All posts by Alison Minami

East West Players in Good Hands: Meet Lily Tung Crystal

Director, Female Artists, LAFPI, Performance, Play, Playwright, playwriting, Production, Theaters, Theatre, Women, , , , , , ,

By Alison Minami

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.

The show runs from October 19 through November 16 at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

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!”

Playwriting through PEP

playwriting

by Alison Minami

For three semesters, I have taught an introductory playwriting class through USC’s chapter of the Prison Education Project (PEP), a volunteer-based organization that offers educational classes to students who are either currently or formerly incarcerated. The first two times I taught over Zoom to a classroom of young males at a juvenile detention center. Having been in numerous Zoom meetings with box after box of up-close faces with carefully curated backgrounds, I was not prepared for teaching to a wide-angle view of a classroom of students. While I’m sure the students likely saw a giant projection of me, I could barely see anyone’s faces let alone learn their names as would be my normal practice. Despite this challenge, I carried on with lessons on character, conflict, and dialogue, having the students freewrite, riff, and generate in each session. I called on students awkwardly, saying “yes?” to a roomful of raised hands without actually knowing who I was calling on. There was always a supervisory person in the room, whose face I never saw but whose voice I occasionally heard demanding students to quiet down or follow instructions. Still, in every class, students volunteered to stand up and read their work—acting out the dialogue with selected partners or classmates—and while I could barely hear their words because of the poor audio quality, what I could hear and see was the audience reaction—the laughter and glee at a relatable situation or a creative twist to a familiar conversation.

This past semester, I finally had the opportunity to teach in-person at Impact LA, a residential drug treatment center that assists clients with re-entry. In this small group setting, I was able to really make connection with the students, and they were able to experience my excitement for teaching and sharing the creative process. In every session, we had time for checking-in and sharing our highs and lows of the week, which set the tone for the class. The students were eager, lively, and trusting. They all had a shared experience, often teaching me the vocabulary of a world that was foreign. They openly supported each other in their recovery journeys and in their resistance or timidity at putting pen to paper. “I know how you feel” or “you could do it” or “just write whatever” were words I often heard when one person “wasn’t feeling it” or was stuck on a blank page. I was moved by the level of intimacy and care that the students had for one another, and it made me think of how important “alternative” forms of education are where students are not confined to raising their hands or keeping every aspect of their inner monologue to themselves—we know–every educator knows–the smaller the class setting, the more intimate the space, the higher the level of investment for all participants. But I digress. You don’t have to teach drama, to a roomful of people who have seen life from the prism of addiction and/or incarceration. Their lived experience has already taken them to the edges of emotional extremity; they know fear, danger, heartbreak, pain, loss. And too, they know joy, camaraderie, wonder, and gratitude. For them, survival is not a metaphor. The question is not what plotline or conflict makes a scene dramatic? But how can we reveal the drama to maximize its effect on the audience?

For each course, comprised of only seven sessions, I culminated by gathering professional actors to read revised student scenes. While this was rewarding for students over Zoom, naturally nothing replaces the magic of live theatre. This past semester, we had a successful last day with scenes that reflected back to the students their own experience. Their words were raw and real, but also clever, funny, and joyful. After the reading, students were given some time to ask questions to the actors, and in one exchange I will never forget, actor Alex Alpharaoh, himself a teaching artist and community activist who founded No Fronts Actors Workshop, shared with students: Some people go to film school and pay thousands of dollars to learn how to tell stories, but you don’t need to; you’ve all lived the story (paraphrased).  He, alongside Blanca Espinoza, actress and founder of Chola Vision Productions and Peter Pasco, actor and playwright of Yoli, Alfredo, y la vida, went on to encourage the students to just create in whatever ways they could—on their phones, on social media, with their pens, etc. The actors, through their acting talent and their wisdom as creatives of color, uplifted the students and showed them that their stories mattered; their voices mattered. One student thanked me afterward, saying “you made us feel important.”

Through my engagement with PEP, I have been thinking a lot about the carceral state and how unjust and dehumanizing our systems of control and punishment are. Creative expression as an outlet and antidote to bigotry or injustice seems to me, now more than ever, a moral imperative. It is liberatory for an individual who gets to imagine the world they’ve lived in and the world they’d like to see, but also, for a collective sense of belonging, affirming, and liberation.

