Thanks for checking out the LAFPI “tag team” blog, below, handed off each week from one interesting female playwright to another.
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Bienvenida a Guadalajara!
by Kitty Felde
It’s easy to despair about the decline of theatre in America. Or America itself. Or the world at large.
Here’s a sign that the universe is not going to hell in a handbasket: Mexico is reading. A lot.
I’m here this week at the Guadalajara International Book Festival, selling a few of my Fina Mendoza mysteries in Español, talking to distributors to get my books on Mexican bookshelves and into school libraries. I’ve been surprised at the positive feedback from experts in the publishing world here. They don’t think I’m crazy – a gringa writing about an Mexican American child, the daughter of a congressman, solving mysteries in the U.S. Capitol, trying to interest an audience south of the border. They attentively listen to my pitch in Spanglish, assisted by an interpreter I hired through the book festival. They carefully appraise the physical books. And several were very interested. We’ll see what develops.
Meanwhile, I’ve been blown away by the festival itself. More than 900,000 people attended the Guadalajara International Book Festival – or FIL – last year. This year, organizers are expecting to top a million. To put that in perspective, the LA Times Festival of Books is about a tenth the size, drawing just over 150,000 people. The convention hall is PACKED with people, holding books, talking about books, buying books.
And here’s the surprising thing: the average age at the book festival is under 30! And they are as excited about books as are attendees at ComiCon about the latest Marvel movie.
Why?
At Guadalajara’s festival, two full days are set aside just for school kids. Outside the convention center, there’s a massive traffic jam of busses, all stuffed with middle and high school kids. Remember: middle school is when we lose readers to their phones. Mexico’s answer: make the book festival an annual field trip for schools all over the region. That translates into a culture of reading, of celebrating literature. That’s why you see so many 20-somethings wandering around the exhibits on the other days of the festival. It’s the place to be seen!
Why isn’t this a tradition in the U.S.? (I’m looking at you, LA Times Festival of Books: why are you not partnering with LAUSD to bring school busses of kids to the FOB – or introducing a Friday dedicated to school kids all over Southern California?) If we want to create that next generation of readers, we need to follow the example of theaters who direct those school busses to special performances or bring performances of plays into classrooms.
Meanwhile, I’ve really enjoyed the Guadalajara festival. There are few Americans here (and those who are here speak Spanish a heck of a lot better than I do.) We’re missing out. In my lousy Spanish, I’ve had wonderful conversations with 11-year-olds who were thrilled to talk to me about my Fina books. I’ve met a Puerto Rican kindred spirit who writes speculative fiction and works as a translator at the United Nations who wandered the shopping streets of the nearby town Tlaquepaque with me and a kid from Miami who’s created a child’s picture book about death who swapped contacts with me and a couple from Mexico City just starting their publishing adventures.
If you write in Spanish (or have your work translated) THIS is the place to be. More than 3,000 publishers are here from more than 60 different countries. There are literary agents here Monday through Wednesday, selling the foreign rights for books (and poetry and plays) in English to the world. If you’re looking to sell the rights to your plays or find a publisher, plan to fly down next December. If your Spanish isn’t up to snuff, you can hire a translator for less than $25 a day. Come to Guadalajara. You won’t regret it.
Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride
by Constance Jaquay
There were days throughout the end of 2023 and the entire 2024 where I couldn’t move, days when my body felt like it had forgotten itself. I cried for weeks on and off. I felt stuck. I had forgotten how to move in my body. I had to re-learn how each body part worked.
It took time.
It took intentional healing.
It took remembering how to live inside my own skin again.
Slowly, I found my way back.
Courage, I learned, isn’t fearlessness.
It’s learning to move through fear |
fear of the unknown,
fear of lost dreams,
fear that an idea may never manifest.
Thirteen years of making work with little funding or support had finally caught up with me. The exhaustion had affected my nervous system; it was bone-deep. For a moment, it felt impossible to continue as an independent artist.
In 2024, I realized Theatre Roscius needed to slow down to understand how it wanted to evolve. After twelve original theatre & performace art works, four short films on Super 8, digital, and 16mm; four original physical scripts; my first exhibition; a new compilation of experimental pocket plays; two installations; numerous physical photography collections and two new sculpture series built from natural materials, it was clear I had earned rest and I took Tricia Hersey’s call to Black women to rest and reset as church. I felt I had earned the space to imagine the next chapter, and to act later.
