HowlRound Theatre Commons: I was watching a play about a Chinese immigrant. This was my first trip to the theatre since the great you-know-what. I sat in the audience, savoring the feeling of the glossy program between my fingers. The play was great. I’d forgotten how fun the genre can be, how nice it felt to see real people onstage. And then, The Moment happened: one of the main characters held up a piece of paper, and her interlocutor asked what she was writing. Wait, my brain said, Isn’t it obvious? She had written down her last name in Chinese for the entire theatre to see.
2 comments:
Yeh wrote something I hadn’t been able to verbalize before the struggle of being not from here or from there. I’m in the same boat as the author of being raised in my home country and then having to move to the United States for work; how that affects in which groups you can be a part of. Specifically, the part about the dramaturg is something we should be talking about more. POC artists should not be expected to only do work that “they could be a part of” for lack of better wording. Taking my stand on the age-old debate of “should people from x group be the sole people responsible for creating pieces about that group” is something I’m still deciding, but I do think it should be up to everyone to decide that. It was satisfying for me to watch the author reach the conclusion of “yeah, both answers are valid”.
I remember when I was watching Mean Girls and Gretchen Weiners was hanging out with an ambiguously asian group by the end of the movie right? Well, I remember when I was literally just a kid and they said something in Vietnamese and it’s not what they translated in English as what they said. And I don’t speak that well and I wasn’t so sure of myself and I thought I was going crazy, but no, Tina Fey really just wasn’t planning on her audience knowing Vietnamese. It’s hard to find the right kind of nuance to encapsulate an entire continent’s worth of people. There’s just too much history and physical mass to cover that it can all get lost in the wash pretty easy. There’s no right or wrong way to be an Asian American theatre maker, but they were right in the article, doing the work is enough.
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