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East West Players and After: Acting and Activism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2016
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“Where are all the Asian actors in mainstream New York theatre?” What began as a plaintive status update on Facebook launched a full-scale investigation by Asian American actors that culminated in a report titled “Ethnic Representation on New York City Stages” and the formation in the fall of 2011 of an advocacy group, the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC). AAPAC's findings were disheartening. In the preceding five years, Asian Americans had received only 3 percent of all available roles in not-for-profit theatre and only 1.5 percent of all available roles on Broadway. The percentage of roles filled by African American and Latino actors, in contrast, had increased since 2009. According to the report, “Asian Americans were the only minority group to see their numbers go down from levels set five years ago.” The data AAPAC compiled were both surprising in their concreteness and unsurprising in their bleakness. The Facebook query sparked an active digital conversation that touched a collective sense of discord just below the surface for many Asian American theatre artists, especially actors. Ralph Peña, artistic director of Ma-Yi Theatre Company, invited key Facebook commenters to hold a more formal conversation about access, embodiment, and Asian American representation. This group, many of whom were artists in midcareer, trained at top conservatories, and fostered in New York City's vibrant Asian American theatre community, became the Steering Committee of AAPAC. The members of the Steering Committee channeled their frustration and anger into archive fever by researching and documenting ethnic representation on Broadway and in sixteen of the largest not-for-profit theatres in New York City over a five-year period. In front of an audience of three hundred, members of AAPAC presented their findings at a roundtable at Fordham University on 13 February 2012 that included prominent artistic directors, agents, directors, casting directors, and producers and was moderated by David Henry Hwang. With the report in hand, AAPAC members roused the New York theatre community with a series of town hall–style meetings and urged theatrical production gatekeepers to do, if not better, then, something.
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References
Endnotes
1. Asian American Performers Action Coalition, “Ethnic Representation on New York City Stages: 2006/07–2010/11 Seasons,” February 2012, 7–9, quote on 7, www.aapacnyc.org/uploads/1/1/9/4/11949532/ethnic_representation_nyc.pdf, accessed 8 February 2016.
2. I received valuable insight into the events that led to the formation of AAPAC, the process by which the group come into being, and the nuts and bolts of the organization in a phone interview with Steering Committee member Peter Kim, 20 April 2015.
3. Karen R. Humes, Nicholas A. Jones, and Roberto R. Ramirez, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010,” 2010 Census Briefs, March 2011, www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf, accessed 8 February 2015.
4. “The Rise of Asian Americans,” Pew Research Center, 19 June 2012 [updated 4 April 2013], www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/#fn-12979-3, accessed 8 February 2016.
5. AAPAC also has a forebear in the organization Oriental Actors of America, which was formed in 1968 to protest yellowface practices. For more, see the subsection “Oriental Actors of America, New York City,” in Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–36. Another moment in Asian American theatrical history that defined discourse on race and representation is the protest surrounding the casting and Broadway production of Miss Saigon. See Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 107–38; Esther Kim Lee, 177–99; Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 57–76; and David A. Schlossman, Actors and Activists: Politics, Performance, and Exchange among Social Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2002), 137–206. Yutian Wong also provides a provocative return to the musical and the protests related to it in her chapter “Pedagogy of the Scantily Clad: Studying Miss Saigon in the Twenty-first Century,” in Choreographing Asian America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 180–216.
6. William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 45, italics in original.
7. For more on the history of yellowface performance see Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
8. Josephine Lee, Yuko Kurahashi, Esther Kim Lee, Dorinne Kondo, and Karen Shimakawa have been instrumental in charting the history and theory of Asian American theatre and performance.
9. EWP held the first Asian American playwriting contest in 1968. EWP's 1969 production of their first prizewinning play—Henry Woon's Now You See, Now You Don't—marked several firsts in the theatre company's history and in theatre history. As Esther Kim Lee notes, “The play was the first EWP production to address issues unique to Asian Americans, and it is considered the first Asian American play to receive staging.” Esther Kim Lee, 46.