In the midst of this self renovation, I fought to hold on to the voice I had spent years building. I felt it was violated at times and challenged by others. I had to sit with myself, it took long, lonely hours, until I found my authentic voice again. I had to listen to all the voices that lived within my head…and then I remembered: Alyson Mead.
I think about Alyson Mead often. We met during the early LAFPI Sam French days; she took me to lunch when I needed it most. Being an outlier in a city where it feels like everyone already knows everyone was difficult. She told me I would find my tribe, that my artistic voice would sharpen with time, but that the road would be hard. She was right.
Those first years after school were shadowed by hard times and scary nights, making work no one might ever see. Somehow, naivety, immaturity, and obsession with the work outweighed any sense of my reality. I kept going.
Then I found love, and my partner stepped in as unexpected support, taking on roles he never anticipated, and somehow we’ve made new work every year since 2013. And though I didn’t find “my tribe” in the way Alyson spoke of or how I imagined, Instead, I found with time something else: an international constellation of support that has been unexpected, powerful, and sustaining.
Time heals.
Not gently, but truthfully.
Life bends, breaks, and reshapes us. And if you keep going, despite disappointments, despite violence, despite the impossible, you eventually meet the support you prayed for years before. I don’t know what would have happened without the emergence of residencies, fellowships, and grants. Maybe I would have continued self-producing. Maybe I would have walked away. Maybe I would have collapsed into a grief that swallowed me whole. But the “what ifs” are dead ends. What matters is this: time keeps moving. And we must too. Keep loving, keep empathy at the center, keep faith alive, and keep walking towards the light even on the darkest of days.
And 2025 arrived like a whirlwind.
The last three years // the work, the political climate, the loss of life around the world // left my nervous system frayed. Sudan’s famine, Palestine’s devastation, Ukraine’s fight for survival, Lebanon on the brink… the world still feels unbearably heavy.
The past few years have been unimaginable, but I am excited for the now and the future. I believe there is always light inside darkness. I believe that moving toward hope changes the frequency of the universe. I believe theatre and performance shift the world, that every piece made in grace and with care transforms a small corner of our collective ugliness into something more beautiful.
“It’s funny the things you remember and the things you don’t.”
— Karen, All About Eve
The Mask
This feels like a funny story to share publicly. I’ve been sitting here staring at a blank screen, wondering what I could possibly offer in terms of writing advice or experience or reflection right now, on this blog. And I just keep circling this moment.
So here it goes.
I love Halloween. I love October. It also ends up being the busiest time when it comes to work, and this year I also happened to have several projects on top of day job stuff. But I was determined to not let spooky season pass me by. So I packed every spare moment with haunted houses and horror movies and spooky excursions.
This included going to two seances in one day.
If you know me, you know I like ghosts. They are becoming a kind of brand for me, I guess. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a real paranormal experience, though. I tend to be pretty skeptical even when seeking out these kinds of things. But I’m also beginning to think I have a wall or thick curtain inside me that drops around my heart anytime I do anything that is sincerely taking these things seriously.
Because how embarrassing to be sincere, right?
So I go to this seance that is meant to be a space for folks to kinda practice their intuition; the folks running it think everyone has the ability to communicate with Spirit et al, and it’s really just a time to try; and to offer any messages to the room that you think you are getting.
I, of course, was getting nothing, and feeling increasingly stupid sitting there. Jealous of others feelings things, but also thinking they were lying, somehow. I tried to focus and observe, filing this away to put into a story or play someday. It’s research! That’s what I always tell myself. Research.
And then one of the facilitators says they have a message for me. They don’t know who it is, but the visual they are getting is someone who is very theatrical, wearing a mask that goes over their eyes and head, kinda like Zorro. And this spirit, they are hopping back and forth being an entertainer, a clown, and then being a savior, a protector. Like these were the roles they bounced between in life. And the message, the facilitator says, is that the spirit is telling me that they wore a mask their whole life and hoped that I would not follow that path. They hoped I could remove my mask more often than they could when they were alive.
Does that resonate? asked the facilitator.
I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about it, I said. And didn’t elaborate.
There are two weird things about this. One is that it was the most specific and detailed message offered that day, amongst many others to other folks in the room, messages that felt relatively vague or general. I mean, the theater girl in the room got a masked Zorro talking to her from beyond.
The other weird thing is that the day before I was talking to my mother, reflecting on some emotional things that have been happening lately, and I said out loud, with emphasis, three times how I’ve gotten very good as masking my emotions. Masking, I said, almost proudly, frustrated, resentful, powerful. A skill I’ve had to learn for various reasons. A skill most women learn. A skill I’ve mastered and had to implement a lot recently.
