a really as one of my colleagues put it a really tough house and so I sort of you know I was and so but one of the things that did happen at the close of that evening which for me was a really long evening is a young woman the only probably Asian American person Asian person in the audience a young woman maybe I would think at late teens or early 20s came up with her mother and she said to me thank you for your talk and then on the way out her mother also thanked me and her mother was and she said this is my mother. Her mother was white. I mean it's clearly someone who was adopted I would guess because we have a lot of transnational adoption in Minnesota and that for me made the whole evening worthwhile. So I think in some ways a lot of the talk has been reaching audiences in the kind of majority and getting everyone. But I think even if you only have one I think one of the things living in Minnesota which is primarily a very white although demographically changing place you know when I started writing about Asian American theater I thought really hard about Du Bois right the African American theater model from the Harlem Renaissance by us for us near us about us right and could we ever make that model work where I lived and I think to some extent you have to kind of stretch what us means in all kinds of ways right and even if us is a one-on-one connection even if there were only four of us way back when and even if there are only 13 of us now there's gotta be more. I think that's really really you know it is the important so I just wanted to say that before I come. Hi my name's Gina Fisa Sal and I'm a resident dramaturge at Alert Theater in the Philly area and we're in season selection and there's something that you brought that up and I'm curious about how the canon can serve the present global cosmopolitan conversation because going studying Asian American theater history I feel like I have a grasp of and also many copies of those plays that I can throw at what we call the artistic cabinet who's in charge of season selection but I have to be really strategic about it because we only get however many token slots to represent minorities but also there's such a huge demand for an all Asian cast within the canon of Asian American theater but I also want to help people like Jeremy in conversations when they meet you on the street and I wanna help people that are here making art that are challenging the idea of Asian American so for me I'm having a really hard time finding of honoring the canon and educating people about it but also addressing the kind of global cosmopolitan nature of Asian American work now so I'm just curious to hear from the panel about that relationship, that tension about what you think serves or dis-serves the contemporary work that's happening now and what's useful about me throwing canonical work at a season selection committee. One thing we have to think about in terms of it it is weird to talk about an Asian American theater canon as if there is such a thing but there are certain works that are taught over and over again and I think the really important thing to remember is if you think that the Asian American theater canon has been only about Asian American identity that the most widely taught Asian American play is a play that takes place in China and France and has no Asian American characters in it and that's M Butterfly, right? So even just starting with that, you're throwing out or you're not, you're complicating what exactly is Asian American, right? Because everyone recognizes M Butterfly as an Asian American play. It's the one that got David Henry Wong as the spokesperson for Asian American drama in so many ways, won the Tony and so there's a critical discourse around that particular play but again, it has no Asian Americans in it, right? So once you break that part open then you really have a very wide parameter of what you can introduce as Asian American drama. Gina, can you be a little more specific for me in terms of your challenge is, sorry, but how does Asian American theater, how can it be introduced to someone who it wants to see how it fits in a global context, is that? Yeah, I mean so much of I think our struggles and like you have that the joke of the where are you from thing. So the fight against foreignness, I feel like is a big struggle that was kind of covered by I mean what Esther calls like first and maybe second wave kind of generation playwrights to claim our American-ness. And I feel like that's a big part of the canon to say there's like to address that question of foreignness that we are just as American as an O'Neill, like characters in O'Neill play or something like that. So now with this global more cosmopolitan kind of movement that challenges this idea of only being American, I'm just curious if those plays that are claiming that American identity as part of, do you know what I mean, the central narrative or like the overreaching kind of theme that like of those plays that are within the canon if they're useful or I understand that they're useful from historical perspective but and they're glorious beautiful plays and stories but just in terms of you know helping with, that's like about Jeremy's conversation about the where are you from question. You know, so there's these plays that say no, we're not foreign but then they're saying like no, no, no, it's great to be foreign but so it's for me, I feel like there's a chasm between those two I kind of identity claims. So that's why I'm just wondering if