ArtsATL: “Have you blown anything up lately?” This is not the typical greeting for old friends, but for Diana and Max, it’s most appropriate. From blowing up snowmen as children to blowing up each other’s lives as adults, in The Two Kids That Blow S*** Up, Carla Ching dissects their arrested development and unmet expectations. This is a theme throughout her work as well as uncovering the love and loss that draws people together to form a family.
4 comments:
I am so upset that I’m not able to see these two plays. As an Asian American from Atlanta they are really right up my alley. I agree with Carla that the Asian American narrative is so important to tell and it’s important to tell it in a non-exclusively Asian theater. People can easily sweep a movement under the rug when it’s put on by a group of people that they don’t relate to. They can rationalize it by figuring that they are not the target audience. But by bringing a piece to a wider audience, she’s able to raise its importance up to a new level. It’s also important to bridge the difference between cultures. Yes, we look Asian on the outside, but we’re so many layers on the inside. I think it brings to light the “American” in Asian American to show that we are all different on the outside, but very similar on the inside.
Representation matters. It is very important that stories are being told from a different lens other than norm. Each person deserves to see their story being told and shown publicly. People are made up of different layers not just their skin color, sexuality or disability. One Asian American story cannot tell the story of all Asians like Carla Ching said in the article. They are a vast group of people and their stories deserve to be told. It is very important that the play was not created to suit the audience even when it was asked of the author.
Being from Atlanta, it’s nice to hear of successful people from my own hometown, who are succeeding in theatre and beyond. Atlanta, in recent years, has become a hub for movie and television production, but not as much for theatre. There is not much large-scale local theatre going on inside Atlanta, especially recently with our largest regional theatre (The Alliance Theatre) undergoing major renovations. South of Atlanta, there is also the Serenbe Playhouse, which has excellent execution and design, however, they do not often produce original works, largely favoring Broadway musicals. In the case of Carla Ching, her plays in Atlanta are being produced by two smaller, but still relevant playhouses, the Horizon and the Aurora theatres. While I am not personally familiar with the Aurora (likely due to its location rather far outside Atlanta proper), I have seen productions staged by the Horizon, and generally, they have been quite good. If I were in Atlanta during this time, I would absolutely go see this play.
“You can’t switch the race of the characters and have the play still stand.” This quote in the article stood out to me, especially following CMU Drama’s own town hall discussion about racial diversity in casting. While plenty of shows are originally written with the intention of depicting racial tension, there’s a growing number of works that place people of color in relatively ordinary, less identity-charged stories-- to me, both hold uniquely important positions in the modernizing theatre world. Carla Ching, who to me sounds like an artist of the latter category, grounds her stories about Asian Americans with universal themes such as family and love. There’s an interesting distinction, both in and outside of the theatre world, between the celebration of multiculturalism and the value of colorblindness. On the one hand, token characters or actors of color don’t prove anything about the diversity values of a company, while on the other hand, colorblind casting strips actors of their unique racially-informed experiences in an emotional artistic space. While for some (especially white) artists, this sounds too complex to be worth the venture, for artists of color, it’s a simple matter of what it takes to feel like a valuable and valued collaborator. Artists like Ching are evidence of an underacknowledged sect of the theatre industry that is eager to take these matters into their own hands.
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