10. Frank Chin, whose Chickencoop Chinaman later won the playwriting competition hosted by East West Players in 1971, founded the Asian American Theatre Workshop (which became the Asian American Theatre Company) in San Francisco in 1973. The next year the Theatrical Ensemble of Asians (TEA, later known as the Asian Exclusion Act and then finally as Northwest Asian American Theatre) was created in Seattle. In 1977, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre was founded in New York City. Companies proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s across the United States: the Angel Island Theatre Company and the Silk Road Theatre Project (now Silk Road Rising) were established in Chicago, Theater Mu (now Mu Performing Arts) was founded in Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Pom Siab Hmoob Theatre (formerly the Hmong Theatre Project; (now Center for Hmong Arts and Talent) was founded in 1990 in Minneapolis. Ma-Yi began as a Filipino company in New York City in 1989 but has since embraced a more panethnic production model and has been influential producing and cultivating new work through its Writer's Lab. The National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), which was also founded in 1989 in New York (by Richard Eng and Mia Katigbak), produces classical works with Asian and Asian American casts. Although Peter Kim, the member of the AAPAC Steering Committee I interviewed while researching this piece, is primarily an actor, he is also the associate producer of NAATCO. For a look at both open and closed companies, see the directory on Asian American Theatre Revue, a Web site founded and edited by veteran theatre producer Roger Tang, www.aatrevue.com.
11. Shimakawa, National Abjection, 58–9, italics in original.
12. Esther Kim Lee, 45.
13. Herrera, Brian Eugenio, “The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27.2 (2015): 1–11, at 1Google Scholar. http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/the-best-actor-for-the-role-or-the-mythos-of-casting-in-american-popular-performance/.
14. Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997): 8.
15. Several scholars have advocated and adopted Palumbo-Liu's use of the solidus between “Asian” and “American.” See David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Metzger, Sean, “At the Vanishing Point: Theater and Asian/American Critique,” American Quarterly 63.2 (2011): 277–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16. Palumbo-Liu, 5, italics in original.
17. Karen Shimakawa, “(Re)Viewing an Asian American Diaspora: Multiculturalism, Interculturalism, and the Northwest Asian Theatre,” in Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora, ed. Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 41–56, at 42.
18. Ibid.
19. For more on the inner workings and dynamics of East West Players' first five years, see Esther Kim Lee, 43–53; Shimakawa, National Abjection, 58–9; Yuko Kurahashi, Asian American Culture on Stage: The History of the East West Players (New York: Garland, 1999), 21–44.
20. In A History of Asian American Theatre, Esther Kim Lee tracks the first, second, and third waves of Asian American playwriting. Several play anthologies have embraced this periodicity. See Chay Yew, ed., Version 3.0: Contemporary Asian American Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2011).
21. Kimber Lee, “How Does the Label ‘Asian American’ Impact Your Work as a Playwright?” Breaking: (Character), 16 June 2015, accessed 16 June 2015, www.samuelfrench.com/breakingcharacter/?p=3080.
22. Philip Kan Gotanda, “Introduction,” in New American Plays 1, ed. Peter Filichia (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992), 79–80, quote at 80.
23. Ibid., 80.
24. Ibid.
25. Ariel Watson, “The Anxious Triangle: Modern Metatheatres of the Playwright, Actor, and Spectator” (Ph.D. diss., Dept. of English, Yale University, 2008).
26. James Moy, “David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die: Repositioning Chinese-American Marginality on the American Stage,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 84.
27. Ibid., 86.
28. Homi Bhabha notes this anxiety when he states that “the stereotype … is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated”; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 66.
29. Josephine Lee, 101.
30. For Shimakawa, “[abjection as figured in Yankee Dawg You Die] does not suggest that Asian American men can or should opt to portray themselves only as something other than abject; it does, however, offer possibly constructive strategy whereby such abject roles may be profitably exploited, deliberately and subordinately mimed in ways that may ultimately undermine their abilities to signify effectively”; Shimakawa, National Abjection, 120. For Chen, “by first acknowledging how stereotype helps to form identity and then re-staging stereotype using its own performative repertoire of exaggeration and grotesqueness, Yankee Dawg You Die argues for the possibility of out-posing the poses of stereotype”; Tina Chen, Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 76.
31. Chen, 81.
32. Shimakawa, National Abjection, 120.
33. Roach, Joseph, “Performance: The Blunders of Orpheus,” PMLA 125.4 (2010): 1078–86, at 1082–3Google Scholar. Roach is drawing on Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
34. Philip Kan Gotanda, “Fish Head Soup” and Other Plays (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 100.
35. Ibid., 98–9, italics in original.
36. Ibid., 126–7, italics in original.