it's like a helpful hurtful like what the, you know what I mean, kind of constructive conversation is between those two. You know, two things pop into mind for me, I think I could think of more if I had more time to think about it but years ago we did a Verlina Hassu Houston's play T at Syracuse stage and we were in, you know, it was a really interesting experience because it's not like there's a lot of Asians, you know, the population around that community. What there was a lot of was a lot of Russian immigrants who had relatives who came to see the play and it was so interesting because people, they were responding to it so deeply and I think the plays that we have in the canon that speak of the immigrant experience, you know, can potentially speak really deeply to a global audience because they were saying these are my ancestors, these are my grandparents, these are, you know, they didn't, the specifics of those particular women related to the specifics of their community in a kind of great magical way and it's not something that maybe could have been predicted but I think that's really true, you know, any sort of immigrant experience where you're trying to adapt to a new land is universal and also I had a very interesting experience with Holy's Truths where a man who was a freedom fighter for, against apartheid in South Africa, he came up to me after a performance and he was very curious about the play and about the reactions I'd had to it here and he said because there are so many parallels for things that we went through in South Africa in terms of, you know, one person that took a stand I just felt that it was something I couldn't have foreseen and this was a man who had lost an arm to a terrorist bombing because people, you know, pro-apartheid people were after him and I was so touched that he related to the play and felt that it was, you know, a play that could speak to a lot of people abroad so I think it's interesting because it's not something I consciously thought of, you know, when I wrote the play but I think there's really great potential for Asian American-themed plays to have global appeal. I think maybe we just have to do a little more thinking and articulation about how that can be so and, you know, certain, and the populations of, you know, people have said certain plays, you should take this to Edinburgh, you know, there would be a lot of connection to immigrant experiences or people that, you know, that we don't even foresee. I don't know, maybe, Jeremy, you can talk about this but I've just heard conversations like this and I haven't done, as I said, a lot of articulation about it but I think there's great potential there from, you know, from things that I've heard. There are moments when I think of getting a t-shirt made that says, David Henry Huang does not represent my experience and that's, you know, nothing on David. David writes to his experience, I write to mine and I think there's room for us all to have our identities. There's nothing hurtful about it apart from when you come up against the idea that there is a quintessential Asian American experience but I think there are also enough voices out there that anyone who's listening will be aware this is not the case. So my answer would be, yes, we should do the, I'm comfortable with the word canon but the established plays because they are, because they're good, because they're good theater because they still have validity because they have stories that are still worth hearing but we should also broaden this base of plays and broaden the outreach to include other voices and other narratives and not confine ourselves. And this is, you know, in terms of identity, the number of hats we're allowed to wear and the question of as an Asian American playwright, do you have to write Asian American stories? Is everything you write necessarily an Asian American story or as you say is Dionysons play Asian American? Lauren E writes about many different communities and some of her plays are, you know, the hat maker's wife is the Jewish community and the Golem story. So is that still an Asian American playing? But Lauren, of course, should write exactly what Lauren wants to write and I think we can be open enough to not try and put a box around everything. So I think just embrace everything is my answer. Yeah, just to continue on that idea, if you look at, the idea of canon is interesting because if you look at David Huang's plays and what Signature Theater chose to showcase for their season, they did Dance in the Railroad, Golden Child and Kung Fu about Bruce Lee. All three, I saw all three of them and they all have visually very Asian markers. Golden Child takes place in China and Dance in the Railroad, that's about the railroad workers in the 19th century, Bruce Lee, obviously, the way he speaks is very Hong Kong accent. So I remember that night when I saw Golden Child and I saw the matinee and in the evening, in the same theater, they were doing an August Wilson play and the audience reaction was completely different. I think the audience of Golden Child saw it as a very, oh, that's so Chinese, look at their beautiful costumes. Look at what they bound their feet, oh my God, that kind of reaction and then August Wilson, there was a sense, oh my God, this is an American story. There's like this embracing, we all kind of shared this horrible history now, we can move on. There is such a stronger feeling and in terms of Canada, I think August Wilson can be considered African American canon in