 Good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us today. So glad you're here. Welcome to the Artist Encounter for the World of Extreme Happiness by Francis Yachukawig. So thrilled that you could join us for this conversation. We have just a couple of housekeeping items that I wanted to address before we get started. We have wonderful support from many many people who make these productions possible and I wanted to start the afternoon with noticing some of those which would be our production sponsors. The major corporate sponsor of the Owen Theatre season is Edelman. Additional support provided by the season and production sponsors and the new work and cultural diversity endowment fund donors. Our new work endowment grand benefactor is Sean M Donnelly and Christopher M Kelly. Thank you to both of them. And just so you know this play was originally commissioned and developed by South Coast Repertory with support from the Elizabeth George Foundation. And the world of extreme happiness you may remember some of you may have seen it was produced in a developmental production workshop production as a part of our new stages series just a couple of years ago. The cell phones that's what I was going to say next cell phones that those wonderful things that make noise if you could try to turn them off please including you on stage. It's really wonderful not to have them go off during performances and talks. Finally this talk will be live streamed via HowlRound that's at HowlRound.tv. So today's conversation is viewable via the web and we hopefully will have some people tuning in to see that it will also be available to you after the fact that you can also access it in retrospect via the same site. So please you want to like get on the Internet ask a question. So if you want to tweet it right now we will be hopefully accepting some questions from folks out there via Twitter as well. So for the future other artists encounters if you'd like to join us that way you also can. I will finally turn it over to our artists. Of course we have our director Mr. Eric Ting our playwright Francis Choukawig and our moderator for today's conversation is Josh Chambers-Letson. Josh. Thank you everyone for joining us. It's such I'm not this isn't actually for amplification purposes and it's terrifying because it's like coming at my face but thank you all for joining us. It's such an honor and a pleasure to be up here and in particular with Francis and Eric. So I thought we talked a little bit beforehand about some of the questions that we'd like to address but we're also going to be sort of free form and let the conversation go where it goes which could be really dangerous hopefully actually you know it could end with riots which would be in keeping with the vision of the play to some extent. But I thought I'd start just for both those of you that are familiar with the play but also for people who are at home or sort of interested in it by asking Francis first if you might tell us how it was that you kind of came to the conception behind World of Extreme Happiness the questions that you are interested in exploring in the play and what the developmental process was and actually bringing it from the idea to the stage. Sure I was really interested in exploring the world's largest migration which they're happening right now internally between inside China and Brazil from rural areas to urban areas and so I was interested in China. I've lived in Asia for about 10 years as a teenager. I lived in Taiwan, Okinawa and Beijing and was in Beijing as a teenager just as they were bidding for the Olympics and got to see a lot of incredible change happening there and a lot of things that also felt really surreal like when they were trying to get the Olympic bid the clouds were seated so that the smog would wash away with rain and the trees were spray paint dead trees were spray painted green and there's just all kinds of just really surreal things happening and then later on I guess after college I had the opportunity to spend some time in Chengdu in central China where my father was working at the US Councilate and I got the opportunity to meet a number of Chinese dissidents who were able to share their perspectives about China with me and talked about their experiences having to report on their activities to the Chinese police and I'm also very interested in contributing to the advancement of complex roles for Asian American women and how they are portrayed on stage like Chinese women and so I was very invested in creating very complex Asian female roles and that was also informing kind of the way I was approaching the play I wanted to write a story about China that told the story from the perspective of Chinese people that didn't have a Western lens didn't have a foreigner a Western interloper that is the entry point for the audience so yeah those are some initial kind of thoughts that I was having when I started the play so can I just a follow-up on that so it's one thing to sort of abstractly think I want to feature right Asian American women actors right but for those of us that have seen the play sunny is such an extraordinary and kind of specific character right I mean literally right so you know how did sunny come to you right yeah wow I really like Arthur Miller's essay tragedy in the common man and I really appreciated his I guess perspective on what makes a tragic hero and so I gave myself the challenge of how can I make an uneducated Chinese woman a tragic hero using his kind of definition was that of a person who rails against heaven and earth at any cost to secure their rightful place in society and among the experience of a migrant worker going from rural area to urban area just such profound change just kind of going from the vastly different worlds and I think I kind of understood that a little from having moved constantly throughout my childhood so I felt a little bit of an in there and I was also as a woman who it was survived her twenties and was very familiar with kind of this culture of self-help and bootstrapping it was very interesting to me that the most popular genre of book among migrant workers is self-help books many of which are translated from Western self-help books and exported to China and that idea of how self-help can be used as a form of social control was fascinating to me and also very dangerous I thought because it's a powerful form of social control if one thinks that all their problems are of their own making versus socially constructed so to follow up on that and I'd like to sort of expand it to both of you there's this sort of idea now to put a story that takes place in China on stage and not to mediate it right through a Western view or frame I should say or character actually what kind of research did you actually have to do to make the leap from that idea to actually manifesting a sort of image or a vision of China which on the one hand kind of stands in for China for the audience but on the other hand can't really stand in for China right because it's a complex enormous place that can't be contained within two hours on a proscenium stage I did a lot of research reading lots of books that explored I guess some of the worlds that I was interested in there's this wonderful book called factory girls by Leslie Chang a Wall Street Journal reporter who lived with factory girls in Shenzhen over a period of time and really was able to kind of see how they changed and addressed their their world and their desire to change over a period of several years there's also this wonderful book by Sinran who's a Chinese radio journalist called letters from an unknown Chinese mother where she interviews women who've had to give up their