Starting with Place: The Atomic Cafe

playwriting, ,

By Alison Minami

This month Center Theatre Group is sponsoring a community play reading of “Little Tokyo Goes Nuclear: A Play in Three Decades – Chapter One.” When Jesus Reyes, CTG’s Director of Learning and Community Partnerships, approached me about writing the piece, he wanted a play that was connected to the Atomic Café of Little Tokyo. The Atomic Café was an iconic Los Angeles landmark, mostly known as a punk rock haven in the seventies and eighties and since demolished to make way for the metro station. Referenced in several popular films and songs, the café was frequented by musicians the likes of David Bowie, Blondie, and Sid Vicious. This is largely attributed to Nancy Sekizawa, otherwise known as “Atomic Nancy”, who was the daughter of its owners and took over the café in the late seventies. Despite its notoriety during the eighties, the café had roots dating back to post war 1940s. As the daughter of a family-owned Japanese restaurant myself, I know all too well the challenges of keeping the greasy wheels of such an establishment open. I wondered how the Atomic Cafe—a gathering place and safe-haven for family and friends—could survive and serve its community for so long. Naturally, first and foremost, the quality of its comfort food must’ve been consistently good, in this case, the café’s chashu ramen and fried rice. But what other factors beyond that?

One of the features of the café that stood out for me in my research was a framed photo of the mushroom cloud, the nuclear explosion of the atomic bomb over Japan, and likely the inspiration for the name of the cafe. From the seed of this photo, two ideas came to mind. Firstly, America as a nation, undergirded by US Imperialism, is obsessed with war. It’s in the fabric of our DNA; the moment we end one war, it seems we are chomping at the bit for another.  I thought about how no matter what decade of the 20th or 21st century we are in, the country is always reeling or healing from war. I wanted to explore the thread of war over the years and its impact on the Japanese American community. Secondly, while the very real atomic bomb was powerful and deadly, the word atomic has hyperbolic associations with adjectives like awe-inspiring, astonishing, and incredible. This was no doubt what made the café’s name so ingenious. The dichotomy of power—for good and for evil—almost as though Atomic Nancy were reclaiming what had been taken away from her people via ancestry if not literally from her own family. Further, it is largely known that punk rock was a subversive art form, one that represented people on the margins that were, in their own way, fighting systemic oppression and the rising tide of consumer capitalism and all the sanitization of expression that came along with it.

Also in my research, I came across filmmaker, Tad Nakamura’s short documentary Yellow Brotherhood, an organization of Asian Americans in Los Angeles who mobilized to help at-risk Asian American youth and steer them away from drugs and other negative influences. Too often the Asian American community is relegated as passive or apolitical, when in fact there are so many instances of political resistance and community power. While the Atomic Café is the setting to the play, I knew that I wanted the backdrop of Los Angeles and its political landscape to be a part of the story I told.

With these ideas simmering in my mind, I thought of how I could tell a story of place as though the place itself were the cradle, the character that watches over its children. The children grow up, and the place changes costume, but its bones and its heart remain the same. Ever since reading the entire August Wilson play cycle, I’ve always wanted to write a cycle of my own. At first, I had thought that I could write a 10-minute vignette to represent the characters of my play in each of the decades for as long as the restaurant was open. However, with the good counsel of Reyes and Sonia Desai, CTG’s new Director of Literary and Dramaturgy, I decided to give both the café and its characters some more breathing room to tell their stories. This has led me to the three-decade cycle, enough time to show what changes and what endures in a family touched by war and struggling to survive.

In this fictionalized story, Troy and Kei meet at the Atomic Café in 1965 amidst the Watts Riots.  Troy is under pressure from his elders—his father and his aunt Yoshiko, owner of the café, to enlist in the army, but he has other ideas of how he wants to live his life. The two fall in love, despite their political differences and opposite personalities. When Kei’s brother leaves for the Vietnam War, she must step up her family responsibilities while wrestling with her own desires as she supports Troy who founds the Yellow Brotherhood, and later, organizes for the reparations movement for Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII. The play, told in three chapters by decade, follows their growth from the 60s through the 80s. As the two help Yoshiko transform the Little Tokyo mainstay into what is known as the iconic Atomic Café, they grow into adulthood, shape their values, and find their voices.