theater but even with David Wong's plays, it's ambiguous. We could claim it as canon but it's also read as very foreign and whether that is Asian American to their eyes, I think we need to really question that. Yeah, my name is Francesca Mackenzie and I'm a theater maker based in New Orleans and I keep on thinking about what Jeremy said at the beginning of why do we have to classify ourselves as Asian American theater, why isn't it just American and you speaking about the origins of that from World War II, from a Japanese American experience and though I also agree, there cannot be a quintessential Asian American experience, I would find it uncomfortable to not claim my own artistic work as Asian American as long as our society is structured in a way where it's meant to elevate an America that doesn't include me. So it doesn't feel like I can say it's just American, you know what I mean? Like that would be the dream but and I guess I open it up to everyone of whether they feel that way because I feel pride in being able to say I'm an Asian American theater maker and I don't think it would make sense for me to just say it's American because it's different. Just to be clear that the part of the Asian American label that I reject is the American part. My identity is very Asian but my question is really can I live and work in this country without being American? Can I just be Asian? Is that possible? Perhaps in time to come I will start to feel American but at the moment, honestly I don't but I still feel that I have stories to share with people in this country, with Americans and I kind of do confound a lot of white people who are like, if I sounded foreign, well I do sound foreign but if I sounded from Asia that would be fine and if I sounded American that would be fine too but speaking the way I do people get really confused and I kind of enjoy that. I don't plan to assimilate. Are Asian, right? So there are students from Asia and they're kind of get into my class and they have a very different take on the material and so I have students who are American but non-Asian American. I have Asian American students. I have Asian students and then I have myself. But I've been starting to teach more about that it's not just about the Asian American part but it's about the drama part, right? So what I kind of stress is how there are certain things about dramatic structure and form that shape our understanding, our perception and we talk a lot about characters and their capacity to imagine and make worlds, right? I mean, because this is what drama happens. So in some ways, I mean, a play like Tea, right? Which we're gonna be doing this week. I was thinking about how to approach it in a way that isn't about a singular Asian American experience, right? So the sort of ideas that these women move between two spaces, right? Imagine spaces of Japan and America and that each space contains sort of a layering of different social identities that they have to negotiate, right? And these, if you know the play, you know that the actresses also play multiple roles, right? So at each moment you see them performing these kind of contradictory things like in light of all these different roles and worlds that they have to negotiate. And so I think that's a way of getting students who are not necessarily familiar with sort of post-World War II American history or who don't have a kind of direct Asian connection in their family line or out of their experience. That's a way to kind of hook them in, right? Because I think that negotiation of the gap between our imagined world and what we would like the world to be, number one. And number two, you know, how much is our ability to effect change limited, right? Or make our worlds. And I found that for me works really well as a teaching tool and also I might add that I'm also teaching Shakespeare at the same time. So I teach the same thing in both classes which saves me preparation. So I don't have to think about more than one thing. But for me it's sort of because I teach both and it's cross listed between English and Asian American studies. And so I get students from Asian American studies who really are, you know, they've taken Asian American history, they're really interested in the identity issues, the social activism issues. And then I get students from the English theater side who know a lot about theater and literature and form, right? But know nothing of the politics. So there's always that bridge. But I actually really like it. And so one of the things I think is that it keeps it fun. And I used to feel really disheartened, you know, sometimes at the lack of progress. But I feel like maybe because I teach a lot of Samuel Beckett and it keeps going on. And it's like being an educator, you know, I get them through four years and then they graduate and then a new batch comes in and some of these students come in and they have the same issues that students had, you know, 30 years ago when I started teaching. And if you don't kind of take it in that, well, it's my job to work with them. And it's their job to learn. So if you don't have that, if I wanted them to know something when they came in, they shouldn't even be in my classroom, right? I mean, because that's why they're there and that's why I get paid, which is nice. Something I'd like to bring up is that part of what determines, quote unquote, the Asian American canon is what Asian American work can actually impact the mainstream ecology of theater in this country, right? So in order to