I masked in the seance room too. I said thank you and I’d think about it. I was calm. But inside I was frantically trying to logic this message — do I know any dead people who would have dressed up like Zorro? No. This was so stupid. But then I started crying. A wave of heat flooded over me. I pulled myself together. Got through the rest of the seance. And in the safety of my car, finally wept. And I cried for a good two hours off and on after that.
Here’s the thing. I don’t know if it was the Universe or Spirit et al or my own unconscious reaching out. Or just a very intuitive guy who saw a woman who hadn’t spoken for an hour and got a read on her because she isn’t as good at masking as she thinks she is.
But does it matter?
I sometimes think I don’t have paranormal experiences because I have a predetermined idea of how they are supposed to look or feel. I wonder if things come through all the time but I’ve blocked them out, out of fear or stupidity or stubbornness. And okay, that’s one kind of problem. But if I’m like that in one area of my life, am I like that other places?
Do I feel like a writing failure because I think success is supposed to look one way? Do I feel behind or lost or sad because I think life is supposed to look one way and have made it almost impossible to allow myself to see it differently?
I’m hoping in the new year I can take off the mask and only put it on for special occasions. I hope that whatever mask I do put on is one that is gorgeous and celebratory and not one I’m hiding behind. I hope I can be open to the possibility of the writing life looking different than what I was told it would be. Not just the writing life, but everything.
I hope I can get out of my own damn way.
Does that resonate? Because I hope it does.
The Agile Rabbit
by Cynthia Wands
Au Lapin Agile, located in Montmarte
In October I saw something remarkable at the cabaret of The Agile Rabbit in Paris. (Forgive me, I just loved writing that.) My sister Susan and her husband Robert had gifted me a birthday adventure with them, and it was a dream come true: we stayed in an apartment near the Notre Dame Cathedral, ate fabulous meals, drank champagne, ate chocolate croissants, and saw dear friends. In short, it was a wonderful excursion, one I will treasure always.
But one of the most unexpected gifts, was the experience of watching the faces of the audience at a cabaret located in Montmarte, in a musical revue that was deeply touching.
We had researched some performance venues to visit while we in Paris. Perhaps we would go to the Palais Garnier, Opéra Bastille, (I’ve never been and someday I vow I will go to an opera there), or Les Folies Bergère, and then, just to bedevil Robert, we might go see the Moulin Rouge Paris show. Robert is back on Broadway right now in the musical Moulin Rouge, and had spent the last two years on the road with the show. But Robert had asked to see something more akin to a Parisian evening, and we kept looking.
And then I found a post online about Au Lapin Agile – The Agile Rabbit – a cabaret that has its own place in Paris history. We were looking for something authentic, not a Vegas style show, and this place sounded promising: “Au Lapin Agile is located in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris and hosts intimate, traditional French performances. The atmosphere is cozy, dimly lit, and focuses on audience participation and classic French “chansons”. The current show, “Songs, Music, Poetry,” features a variety of performers singing old French songs, Parisian melodies, and drinking songs, with the audience encouraged to sing along.” We were intrigued.
And here’s a bit of it’s history:
“The name means the agile rabbit, or Gill’s rabbit. It comes from the commercial ensign painted by the artist André Gill in the 1870’s showing a rabbit skipping out of a frying pan. The rabbit carries a bottle of wine, and is wearing a red neckerchief and sash. Because the rabbit (lapin) was painted by Gill, the sign – which quickly became famous in Montmartre – came to be known as the Lapin à Gill (Gill’s Rabbit). By repetition this became Lapin Agile (Agile Rabbit), this latter name stuck.”
Image by the artist André Gill
“In 1903 Frédéric Gérard known as Frédé became landlord of the property that would become Au Lapin Agile. Frédé was well known in Montmartre where he would go round the streets selling fish carried by his donkey. Frédé’s crow, goat, monkey or his pet white mice would sometimes also make an appearance at the cabaret.”
“He also had another café called the Zut where Picasso was a regular, so Picasso came to the Lapin Agile too. Frédé was musical and easy going. Just like Lapin à Gill (Gill’s Rabbit) he too wore a bandanna around his neck and sometimes on his head. We can catch a glimpse of Frédé (wearing clogs), in Picasso’s painting Au Lapin Agile, painted in 1905 and hung in the cabaret. The work can just be made out to the left of the sculpture of the Christ figure in the attached photograph.” (The photograph shows him singing and playing his guitar as an attentive bohemian audience looks on.)