I am so honored that CTG has provided the resources to bring together such a powerfully creative and talented team. Little Tokyo Goes Nuclear: A Play in Three Decades is directed by Fran de Leon and assistant directed by Desiree Fernandez, starring Tamlyn Tomita as Yoshiko, Thomas Winter as Troy, Mika Dyo as Kei, CJ Cruz as Don and Janet Song reading Stage Directions. Please join us for Part 1: The Sixties at the Malabar Library on Saturday, March 22 at 2pm, at the Robert Louis Stevenson Library on Tuesday, March 25 at 6pm, and at JANM (TBA).

Bad Parenting

playwriting

by Alison Minami

Over the weekend I took my five-year old to see Duel Reality by a group named The Seven Fingers at the Ahmanson. This show promised to be a mix of acrobatics, aerial stunts, and dance choreography set to the storyline of Romeo and Juliet. Think Cirque du Soleil, but on a much smaller, therefore, much more intimate scale. The morning of the show, I decided to explain the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet to my daughter. It was one of those things that I didn’t think through, and once I’d realized the folly of my ways, well, you could say, I was in too deep; I proceeded to tell my daughter the very end of Romeo and Juliet, death included but minus the graphic of daggers, and….surprise, surprise, she burst into tears.

As an aside, and perhaps, somehow, in some unconscious way, undergirding my questionable parenting decision, I’ll never forget in college going to a showing of the film Romeo and Juliet starring Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio. It was the holiday season, and we were in a crowded mall in Cleveland. That was the first time I’d ever seen a family of four—mom, dad, girl, and boy—wear matching Christmas sweater outfits complete with Santa hats, without, I’d believed, any sense of irony. Having barely left high school, I could not stand the sight of these two sibling teenagers, leaner and taller than I (read: more American), happily donning the same gaudy red and green bauble sewn sweater as each other and their parents. I felt mortified on their behalf, and because I was young and judgmental—now I’m old and judgmental, but also much more empathetic and forgiving (I think, I hope), I attributed such behavior to all the stereotypes fed to me by my new-ish collegiate peers about the Midwest. Nevermind that I was then living in the Midwest, de facto a guest of the Midwest, drawing from its cultural and educational institutions like an ignorant leech, engaging in the worst kind of generalizing that I had hoped to escape when leaving high school.

I digress. It was on this same mall trip that I and a friend went to see Romeo and Juliet. And now that I think of it, I believe that this was the Thanksgiving Weekend, and we were the loners who had nowhere to go for the holiday, which tells you something perhaps about the origins of my judgment. Maybe, just maybe, in some twisted way, I was jealous of a family that loved so much, so openly, that that symbol of unification and holiday cheer overrode their tacky spectacle. Anyway, I was not as insightful as I’d believed myself to be at age nineteen. Sitting in the theater, I resisted enjoying the film. I used to reference Leonardo Dicaprio as Leonardo DiCRAPrio because I thought he was a shit actor. This wasn’t really based on anything except that everyone else seemed to think he was a heartthrob. I hadn’t even yet seen Titanic, which I’d later watch with a proselytizing Bible beater who tried to make Jesus ties to the film’s end to convert me to Christianity. I thought that movie was shit too. Why on earth didn’t Rose let homeboy onto the floating raft or whatever? And were we just going to gloss over all the poor people stuck on the ship, literally under lock and key to prevent them access to rescue boats? Why did it have to be about Leo and Kate, their love, and not the injustice of class discrimination? At the time, I was an anti-capitalist who didn’t understand capitalism, and certainly, not the capitalism embedded into the movies. Anyway, at the end of Romeo and Juliet (SPOILER ALERT), the theater erupted in clapping and cheer, and one kid in the row ahead gasped, “But wait, they die?” My friend and I took this as an opportunity to sneer and ridicule (privately) this presumed teenager. It was another way to separate and elevate ourselves–and to stereotype kids and their Midwestern origins, despite our likely only being older by a couple years. It really is embarrassing–for me, not them–to think of my snobbery. After all, just because I read Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade, doesn’t mean every kid does.