answer that, you've got to know, well, what is the function of Asian American theater in American theater? And here's the thing, artists love, many artists love to say this, well, why can't I be just a writer and stuff, right? But honestly, it's naive because what is the function of Asian American theater in the larger ecology? And actually, this is true of every writer of color. It is to educate, quote unquote, the mainstream about race. That is what they're looking for and depending on what they're ready for, that's what gets produced in that time, okay? So going to Gina's thing, you have to be able to model what your ADs and literary people want. They may not be ready for these characters only happen to be Asian because what do we need to learn from you about people who are just human? No, we wanna learn and have that cultural tourist experience, right? And I use that both in a positive or negative way. David Wong very consciously uses tropes that you could see as Orientalists because he knows that's what the market wants and he's able to also sneak in his own quasi-subversive thoughts about it at the same time, right? It is quite conscious and brilliant on his part. So in terms of the we are, in fact, American stories, a success like Gina's play shows how that's still relevant now. Do you know what I mean? If everyone in Seattle knew about the story then it might not be, do you know what I'm saying? But clearly it's not. They go, oh my goodness, he's one of our own and then that's a window, that's an opportunity. You can use that as you will, right? And so that's also true of the super angry Frank Chin plays of the 70s. Off Broadway was ready for it in that era. Probably they wouldn't do it now because it's not that fun to be slapped around and blamed even if Frank is somewhat justified, right? That runs out. You'd much rather now see Chinglish, right? So then the global angle is, right now, China is super relevant, right? Especially a China that is oppressive, patriotic, capitalistic, all of the above. So you're gonna get these what I call yellow dystopia plays, right? They're probably not gonna produce about wow, China's finally rising up again after being slapped down by the West for the last 150 years which is just an accurate view of China, which is just as accurate a view of Chinese history as Tiananmen or Hong Kong protests, right? So it's part of being savvy about well what is our function in that and then within those parameters if you're using their means of production, right? What can you sneak in or not? Francis's play that's been, oh, I'm sorry. Francis, her play that's been done right now in Chicago and then later. World of Extreme Happiness. Yes, it's a hugely current global play. I remember when I read it and I was thinking, it makes you think of your own, your iPad and your iPhone and the laborers that work on these horrible conditions. It's interesting because as an American without any hyphen momentary lightning, we all use these devices. So I think that play is a hugely relevant in the global sense play right now. Do you know that play? So, yeah. Dan, I was interested in what you were saying earlier about the curriculum that you, how do you define Asian-American theater? Because it's come up several times during this conference, like Kenneth Lin, he's a Taiwanese-American playwright, but Ken is writing plays that aren't necessarily for Asian-Americans. He's written Asian-American characters. So would we call, would we say that's an Asian-American play if it doesn't have specifically Asian-American characters in it? Or if, like you said, a Caucasian playwright. I mean, what was that great production at MA-YI about Magna Rubio, which I loved, and that was not written by an Asian-American. So it's interesting, we talk about Asian-American plays and Asian-American productions. It was something that interested me how you define that. Yeah, I've taught Magna Rubio as well. But just in relation to that, like I said, it's a matter of teaching the work and then interrogating how it relates to what we think about as what is Asian-American, what is Asian-American identity. Another thing that I teach is I teach about Chinese opera in New York City, right? So looking at how, and like these performance traditions that are going on. So we look at Meilan Fong's visit in 1930 to New York and how the constructions of race, there's an article whose name I'm forgetting, but takes a look at the construction of race around how Meilan Fong was received as opposed to how the local Chinatown troops were received and looking at that, which is not something that my Asian-American students even have thought about in relation to how do you construct race in terms of performance. So it's just looking at the ways that race and performance intersect around Asian and American identities. And so the more that we can keep it kind of undefined in a certain way, the more I like it. So like I said, I teach it and the fact that it's in my course means that I am considering an Asian-American theater, but if you go outside of that, that a lot of people won't necessarily consider what I consider within the Asian-American theater of canon if we want to call it that or for naught. I mean, just to respond, I mean, I think it's a really interesting question. And when I used to teach in Asian-American studies, we're constantly having to grapple with this every quarter, right? And what I think is it's a performative just to use the lingo of my field, right? The designation of Asian-American is a political choice, right? And it's a political act, just like calling Shakespeare stuff English is a political act. And I think that's what's interesting. If you claim it as a political agenda, right? It means something to say this is Asian-American. I think part of what I think is hard is trying to grapple with, well, there is this platonic correct definition that we're all trying to get to and we just need to find, yes, what is the definition of Asian-American? But you make it every time you claim it and there are political consequences to deploying it. