HowlRound: The Ma-Yi Writers Lab is the largest collective of Asian-American playwrights ever assembled. The Lab was founded in 2004 as an offshoot of Ma-Yi Theater, which was itself an offshoot of the Asian-American theater movement: a company formed in 1989 out of the need to tell stories by and about Filipinos at a time when those stories weren’t being heard. - See more at: http://howlround.com/i-ll-disband-my-roving-gang-of-thirty-asian-playwrights-when-you-stop-doing-asian-plays-in-yellow#sthash.DYnxsEK5.dpuf
3 comments:
I do not understand people who continue to think that minorities are this mass of stereotypes who all have the same experience and want to write and thing about the same thing, and that their entire lives revolve around and are defined by being a minority. People never seem to think that minorities are people too, and want to write different things. I also do not understand how people still think that things like yellow-face are ok. Just as bad is when you just whitewash a character and remove any connection to their original culture. White people do not seem to understand the importance of representation, and seeing people like you just doing things and being treated like people and not like stereotypes or like a conglomerate hive mind who have the same experiences.
First of all, this article has a really great title, I had to open it.
I am not at all surprised by the content of this article; minority groups are still having issues with employment in the acting world. This article reminds me of one I read a long time ago about Peter Pan onstage and the argument was against having a white woman playing a Native American. With the article was a clip of the Disney movie version, the scene where the boys run into the Native American tribe and it was actually really racist, looking back on it having not seen it since I was a child. This goes to show that stereotyping and discrimination is still a big problem in the entertainment fields, which is a shame because we are supposed to be the liberal ones (entertainment people). There was a point in the article that asked if an Asian specific theater/play writing group was really needed? I think that even if the world had finally rid itself of discrimination it is good to have groups that celebrate ancestry and culture even if not all the work produced from it is related to the culture.
It's interesting trying to rationalize why cultural plays are generally produced in smaller cultural theaters. Growing up in San Antonio I saw tons of "Latino" productions and never actually stopped to think about different cultural plays until I got here. I too would like to see cultural plays in larger theaters and would like to see color blind casting more, but I think a major obstacle in moving forward is that there are already tons of classic and popular plays that call for an all black cast or an all white cast that color-blind casting would change the whole story. Furthermore, I can understand why larger theaters with probably a predominately white audience would not put on a play like Seven Guitars which focuses on minority and racial issues with an all black cast. It isn't relatable for them.
I'm not sure how to integrate theatre productions more, but I understand why it can be so difficult to move forward in this art.
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