Asian American Drama

Introduction

Asian American drama emerged from the identity politics and student radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The term Asian American was coined in the 1960s as a replacement for Oriental, a term that many considered a demeaning colonialist description that exoticized all individuals to whom it was attached. By contrast, the term Asian American, implying a coalition or strategic alliance of peoples from widely dispersed geographical regions, became a political identifier, a verbal banner under which immigrants from Asian countries and their descendants could unite in the struggle against racism, ethnic profiling, economic discrimination, and invisibility.

Many Asian American playwrights feel that their work, because of their cultural heritage and ethnic identities, can be regarded as Asian American drama. Although their audiences make certain assumptions about any work thus labeled—the work must be Asian-inflected and represent the total experience of an ethnic minority—Asian American playwrights emphasize the diversity of theme, the fluidity of genre, and the universality of emotion in their dramatic creations.

Although Asian American drama varies as widely in form, structure, and focus as any body of art, plays and performance pieces by artists of Asian descent often share common concerns—the search for identity and self-definition, the complexities of a life lived on cultural borders, the effects of racism, and the excavation of buried cultural histories. Moreover, the plays typically raise similar questions. What constitutes an authentic Asian American experience? Is there an Asian American cultural identity?

History

Theatrical activity has always been an integral component of Asian American communities. Historically, “Chinatowns” in California, New York, and Seattle mounted productions of traditional Cantonese operas and dramatized folktales. Japanese immigrant communities performed their versions of their homeland's Kabuki and Nō dramas. These performances recreated cultural traditions imported from immigrants’ home countries rather than plays that attempted to recreate and reenact the performers’ current lives and situations.

During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, Asian characters onstage existed primarily as caricatures, as two-dimensional stereotypes: the evil Oriental (Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless), the loyal domesticated Charlie Chan with his agreeable “Ah so"; she geisha; the dragon lady; and the shrinking lotus blossom beauty who walks three paces behind her man. Moreover, these characters were generally played by White actors, and production handbooks of the period gave explicit instructions for makeup that could turn a Caucasian into an exaggerated Oriental. Meanwhile, with rare exceptions, Asian performers were limited to traditional dramatic forms such as Chinese opera or performed on the “Chop Suey” vaudeville circuit. Very occasionally, an actor of Asian descent had the opportunity to perform in main stage productions such as Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rogers’s Flower Drum Song (pr. 1958). Yet, even in that venue, the Asian characters were thinly disguised stereotypes. The situation would not change dramatically until the emergence in the late 1960s of student strikes worldwide, which fostered a radical political climate that gave rise to the Asian American movement.

Hawaii arguably served as the birthplace of what would later be called Asian American drama. The earliest immigrants from the Asian countries—mainly China and Japan—brought with them a variety of forms of traditional theater, folk drama, pageants, and festivals that involved role-playing. These popular modes of performance would ultimately find their way into more structured and self-consciously artistic forms of theater. In 1928, Gladys Li’s play, The Submission of Rose Moy—about a young woman who must decide between the traditional ways of her immigrant parents and the seductive freedoms of the West—was produced at the University of Hawaii. Nearly twenty years later, in 1947, the University of Hawaii’s Theater Group produced Bessie Toshigawa ’s Reunion, a play about the return of World War II veterans who fought with the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Like the Asian American plays that would follow—in Hawaii and on the United States mainland—in the coming decades, The Submission of Rose Moy and Reunion raised questions about assimilation, identity, and racism in portraying the tensions growing from the chasm between East and West. Reflective plays such as these found a formal outlet in 1955 when the Honolulu Theatre for Youth was created.

1960s and 1970s

In the United States of the 1960s, the Asian American community consisted of immigrants from a handful of countries, and the defining label encompassed primarily those whose heritage was Chinese or Japanese (the earliest immigrants) and, to a lesser extent, Philippine, Korean, or Indian (the second wave) immigrants. Therefore, the earliest theatrical productions that bore the Asian American stamp examined the viewpoint and experience of those cultures in the majority. With the 1952 reforms in immigration law, immigrants from other Asian and Pacific nations began to make their home in the United States, changing the composition of the Asian American community. In particular, the end of the Vietnam War saw an increase in Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong immigrants, and the Asian American experience onstage expanded to reflect the lives, dreams, and concerns of the newest arrivals.