And yes, this is the place that inspired the writer/performer/musician Steve Martin in 1993 to write the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. The play features the characters of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, who meet at the Lapin Agile in in Montmartre in 1904. In the play, at the Lapin Agile, they have a lengthy debate about the value of genius and talent.
On a beautiful night in October, friends traveled from London and Ireland and Montreal to join us in Paris, and we were a chatty bunch, out on the town. So we gathered our group together, and headed off to what was billed as an authentic Paris cabaret.
We arrived, somewhat early, I realize now; and we loitered around the closed front doors, as the singers appeared, banged on the doors with vigorous knocking, and were let inside. Eventually, the doors opened and we were escorted upstairs, to a large open room with square tables, an assortment of chairs, and a piano that was stacked with sheet music. We ordered drinks, and watched as more and more people crowded into every available seat, the noise and laughter creating its own kind of music.
Once the room was very full, the lights changed, and a quietly elegant musician sat down at the piano, which was right next to us. Then several singers appeared. They all sat down at a large table in the center of the room; nodded at one another and the music began. They started singing together, with the pianist playing such incredible melodies, without looking at sheet music, but referencing a play list that was announced with a nod, or a pointed finger at one of the singers. They sang drinking songs, and duets, and beautiful solo melodies.
And it was fabulous. It was unexpected. And also crowded and emotional and intimate. The crowd seemed to know every song, and would, on command, join in. Our friend Jennifer speaks fluent French, and sang along with such spirit, that it seemed she had been there before. My sister Susan knows and speaks French, and she could nod and comprehend the nuance of the songs and lyrics. I, other hand, could only marvel at the expression and nuance of the language, gauging my reaction on what was meant by the faces of the audience.
And here’s the gift of the evening – the faces of the audience: uninhibited, engaged, positively charged for hearing and enjoying the music. It was such a committed crowd to the singing – you saw the nods and then the laughter, and the anticipation of knowing what comes next. You could feel the transmission of the emotions and the receipt and acknowledgement of the audience – and it seemed so much like gospel in a church. The call and response. The encouragement and acknowledgement, all done with such enjoyment and connection. I haven’t seen an audience this energized and connected in a long time. It spoke of community and history and shared perspective.
There was also the performance of a man, who was introduced as a 93 year old singer, who sang several songs, and the crowd LOVED him. And wanted more. I couldn’t help but think of our American idea of youthful charisma on stage, and the contrast with this venerated gentleman.
We left at 11:00pm, as we had an early morning the next day, and the cabaret was going on strong when we left – our seats were immediately claimed by the crowd.
But I left with the memory of the faces in the audience. The singers who could create such magic with their songs and such exquisite vulnerability with the audience.
If you ever have the chance to go to Paris, and you’re looking for a conduit to the real night life, consider this encouragement to visit Au Lapin Agile. I hope you have the kind of evening we experienced.
When the night is thin
A night blooming Peruvian cactus lived steps outside my door this past summer. On it was a single bud waiting to open. Last month, late one night, it finally bloomed. I thought about waiting until the next day to see it, tired from the day that passed, but curiosity finally won and I stepped outside. The creamy white flower was a stark contrast to the blackened sky, the petals lush and like a kaleidoscope, never ending. I took a few photos and went back into my home. The next night, I returned to look at the flower again, but it had withered, drooping over on itself, for the flowers only bloom for a single night, serving as pollination for bats, then immediately die, offering seeds to the birds.
Life is full of seasons, of phases, of things that flower, then disappear. Death of old selves. Death of old lives. Death of dreams. Ready or not, life releases, the only way the new can appear. This intensity exists all around us. The grapevines in the backyard wither too soon, before we can enjoy all the grapes the season offered. The hummingbirds start to leave the honeysuckle earlier and earlier as autumn approaches, long before we are ready for the shorter days. When it happens, we are often wholly unprepared. We leave the flower, assuming it will be there the next night, only to return and find that we are forced into the new. Change arrives whether we welcome it or not.
For what feels like a painfully long time now, my own writing has been shifting and changing and morphing, slow and directionless. Family drama, realism, surrealism, sci-fi, absurdism, climate crisis focused, what haven’t I written at this point? Sometimes you wonder why you create something that might only be performed once, if at all.
The only consistency in life, it seems, is death of the big and small. Death of who you thought you were, of who you actually were, of who you hoped to be as the new is ushered in. The night is thin, beckoning you to witness the flower that sorrowfully lives for only a night. We’ll attempt to capture it with words that are marvelous and sad, intense and happy, joyful and ready. We make plays that are ephemeral, alive sometimes for only a night, the creation existing for those who dared to come outside into the night and see.