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. So I think if you can think of it as like a political claim that you make and deploy it or choose not to but do it purposefully, I think you can either get the benefit of it or get the benefit of avoiding that label or whatever. But it's a political act. It's not a pre-existing category that you're trying to correctly access, right? That's how I use it. Yeah, and just to continue on that, I think what Gina is asking also is if you are a theater company and you make the selection, how do you market it? And who is the audience for this? I'm actually curious about what you guys think. Tim, I don't know if you could speak to the East-West players experience of how do you access the audience and how do you market a certain production as Asian-American or not as an Asian-American? And I know that, I think I talked to you for my book many, many years ago and I think that's when you were trying to move away from mostly niche subscription base to a much more diverse and how that kind of worked out and so can you talk a little bit more about audience and how the East-West players does? I think the idea about claiming is right on because if we are doing a production of Sweeney Todd with an all Asian-American cast, for that time being, Stephen Sondheim is an Asian-American playwright in residence at East-West Players. And in fact, because we've done 12 Sondheim shows, we call Stephen Sondheim the most produced Asian-American composer at East-West Players. So I think that's right in terms of the way that we market it. Our audience is a very interesting mix. We're 54% Asian and 46% non-Asian. So I think a lot of theaters would kill to have our kind of diversity there and we do think a lot about how we market our piece and who we're marketing to, which is basically a much broader audience than the Nisei audience of 20, 30 years ago. That's changing. Our largest donors are Japanese-American. Why are Japanese-Americans the largest donors to an art organization like East-West Players? How do we get all the other communities to start giving Chinese-American, Indian-American? And all of this is built along a strategic plan that we're building right now. This is all going towards 2042 when we're gonna be majority-minority. What's really important right now for East-West Players is to do more South Asian work and to do work that deal with bi-racial characters. At the TCG conference, a lot of questions were asked, are there any bi-racial characters that are half Asian, half Caucasian or half Asian, half Black that are written in the American theater? And the answer is they are rare. And so East-West Players is now writing about the bi-racial experience. Who's our audience? I think our audience is slowly becoming more and more diverse, that I think it is good that it is becoming less Asian and more multicultural. Over at 2G in New York, when I took over about two years ago, I was asking the same sort of questions. So I commissioned a bi-racial piece from Adam Manchur, who's never actually worked in an Asian-American theater. She's half Chinese, half white. And so she is actually looking inward not trying to explore her own bi-racial story. And I paired up Sung No to extend his work on Galois, which is about a French mathematician. And people are saying, why are you working on this piece and calling it an Asian-American musical? But I feel like that curiosity that a Korean-American playwright can write about a French mathematician and we call it an Asian-American musical really screws up with people, right? Is it possible? And for a few days this summer, it was possible. And so those are the things that we're sort of tinkering with, sort of the borders of this place. Is it harder to market? Yes. Because part of what I'm discovering is sometimes people just want the thing that they think they know and understand. And so if you're coming in, they're trying to deconstruct it. I realize as chef or whatever I am, I have to shepherd people towards the next steps, right? Of what people are expecting and how can I get them there as opposed to maybe pushing away what that content is. So, okay, kind of in addition to this is really thinking in terms of one. We get one play. The only Asian-American playwright we have produced at our theater is Diana Sons Fishes. So do we introduce our audience to the canon or do we introduce our audience to world of extreme happiness? Do you know what I mean? So this is my quandary now of like, they're asking me to submit Asian-American plays to this selection. So I don't want to disagree, but they're only looking at contemporary Asian-American playwrights really because they're asking the global cosmopolitan questions. But I also totally want to honor and acknowledge the established Asian-American playwrights as well. So I love the idea of challenging the idea of what Asian-American is, but I feel like we're not even there yet. So like I'm in a