Asian American drama grew out of the frustration felt by Asian-descent actors who felt marginalized and deprived of all but stereotypical roles on the American stage and screen. In response, the first Asian American theater company, East West Players, was established in Los Angeles in 1965 under the artistic direction of the famed actor Mako. With the help of Ford Foundation funding, East West Players sponsored a playwriting contest for Asian American writers in 1968 and thus launched the careers of the first generation of Asian American dramatists, including Wakako Yamauchi (1924-2018), Frank Chin (b. 1940), and Momoko Iko (1940-2020). In the next decade, other theater companies emerged: LaMama Chinatown in New York; Kumu Kahua, or “Original Stage,” in Honolulu; the San Francisco-based Asian American Theatre Company; the Northwest Asian Theatre Company in Seattle; and New York’s Pan Asian Repertory (which grew out of LaMama Chinatown in 1977). These theaters, along with Joseph Papp (1921-1991) and the Public Theatre in New York City, nurtured a second generation of Asian American playwrights: Jeannie Barroga (b. 1949), Philip Kan Gotanda (b. 1951), Jessica Hagedorn (b. 1949), Velina Hasu Houston (b. 1957), David Henry Hwang (b. 1957), Genny Lim (b. 1946), and Elizabeth Wong (b. 1970).

Late Twentieth Century

In the 1970s, most Asian American theatrical activity was confined to the West Coast or New York. The 1980s and 1990s saw several significant theater companies established elsewhere in the United States, including Theatre Mu in Minneapolis and Angel Island Theatre Company in Chicago. These ethnic theater companies began to produce the work of playwrights from Asian immigrant communities founded after the 1960s. In New York, the Ma-Yi Theatre focuses mainly on productions by Filipino American playwrights, the National Asian American Theatre Company mounts productions of classic plays—such as works by Eugene O’Neill and Molière—with Asian actors; and the Yangtze Repertory Theatre brings together traditional Chinese theater with Asian American theater. San Francisco’s theater scene is enriched by the Filipino American Teatro Ng Tanan (“the people’s theater”).

Mainstream stages also have noticed Asian American writers and performers. In particular, New York’s Public Theatre—responsible for bringing Hwang and Hagedorn to the notice of New York theater audiences—stages at least one Asian American work each season, and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles sponsors the Asian American Theatre Workshop. Two popular Asian American novels—Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) have been adapted for the stage with productions by, respectively, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 1994 and the Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut in 1997.

The growing number of playwriting competitions aimed at the ethnic community has fueled the rapid growth of Asian American drama. Among the most significant competitions are The Seattle Group Theatre’s annual Multicultural Playwrights Festival and the biannual Ruby Schaar Yoshino Playwright Award sponsored by the National Japanese American Citizens’ League.

Some of American theater’s most interesting experimental work has come from playwrights and performers of Asian descent. Perhaps because so many of these artists are forced by birth and circumstance to straddle cultural and personal boundaries, Asian American playwrights often employ untraditional staging that privileges unusual interpretations of space and time. Among those who have done notable experimental work are Ping Chong and Hagedorn, Han Ong, Amy Hill, and the troupe Peeling the Banana, among the younger generation of theater artists. Slant Performance Group, which consists of three actor-musician dancers, pushes the boundaries of performance art through its dramatizations of contemporary life in the Asian American community and its celebration of life on the borders.

Asian American dramas and Asian American playwrights and performers continued becoming increasingly important in American theater in the early twenty-first century. In 2018, Young Jean Lee's Straight White Men premiered on Broadway, making Lee the first female Asian American playwright to accomplish such a milestone. In 2022, composer Helen Park became the first Asian American female composer to have their work showcased in a Broadway production. Additionally, the first all-Filipino cast Broadway production, Here Lies Love, premiered in 2023.

Bibliography

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Heinrich, Rena M. Race and Role: The Mixed-race Asian Experience in American Drama. Rutgers University Press, 2023.

Houston, Velina Hasu, ed. But Still Like Air, I’ll Rise: New Asian American Plays. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1997.

Lee, Esther Kim. Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era. University of Michigan Press, 2022.

Lee, Josephine. Milestones in Asian American Theatre. Routledge, 2023. 

Lee, Josephine. Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1997.

Nelson, Brian, ed. Asian American Drama: Nine Plays from the Multiethnic Landscape. New York: Applause Books, 1997.

Xu, Wenying. Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.