The Peruvian night blooming cactus does not weep if no one witnesses the single night of its magnificent creation. The flower appears regardless. May that be a reminder to me.
The Two Leelee’s
This Hispanic Heritage month, I had the pleasure of teaching kids about the wonderful and amazing Frida Kahlo. While brushing up on my knowledge of her legacy, I was deeply inspired with how vulnerable she was to include herself in her art pieces. As a child, Frida found solace in creating art when her illness (polio) made it so unbearable that she was paralyzed and oftentimes bedridden. Her roots as a creator stemmed from communicating the truth of her pain. Frida found herself expressing her big feelings by centering herself as the focal point of her work.
WHAT? Girl, how?
“My painting carries with it the message of pain” Frida Kahlo.
When I write plays, I center those around me. My mother, father, sisters and friends. Where I’m from, my culture and parts of my upbringing like Spice Girls and double dutch. But when it comes to writing about me, I just don’t do it. I steer away from telling my story because I feel like I’m better at telling other people stories because it’s more relateable. It’s not like I’m not in there, I’m just not the lead… or supporting but more like the understudy. But Frida challenged me. And boy what a challenge it is.
Have you ever told the truth about yourself? Like telling the paper what it is you truly believe of how you really are and who you know yourself to be? My god, it is not for the weak. When Eugene O’Neill wrote his semi-biographical play Long Day’s Journey Into the Night, he made it so that it would not be produced while he was alive. The play is his truth. How he sees himself and the toll his toxic upbringing had on him. The play was so revealing, it exposed him in this vulnerable way that he refused to share until years after his passing. Baby, I get it.
Engaging with Frida’s boldness as a truthteller, I challenged myself to write a play about myself (cringe!). I am able to see myself on paper in a way I’ve only been able to think about and I don’t always like who or what I am seeing. A friend from my graduate cohort once said during a lecture, it’s important to “show your scars, not your wounds,” as to say if there is something we are not yet healed from, we do not have to feel pressure to write about it or share it with the world. And I agree. However, I have the scars, yet refuse to confront what caused them or who caused them due to the fear that more often than not, it was me.
Each scene in this new… experiment has me feeling all undone and exposed in a way I’ve never been in my life. I write a little bit then hide from it. Scared that it’s not good or I’m not good or that I’m not telling the whole story or that it’s a poor depiction of my memory and how I want to communicate who I am and how I think of myself.
In the portrait The Two Frida’s, created after her divorce with Diego Rivera, we see two versions of the artist holding hands. Both have their hearts exposed. While one (the traditional Frida) heart is bloody and open and… undone, while the other, a newer version, heart is closed. Healthy though exposed. For me, this is what I hope for myself. The chance to see a healthy part of me holding this raw version of myself with love. The way I’d like to approach that is through playwriting which is my art and accept myself through it all.
I look to Frida as my north star in writing about myself in the most honest way I can understand. I look to her for guidance as I think about how I see myself on paper and in the mirror. It’s okay to confront pain and lies and truth and my ugly through my art work. But I’ll also be available to hold my hand and allow for each version of myself to be seen, loved and accepted. By creating this work and even sharing it (if I feel like it) I’m giving each version of myself the chance to be visible by the world. A world who has been harsh, unkind and unforgiving to me but also, caring, generous and graceful.
I love you Frida Kahlo! Thank you for your truth which has set me free.
From Instigator Nancy Beverly: Picture This – Part 3
This week, we’re sharing some fun stuff from LAFPI Instigator (and former blogger) Nancy Beverly! Check out below for her latest Substack Post. And play catch up and stay in the loop at substack.com/@hikernb
Climbing Mt. Olympus??
(Yeah, that looks a little steep, doesn’t it?)
Should I spend $200 to buy my theatre pal Marc’s Olympus OM-1 camera at the end of my sophomore year of college????
Here’s some back story from my childhood to explain why this was such a big decision:
When I was in the third grade, men in suits came to the front door. I thought they were insurance salesmen because back then, those type of guys came a knockin’ to sell policies. But THESE Men in Black took the car away. Oh. NOT insurance guys. I later learned the term Repo Men. As in repossession. Apparently Dad had fallen behind on the payments for our Thunderbird.
We went through a bunch of cars the next few months. Dad had a little red Corvair for a bit…
… not to be confused with a snazzy little red Corvette and no need to cue up Prince’s song.