So back to my daughter. Yes, she cried, as one should expect at such a sad tragedy. Isn’t that what Shakespeare wanted? For us to feel. I tried to reel in my poor parenting decision, wiping away my daughter’s tears. “The main point of the story is that when you love someone, no one can keep you apart. Like me, I love you so much, that no matter what, I’ll always be with you,” I told her. To which, my daughter, without skipping a beat says, “unless you get arrested.”  While this may lead you to question my other parenting decisions and to query why she might even know about the carceral state, try to stay focused.

Any description I come up with, cannot do justice to the extraordinary wonder of this show. There were people doing triple spins in the air before landing on their feet; there was pole climbing and sliding upside down, stopping short within an inch of their face hitting the floor; there was swinging and body tossing; there was hoop jumping and gliding like dolphins at Sea World but without water, and all without harnesses or safety ropes…I could go on. But suffice it to say, it was mostly a physical show, with very little in the way of Shakespeare, although audience members on one side of the house did receive blue bands while the other side received red bands, which we were supposed to raise into the air for our respective Capulet or Montague teams, until the end when we were encouraged to throw them in the air, casting aside our differences.

Despite the spectacular nature of acrobatics and body contortions, more than once my daughter leaned over and asked, “When are they going to die?” and “Is this the end, because I didn’t see anyone die?” As it turns out, no one dies. A performer, in one of the only lines in the whole show, announces, “We changed the end, because who needs that kind of tragedy these days?” (What?! I didn’t even have to tell my daughter about the poison and the fake death and the real death, not one, but two!) I guess the troupe had already thought through little children coming to see their show.

Why am I writing this? Because it just happened. It’s funny. It’s also a reflection of my bad parenting, I think. But also, also, drama is a thing that starts at the beginning (of life) and lasts forever. My daughter was a pure, or maybe I should say, unadulterated (literally) receiver of the story. She knows, at five, what sucks and what hurts, and she was waiting for it, even amidst the fanfare of triple flips in the air, she was waiting to see the simultaneous destruction and unwavering bond of star-crossed lovers reach its ultimate fate.

The Legacy of Patsy Mink

playwriting, ,

By Alison Minami

Currently I am writing a play based on the life of Patsy Mink (1927-2002), the first woman of color ever to be elected to Congress, for East West Players’ Theatre for Youth Program. The opportunity to write this piece has been so humbling, in no small part, because of the extraordinary life of Patsy Mink, a Japanese American, Hawaii born and raised native, and feminist trailblazer—a life of which I might never have bothered to learn about had I not been asked to write this piece.

Patsy Mink is known most for co-authoring the Title IX legislation (later renamed Title IX: Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act). This landmark law says that any federally funded educational institution must offer equal opportunity and access in any activity or program for all students regardless of gender, race, religion, or any other classification. This law is widely credited for building women’s collegiate athletic programs across the nation. It is because of this law that athletic scholarships for women exist, and that women’s sports programs are funded seriously at all. While Title IX is often most associated with women’s athletics, it has had far reaching impact in all areas of education including, for example, in mitigating sexual harassment on college campuses, creating gender equity in traditionally male dominated areas of study and their related professions, and accommodating students with disabilities.

The drive to draft such legislation was undoubtedly rooted in the many instances of gender discrimination that Mink faced as a woman in the 1940s, 50s, and throughout her career. As a college student at the University of Nebraska, she was denied housing in the dormitories because she was a woman of color, instead, told to go live in the International House, though she was from Hawaii, then a U.S. Territory. She also had her heart set on being a doctor from a very young age, but she was rejected from 12 medical schools. This rejection prompted her to switch gears and attend law school at the University of Chicago where she was one of only two Asian Americans and one of only two women in her class. Upon graduating law school, Mink could not find a job as a lawyer, despite having passed the Hawaii State Bar. The good ole boys’ network (read: old white men and plantation owners to boot) ran the show, and they weren’t about to let a woman, let alone a woman of color, into the club.