place right now of like how, and I love the idea of like introducing and established kind of form or story, but then sneaking subversion kind of in there. So this is my quandary and I feel like I'm so happy that there are ethnic-specific theaters there that get to ask the bigger questions. But I feel like we're just starting out to construct before we can deconstruct, so. I'm just gonna say to that that, it is very theater-specific because it sounds like your theater is at Asian-American theater 101 level. And other theaters are at Asian-American 202, and I mean, yeah, I mean seriously. And those of us who've been in the field for a long, long time, we're in graduate studies because that we are, we're pushing the envelope here. So basically, if you're talking about, even though they are contemporary playwrights, you have to think this is Asian-American 101. You need to have these people navigate things that are going to be unfamiliar to their audience. So maybe stuff with baby steps, that's all I can say, yeah. We can talk about this after, seriously. No, but it'll have to do with how many can they hire? What's the cast? It's very, very practical. It's very savvy. How many Asian-Achers are allowed? Does it have to be a mixed white Asian cast? And we can help, I think, with that. Oh, here's, every Asian-American play I've come across, you're all gonna think of exceptions for me, has fallen into one of three categories. So I'll tell you if it's useful to you. Number one, playwright of Asian descent. Number two, lead role character is Asian-American. Number three, lead role is almost always played by an Asian-American. Every play I've come across qualifies for one of those or more of those categories. M-Butterfly, for instance, is only one in three, but not two. Stop Kiss, for instance, would be, right, et cetera, et cetera. So find me exceptions, I think that'd be interesting. But that's been useful for me. Any of those three are claimable as far as I'm concerned. So yeah, so to sort of respond to your comments. So you're working with the theater in Philly, or Philly area? Yeah. Okay, so yeah, I just think it's, so it sort of goes back to what Roger was saying. I think it is really important to, and not necessarily just think as like, oh, well this theater in particular is at Asian-American 1.0 and this one is at level two. But you really have to think about truly like your context, your location. And I think Philadelphia in the Delaware Valley region is in an entirely different place than Los Angeles or New York. There's definitely similarities, but I think in some ways more differences. So I feel like we are still at that level of sort of this kind of more traditional narrative of first generation, second generation. And that's sort of the standpoint where I'm coming from. And so I'm from Philly, I'm an actor, but I actually, not too long ago moved to New York and I went to school in New York. So I'm actually really excited to be here because I went to undergrad at NYU where I was fortunate enough to really absorb a plethora of resources within the Asian-American theater field thanks to Asian-American theater professors like Karen and Dan. So I was really lucky, but I also acknowledged that, well I'm sort of also an anomaly because I came from Philly and grew up at a time and place I guess where I feel like, although Philly has a very sizable Asian-American population at the same time, you have to be kind of like in the right time at the right place to really find your Asian-American people and that may never happen. So if you're like me, then you grew up very confused and it wasn't until I went to New York where there are all these resources in Asian-American theater companies that I really began to understand for the first time Asian-American theater 101. And sometimes I take it for granted because when I tell people my background, I was like, oh yeah, I went to school in New York and I learned a lot of things, took Asian-American studies. But a lot of people aren't that fortunate to do that and it was a very critical time in my life because if you think about it, if I had come in at a point where maybe I went to see a play at 2G about a French mathematician, maybe I wouldn't quite get it. But then if I went to the public theater a few years ago and I saw yellow face, then oh wow, maybe I really get it and I really learned something because I relate to this story. So I think I guess sort of since I'm personally invested in Philly being from here, I think I like to really emphasize sort of contextualizing where we come from and how do we move forward from there and really thinking about the audience as in not just people who can afford to go to the theater and people who like to go to the theater, old white people, but people who actually grew up, everyone from Philly, so actually Asian-American community from Philly and a lot of people like me who, when I grew up, I never actually had access to theater here. It was just through public school programs and scholarships that I fortunately was always one of the, I was just the only Asian person taking the acting class or going to drama society after school and stuff like that. So yeah, and also I just want to say about Jeremy's play. When I first read, because I was in the reading for Alameda, when I first read your play, and we did the reading and the rehearsal, I think we were all trying to figure out where Jeremy was from and how he kind of came up with his story because the play is called Alameda and it's set