Then Dad got into an accident where the Corvair was totaled. Great. The guy living next door to us was a mechanic so he loaned us an ancient gray clunker from the 1940s. Eventually we got a green 1951 Hudson that was the color of Dino the Dinosaur (of Sinclair gas stations fame) – and it was about the same size.
At first I was okay with Green Dino, it beat to hell and back driving around in that gray clunker. I showed my aunt (she was just six years older than me) that the back seat was so wide I could lay down across it without having to bend my knees. She rolled her eyes implying the Hudson wasn’t even remotely cool, since this was the mid-60s. Shame washed over me.
About this time of us going through cars left, right and sideways, I became fascinated with Mr. Potato Head. I’m not sure why. I already had some Legos and had started collecting Matchbox cars. Maybe it was the fun of creating a funny face, so I asked my mom if I could have a Mr. Potato Head.
She said no, we couldn’t afford it. Wanna know how much Mr. Potato Head cost in the mid-60s? Ninety-eight cents. I’m not kidding.
I begged and pleaded with my mom until she finally drove us down to Ayr-Way where she bought me one. In hindsight, I’ve often regretted pushing Mom so hard for that toy… but when you’re in early grade school, how else do you stand up for yourself?
I did have a small plastic bank back then (it looked like a vault)…
… where I put my tiny allowance when Mom could afford to give me a nickel or a dime (my job was to take out the trash and dry the dishes). But Dad stole money from the plastic vault one Saturday morning when he thought I was asleep so he could go buy coffee at the corner diner. I ratted him out to Mom and she chastised him big time. I don’t remember him paying me back.
So you can see why I was nervous and my mom was freaked out by me wanting to spend $200 on Marc’s Olympus OM-1 35 mm camera.
How could I even afford it, you ask? Well, I worked summers at Eagle Creek Park in Indianapolis to save up for college, plus I did work-study jobs at the University of Evansville (set building, publicity, box office), and I got grants (BEOG – the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant) and scholarships. No loans, I did NOT want to end up in debt like my dad.
All of that added up to my bank account giving me the green light to buy Marc’s camera. Not to mention my intuition and instincts that were yelling, “GO FOR IT!” So, I bought it. And used it for close to 30 years. A truly fabulous investment.
(It says 28 millimeter but the film that fit inside was called 35 mm)
Now that I had this fancy schmancy camera, what was I going to take pictures of? Surely more than just water droplets on clover and raindrops on roses (as much as I loved Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music)…
Wait, hang on… I was in the Drama Dept. at U of E…
Yes, photo ops there started to call my name…
(An action shot of mine from The Boyfriend, a musical production at the University of Evansville)
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East West Players in Good Hands: Meet Lily Tung Crystal
Lily Tung Crystal, artistic director of East West Players in Little Tokyo of Los Angeles, has made a full circle back to Southern California. While the path may have been unconventional and circuitous, every place she’s had the pleasure of making home along her artistic journey has contributed to her role as a thoughtful and influential leader in the Asian American theatre community.
Lily’s first stage was the raised fireplace of her childhood home in Rancho Palos Verdes. She’d use the handle of the fireplace screen pulley as her microphone and sing the showstoppers she’d learned from outings with her mother to the Pantages or the Ahmanson. Having once been a competitive dancer and carrying a natural ear for music, Lily’s mother held a deep appreciation for the arts and passed this on to her daughter. At the age of seven, Lily began taking singing and piano, which ultimately led her to musical theater—roles in Oliver, The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz to name a few. Despite being one of the better singers, Lily never got the lead, possibly because the directors couldn’t square Lily’s Asian face with the traditional white casting of these shows. At the time, representation was barely a conversation, and it never dawned on Lily that she could ever see her onstage talents as anything more than a hobby.
After graduating Cornell University, Lily moved to China to work as both an educator and a journalist. All the while she kept her hand in the theatre—but mostly as an avocation, something to keep her creative spirit nurtured. Eventually Lily made her way back to her home state of California, but this time to San Francisco, where she found herself joining community theatre and acting classes. Even as she was immersing herself in the Bay Area theatre scene, she never considered herself a professional actress despite joining the union and landing significant onstage roles. Claiming the identity was a slow process, and Lily recalls herself thinking, “Maybe I can say I’m an actor now. Can I really say that?” Asking for permission is an all too familiar refrain for artists in the shadows, especially those of color—I certainly have had my fair share of imposter syndrome around my creative life—but once Lily gave it to herself and said YES, there was no holding her back.