In reading about Mink, it is clear that Title IX was just one demonstration of Mink’s enduring core value to fight for equality and against social injustice. Mink entered politics in part because of all the barriers of entry she faced in her other professional endeavors. She yearned to make an impact and to work toward just causes. In Hawaii, she started the Oahu Young Democrats, and when Hawaii officially became a State in 1959, she ran for the House of Representatives. Her friend and political ally, Daniel Inouye, was running for Senate, but when Governor Jack Burns called to request that Inouye stand down and allow his political predecessors to have the Senate seat, Inouye became Mink’s opponent in the House race. Mink lost this race, but she went on to run many, many campaigns.

Notably and aforementioned, in 1964, with the help of her husband John Mink as her campaign manager, Mink became the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman to be elected to Congress. During her first stint in Congress, Mink fought tirelessly for educational equality and for the rights of women and children. Recognized for her anti-war stance regarding Vietnam, despite opposition from her own party, the Oregon Democrats recruited Mink to run for President, making her the first Asian American woman to ever run for the highest office in the land. Years later, during her second stint in Congress in the 90s, Mink would be one of the only members of Congress to vote against the Patriot Act. When she left her house seat the first time for a run for the Senate, she lost and returned to Hawaii. However, this loss did not stop her from political and civic engagement; she went on to run for city council, Mayor of Honolulu and Governor of Hawaii. She won the first and lost the last two races. What I found to be incredible about Mink is her tireless fight and her unwavering conscience. Mink was not under the spell of lobbyists, corporate donors, or party leaders. She was unafraid to speak her mind, loudly and vigorously, even when it meant offending her colleagues or going against unspoken party rules. She withstood any knock down in her life, and then stood up and looked for another door, because the fights she took on were never about her political career, but rather about her advocacy for the poor, the working class, and the disenfranchised.

At a time when so many of us are disillusioned with electoral politics, and the virtually fake democracy in which we live, the life and times of Patsy Mink reminds us (or me) to stop complaining, to not turn into a ball of apathy and cynicism, but rather to believe as Vaclav Havel once wrote “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” This, I believe, is the spirit in which Mink lived her life. Her sense of justice and equality and the dignity of all human life is what guided her, and it is what made her a force to be reckoned with.

I realize that you can just go on and google Patsy Mink, but to understand the essence of who she was, I insist that you watch her 1984 DNC Speech. (https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5007067/user-clip-rep-mink-dnc-1984). It reminds me of how hard so many people have fought for the world I live in today, which is certainly not without its faults and atrocities, but is yet and still, a far more just society in many respects than just fifty years ago.

As well, you can read Patsy Mink’s biography Fierce and Fearless (https://nyupress.org/9781479831920/fierce-and-fearless/), by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and co-authored by Gwendolyn Mink, Patsy Mink’s very own daughter, or watch this wonderful documentary on PBS entitled Ahead of the Majority by Kimberlee Bassford. https://www.pbshawaii.org/patsy-mink-ahead-of-the-majority-2/

As an educator, a woman, a woman of color, an Asian American woman, I am so heartened that East West Players is supporting the telling of Patsy Mink’s life story. Every student in America should know about her legacy.

Mistakes Make You

playwriting

by Alison Minami

As a mother to a young child, I often think of the lessons that I want to teach my daughter. I think about how I can instill in her the spirit of creative risk-taking. I want her to be willing to fail, to fall flat on her face and still get up. I was always inspired by the story that Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx shapewear, shares from childhood when her father would require her and her brother to report back their failures at the end of every week. He wanted to instill in them a willingness to try new things despite the fear of failure. He was not interested in their easy or comfortable achievements. I know these kind of stories are aspirational and also reflect all kinds of privilege that don’t account for the very real social and economic struggles of both children and adults, but I still like it. I’m always thinking about what my version of this parenting will look like, mostly because it is a skill that I feel I did not learn as a young child, and then, as an artist.

I have been paralyzed with fear when asking for help or advocacy in my creative life. I’ve hovered my finger over the send button when trying to reach out to a person that I deemed to have some sort of authoritative role or in a position to negatively critique me or outright reject me. I have stood awkwardly at the drink table at many a networking event, wanting to disappear into the walls. I have sat in darkened rooms, my face burning hot from a rejection letter. Honestly, it’s embarrassing. It’s much better now…I think age has made me more resilient, but I also feel like I wasted a lot energy in worry or self-consciousness. Nobody cares, I must remind myself.