in California and when I was reading the play, it actually, I thought a lot about David Henry Wong and I was like, I can relate to this so much. This playwright is like me. He's dealing with all the same issues as me. And then finally, when I met Jeremy, I was like, oh my God, he's not like me at all. He's from Singapore, he has this accent. And so, but in just hearing you talk more and more and really claiming this identity of yours that is not so much American, but still your work is a part, we are embracing it as a part of this Asian American theater, you know, conference. I think, yes, that is a political choice and I think that's what makes me feel close to you as an Asian American artist. Just to speak to that, my play Alameda, which had a stage reading yesterday as part of the conference and that Victoria gave a lovely performance in, was initially inspired by the 2011 Confest in Los Angeles. And my experience of, at the time, I was still living in London and Tisa asked me to come to LA to talk about British Asian theater. And so, I sort of quite naively turned up in LA and we all have lots in common. And a couple of days later, I was like, there is a whole codified Asian American identity that I don't have access to. And that was a really interesting experience and provocative and made me want to create a play about just what is this identity, which is not defined at all. It's fluid, it includes and excludes all kinds of people. And yet, I definitely felt that there was some kind of invisible force field that I was on the outside of. So, which is why I've been asking all these definitional questions and trying to assess what our role, each of us, how each of us finds our role in this ecology and then what this ecology has in relation with the mainstream and what that process of exchange is. I don't have any answers, but a lot of my writing is to do with asking questions. I'm not sure if you're supposed to go with 45 or to six. Maybe one more question or comment? Thank you. I have a very huge question building upon our discussion of differences and multiplicities and it's about, can we talk about the state of Asian American theater as intersectional? Can we talk more about, for instance, gender and class and sexuality issues and the state of that within Asian American theater? That is huge. Do you want to do a specific point of departure for us? Like an example, do you want to present to us? I don't know what I can say, first of all, is that whenever I teach Asian American theater, that's always part of my classes and actually I would say that's part of all of my classes. Like Joe, I teach a lot of the same things across a number of my classes and so they all address the same similar questions. So whether I'm teaching introduction to theater studies or I'm teaching Asians in the US, I am constantly looking at issues of race, gender class and sexuality as they apply to the subjects and the plays and the objects of study. So part of it winds up being what are the concrete objects you want to study? And there are things that I've chosen in my classes for representational value. Right, so there are certain things like I wanted to teach about internment and so I would teach 12.1A, right? I wanted to teach about gay, lesbian identifications so I might teach a language of their own. But within that, there's also other things that I want to address and want to make people question. So yeah, it just winds up being there is a lot of stuff out there and there's a lot of ways that you can approach it and what is more important is to give the students the tools to sort of find the way to get into these subjects and so you can point them towards resources, you can point them towards objects of study but in the end they're gonna have to pick them up themselves and figure out what to do with them. Well just quickly, I will say that's something I've observed that cultural identity or ethnicity does seem to have become in many ways the dominant mode or dominant lens by which we approach a piece of theater. So we've been discussing world of extreme happiness as an example of Asian American theater but actually the play is for my money much more about the growing inequality within China and capitalist exploitation. It's much more about the devaluation of women in China and the lack of agency they have and yet it's hardly, I have not seen it discussed as a feminist play or a anti-capitalist play. It's an Asian play that becomes the lens we put on it and it's very much either or you don't see much discussion of intersectionality, what's it like to be a Chinese woman in particular within that play? Similarly, you see Che Yu being discussed as an Asian American playwright rather than a queer playwright a lot of the time, let alone what's it like to be a queer Asian playwright and I think that is something that in the morning plenary there was a discussion about how criticism and reviews play a big part in the development of work and I think that's something we haven't come across which seems critical because it speaks to the framing of the work and the way in which... I feel the universe is telling me to stop speaking but I will say that the interpretation of work is as important as the work itself I think in terms of where we place it and how we see it and that's something to consider too. I think that was very eloquent, I think that's a really nice place to end our conversation. Thank you so much for attending the panel and thank you so much for participating as panelists.