In 2009 Lily received a Theatre Bay Area Titan Award, which led her to start the Bay Area Asian American Actors Collective, where she found kinship with fellow actor Leon Goertzen. A year later the two co-founded Ferocious Lotus, an Asian American theatre company in the San Francisco Bay Area. As it turns out, in one year, Lily birthed a theatre company and a baby! She remembers sitting in rehearsals for their first show—a night of one-acts co-sponsored by the Asian American Theatre Company—with her infant strapped in a baby carrier. I am particularly delighted by this image in my mind’s eye—a scrappy and determined young Lily with a script in one hand and a bottle in another, baby nuzzled up against her body—as it demonstrates the grit and passion that Lily has always brought to her work. With Lily at the helm as founding co-artistic director and later, artistic director, Ferocious Lotus went on to produce and support many emerging Asian American playwrights and artists and became a vibrant and influential theatre space with national recognition and reach.
In 2019, Lily moved on from Ferocious Lotus to become artistic director at Theater Mu, the premiere Asian American theatre of the Midwest based in Minneapolis. There Lily continued to grow the landscape of Asian American theatre and stretch the boundaries of definition and opportunity, always striving for diversity and equity in development, education, production, and outreach. Five years later in 2024, Lily found herself back in Southern California, the stomping ground of her youth, taking on the role of Artistic Director at East West Players (EWP).
EWP is the longest standing Asian American theatre and theatre of color in the nation, and Lily is ushering in its 60th anniversary. Honored by the task, she was particularly mindful of the curation of such a milestone season, aiming to create balance between the OGs of Asian American theatre–the elders like Philip Kan Gotanda and David Henry Hwang, who laid the foundation when there was no Asian American representation to speak—and the next generation of playwrights, like Lauren Yee, Prince Gomolvilas, and Jaclyn Backhaus, who have created works that have become Asian American classics in their own right.
In what she coins a “widening circles” vision for EWP, Lily focuses on several values that undergird her goals. Think of the concentric circles in the frequency of sound waves. In the first circle, Lily wants to encompass as much of the Asian American diaspora as possible. While Asian American representation in the theatre has historically limited itself to East Asian cultures, Lily recognizes the need for wider visibility for all Asians American voices including those from South, Southwest, and Southeast Asian American communities. Her second circle aims to acknowledge all the creativity and labor of the people backstage. What of the set and sound designers, costumers, and stagehands? Lily is doing just this by inaugurating a fellowship for backstage artists, where recipients will get paid on-the-job training to learn firsthand the behind-the-scenes work of production. The third circle aims to address intersectionality with other marginalized communities— LGBTQ, disability, or specific racialized communities to name a few examples. The fourth circle—and there’s some overlap here, but that’s the point—considers the question of how we make theater accessible to all people. EWP has made moves to make the theatre more affordable with $20 tickets or pay-what-you-can performances as well as affinity evenings for specific audiences. For example, for Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee, EWP worked with Khmer leaders in Los Angeles to ensure that the show could be accessible to Khmer audiences; it stands to reason that a play about a people should be viewed and experienced by them, or else, whom and what is it really for? The final circle aims to innovate alongside and in collaboration with the film and television industry. A great example is in this season’s revival production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die, which utilized high level film projections to capture the old-timey feel of Hollywood circa 1930s.
Notwithstanding all the managerial and administrative duties that come with leading a theatre of EWP’s size and stature, Lily has found space to nurture her own creative projects. This springtime, she will direct a revival of David Henry Hwang’s Flower Drum Song for this season’s last show. This is especially exciting for Lily who has known Hwang for years as a mentor and friend—and whose name is on the EWP theatre—but has never collaborated with him artistically. Hwang is also updating the musical after first rewriting it in 2002 to be more relevant to the times—Oh the times! Combine that with Lily’s musical theatre sensibility, and the show promises to be a tour de force.
Secondly, as I write this, Lily is completing her first tech week as director for नेहा & Neel (pronounced Neha and Neel) written by playwright Ankita Raturi and produced by Artists at Play. नेहा & Neel is about an Indian immigrant mother who goes on a road trip with her teenage son, in a last-ditch attempt to teach him his culture before he is off to college. Raturi’s play resists preachy polemics and instead engages with serious issues—racism, colonialism, identity in America—through humor. In another serendipitous collaboration, Lily found herself crossing paths again with Raturi, an artist she’d supported during her tenure at Theater Mu, but whose new work Fifty Boxes of Earth, which Lily programmed for Mu’s 2024-2025 season, she did not get to see to its fruition because of her departure last year. So, it was an honor to be asked by AAP and Raturi to direct this piece and to celebrate, as Lily describes, a play that centers on “Asian joy.”