children midwives who killed girl babies and just really got into their perspectives and so very often when I'm trying to get into a view that I don't really understand I just try to read as much as I can first-hand accounts of those perspectives you know for us from the production perspective we've really I think we made the choice early on to really rely on Francis's play and on Francis's research she has this amazing kind of appendix in the play where she lists a large number of resources and sources in particular that I think we encourage everyone involved in the production to really immerse themselves in and that there's something about that depiction of the contemporary Chinese experience that that that list focused us on more importantly I think finally in the end we in the rehearsal we started from the very beginning just acknowledging the fact that to open that box that you're talking about is sort of to open a kind of rabbit hole and to never really come to any sense of closure because it's so deep it's so dense it's so convoluted and layered that pretty much from the beginning we said what we wanted to focus on more than anything else was just to tell the story and that and to rely in part on production choices and to rely in part upon a kind of pre-existing experience of the actors that were that are involved in this production to really just create that authenticity that I think we're all chasing to make sure that Francis's words and specifically the story of Sonny Lee really takes off so I'm gonna jump from the word authenticity right in part because I hate that word like you know at any time somebody tells me that there's a restaurant with authentic food I immediately know I shouldn't go there because I just sort of imagine that there's this striving to create you know it's you know especially I think I know Francis and Eric we haven't talked about this but you know I my mother's Japanese you know Francis's live Francis is also part Asian has lived in Asia and you know whenever somebody says something about like authentic Japanese food I never know what that means because when I go to Japan like there's no such thing as authentic Japanese food there's just food right a lot of it and some of it's really bad actually right you know so some of it's good right I'm in the same way that the idea of like authentic Chicago food doesn't really make any sense so authentic is an interesting question right because on the one hand it there's a kind of representational burden how does one represent the verisimilitude of people who are having real-world experiences right so the real-world experiences of migrants that are that are moving from rural areas to places like Shenzhen to work right without transforming that representation into a kind of stand-in for the reality of every single rural migrant right or every single person living in Shenzhen so what strategies did you guys come up with to tell the story in a way that would not because that's I think one of the strengths of the place it doesn't universalize and say this is the story of China right or this is the story of rural workers it says this is a story that takes place within this context and and I imagine that there was a lot of thinking and work that you had to do to get to that place to make it really work yeah the designers did a lot of work in particular the costume designer Jenny Manis to make sure that every choice was as specific as possible she's been doing research for six months and made the choice that she was going not going to put anything on an actor unless she could find like actual images from that specific region that the play took place that had you know Chinese people in those clothes and I think that helped a lot at least create specificity and I think I think the choices for us to make it seem more real was just to make it as specific as possible and make the characters not romanticized not idealized sunny it's very bratty and very bitchy at times throughout her journey and has to go through confront a lot and get through a lot in her own personal development before she becomes a person that we would say is does something brave and Eric has been very very good at like chasing the actors to like always try to just be simpler be more direct don't try to put all these layers on top of it aren't there but just just embody the character I think you know you and I should have a debate about our conversation about the word authenticity but I think you know I can do it right now I don't I mean I completely I understand exactly what you mean by that of course and I think I think for me artistically we're on stage part of what stage is about is artifice right that the kind of like the theater is by its very nature a kind of artifice as opposed to film which tends to have tends to lean more towards verisimilitude than what we can accomplish on stage and so where we seek truth in the theaters and the performances right it's in the story that's being told and it's in the way that the people that we recognize on stage are living within those stories and either we believe it or we don't and if we believe it then we have empathy for that and that that empathy then carries us towards I think what is all all that is good in the theater about the theater I do think though that that's the question right there's a sort of like so Mimi Lian who's our set designer for instance is also constantly engaged with this idea of what is real versus what is unreal right so it's that if she has an opportunity to select materials that are creating the space within which the play is set she will much rather choose real materials like so you'll go into our set and you'll see was essentially a dirty concrete box and if Mimi had had her way it would have been real concrete and but that's you know that would have collapsed the stage in the Owen so we didn't do that but but it's but there's something about this idea of creating a space where we don't wear the characters the stories of these characters can exist unencumbered right by the burden of telling something larger you know we the conversation is often about specific universality through specificity and so a lot of it was it was great to have Francis in the room because Francis was constantly answering our questions about sort of like well where do they come from is there a specific village that you have in mind you know sort of like what is the nature of of their work what is the nature of their every day and to the extent that the actors have been able to sort of let go of the burden of telling a kind of cultural story but rather you know just been able to sort of come together to tell this one story the hope is of course that that's what we connect with that what we connect with finally in the end is a kind of reality that is unfolding in the course of the play and that that that create and I guess authentic for me is like I know I don't have the kind of I don't have the same sort of adverse response to the word but there's something about that sense of of honesty that we're constantly chasing all right that's interesting I feel you know I shouldn't have made authentic the red herring it's just you know it's just it's like my skin crawls but at the same time I think there is this question about how do you actually tell stories that are you know true to some extent yeah even if they're fantastic right yeah well that was like my first response and I remember when I first read Francis's play kind of because you know I think we hear stories like we hear in the West in this country we hear like there's a wave unpacking Francis's story the play where there are sort of like there's they're just certain there's a topicality right sort of in