Given the current political climate and the blatant assaults from this administration on people of color and the arts—EWP lost all its NEA funding—Lily does not take lightly the mandate of EWP. She says, “It is more important than ever to continue to tell our stories and to lift up BIPOC stories. When people don’t know our stories, it’s so easy for them to perceive us as other.” She goes on to emphasize how important it is that “people see us for the true Americans that we are.” Everywhere we turn, this administration is pushing us to the margins, rendering us invisible as people of color, and telling us in so many words that “we are not patriotic or don’t belong here.” Lily is adamant that we counter the bigotry with our own narratives of community. She is committed to making EWP a “safe and joyful space to create art together” and it is with this spirit that Lily carries the torch for many generations of Asian American theatre artists—past, present, and future.
Finally, when I ask Lily, how she likes being back in Southern California outside of work, she quips, “the traffic sucks, the food’s great!” And to that I say, “Welcome home!”
Wrong Audience
by Kitty Felde
I’ve been working all summer on a new podcast. Honeymoon Road: Pete & Me & our Model T.
Exactly 100 years ago, my Felde grandparents drove across the country on their honeymoon, riding (and sleeping!) in their cranky old Model T Ford. My cousin Marie Felde and I recreated that journey, stopping at all the places along the way that “Gert” wrote about, to see what remained of the America they saw back in 1925. My actress cousin Terri Felde Shauer voiced the 25 year old Gert and the show includes interviews with folks at the Kansas State Fair, honeymooners from the Grand Canyon, and gal campers on their way to North Dakota.
I assumed the audience would be the 32 grandchildren of Pete and Gert. I was wrong.
At the going away party for my niece, heading off to college, I played the first episode. Three of my brothers got up in the middle of it and headed to the kitchen for dessert. I was crushed.
It was the same kind of rejection we all feel when our scripts are rejected by the theatre we were certain would jump for joy at our work. Ouch. It makes us doubt our talent, our work, our very sense of ourselves as writers.
But really, it should make us reassess who our audience really is.
I know that my plays are highly unlikely to ever be performed at the Taper. Or any other regional Equity house. I don’t write knockoffs of Jane Austen or small cast musicals or edgy political screeds. That doesn’t make my work bad. My war crimes play found its audience on college campuses around the world. A one-woman piece about Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice played twice in her adopted hometown of Washington and among retirees in Naples, Florida. A piece set among the water lily garden of a feisty entrepreneur got a reading in her lily garden.
The key is not to get discouraged. Think creatively about the people who NEED to see your play, hear your message, experience your creation. Don’t let somebody else’s rejection sink in and make you think your work is worthless. You just haven’t found your audience. Yet. Believe that. Find your people. They are out there. I promise.
Oh, and that podcast? Honeymoon road did find an audience. It’s people who have their own tales of family journies. Every time my cousin and I told folks on the road trip what we were doing, they had an equally interesting story to share about their own family history. In fact, we set up a place on the honeymoonroad.com website for them to post them.
I haven’t given up on my entire family. Some of our Felde cousins have become our biggest fans. One even wants to write an opera with a song called “Meet Pete.” Perhaps the rest of my brothers will come on board. But if they don’t, I know they are just not my audience.
Kitty Felde hosts three podcasts, including Honeymoon Road: Pete & Me & our Model T. She is the author of The Fina Mendoza Mysteries series of childrens books.
what if slow was fast?
—Constance Jaquay Strickland—
I turned another year older /
life is clearer, not easier, yet I feel brave and bolder.
Although time has brought blessings, I can’t help but hold my breath as I pray for the mothers who huddle and hold hungry babies in their arms in the midst of rubble.
As I walk through this unfamiliar Italian town, I hold my head high | I remember I’m the first of our matriarchal line on my mother’s side to leave the country:
I hear my grandmother’s voice in my ear__remember / we’re Black and we’re proud….so I keep moving.
During dinner, it begins to rain in Genoa. The wind blows remarkably heavy; it starts to speak /
I wonder if I am the only one who can hear our ancestors whispering?
It’s 3am and I’m still awake. Naked, I lay down in this bed that is not mine on top of a vintage mattress. How many before me have laid their head down in this same spot, staring out into the darkness // dreaming of a future that may not come.
I drift. I allow my eyes to close. Allowing my body to find a sense of renewal | I give control to the darkness as the Medeterrian Sea sings me to sleep.
As I enter a new realm, I hear her voice:
What if we slowed down and healed?