So then, I ask myself, how to build resilience for my daughter, so that she doesn’t become too precious or perfectionist, but that she sustains passion and joy in her artistry. So you can imagine my delight when she sat at the piano yesterday–she started lessons–and sang me an original song that she wrote. It was only one line, but it had heart and it was lyrical as songs should be. “If somebody hurts, hurts you, I won’t be fine.” Maybe I’m just being one of those parents who delights in everything their kid says or does, but I thought it was pretty good. When she explained the songwriting process to me she said, “You know how I make my songs? I make a lot of mistakes. It’s okay if I make mistakes because I learn from them.” This was such a proud parent moment for me, and now my daughter can give back the lesson to me.

I’m struggling with a new play. There’s a whole lot of non-work happening with a whole lot of loose thinking about different avenues and directions. Starting at the blank page is always a challenge. I just need to adopt the spirit of making mistakes.

The Buckle Sisters

playwriting

By Alison Minami

Playwright and dramaturg Alice Tuan changed her writing practice during the pandemic. She vowed to herself that beginning on November 1, 2021 she would not succumb to the social media and internet doom-scrolling that so many of us are accustomed to first thing in the morning and would instead, begin the day–and the writing–“with a fresh mind.” She describes that morning vividly—how difficult it was to get out of the bed, how forceful the lure of reaching for the phone, the visualization of the writing table, so close yet so far away. All I have to do is get to the chair and sit in it, she told herself. It took her nearly thirty minutes to get out of bed, but she did it. And the next day again, and the next, until she built the musculature for a new habit. It was the beginning of a new way of writing and being for Alice. Influenced by her Buddhist meditation practice, she wanted her writing to be informed by “deep listening” rather than being “flashy and loud.” Early in her playwriting career, her works demanded attention, both in their content and form. But in this new practice, Alice strived for egolessness. She also began writing by hand in tiny letters on the backs of scripts she’d helped usher into the world through her dramaturgy—another way of slowing herself down and not screaming at the page, waiting instead for what was emerging from within rather than manipulating ideas from the external chaos of the world.

It was through this practice that her new play The Buckle Sisters was written. A fictionalized story inspired by Alice’s relationship with her own sister, the play centers around Bea and Bar, two sisters who could not be more opposite in personality or temperament. Of the pair, Bea is the free spirit, a starving artist who never has the approval of her Chinese mother, while Bar is an ordered and perfectionist mother and wife, working hard to tend to the needs of everyone in her nuclear family. But this is not a sibling rivalry play at all. Rather it is a play about sisterly and familial bonds that endure and even strengthen in spite of–or because of–the oppositional energies that engage in a continual push-and-pull, yin and yang dance of interpretations and negotiations amidst family secrets, legacies, and re-constructed memories.

I had the great pleasure of experiencing The Buckle Sisters first as a reader in a private Zoom read, and secondly, as an audience member for a professionally staged reading at Boston Court Theatre in conjunction with East West Players directed by Rebecca Wear. As a reader, I was excited by the language and the wordplay; there is so much happening with language—the double meanings, the symbolism, the puns, the sounds—that an audience member might miss how deliberate and poignant each layer of meaning is crafted. Beginning with the play’s title, to buckle, Alice points out, means to collapse, but it is also a mechanism in which to keep people safe, as in, buckle up. Add to that, Bea’s favorite singer Jeff Buckley and Bar’s middle school impersonation of William F. Buckley, and the dialectical nature of relationships reveals itself as both significant and imperative to a family’s survival.

This sort of subtle and nuanced symbolism is embedded in both the process and the product. Thematically the play touches upon capitalism and the paltryarchy (as Bea calls it). The text itself is written entirely in lower case letters, and it is in part, a way to fight the Capitalism with a capital C. While an audience member might not ever know this about the text, I can’t help but believe that the process impacts the product, which is to say, this measure of resisting traditional form compelled the words to look different and then subsequently be different. Bea and her sometimes love interest, Pierre Nous, discuss the voraciousness and the boring, limited scope of capitalism. This is mirrored in their dog chase cat games or in Bea’s job as a sushi plate—indeed, there is something capitalistic to a predatory chase or to the commodification of the body as it relates to hunger. When Pierre says to Bea “You are obviously not a capitalist”, Bea declares, “I’m not a capitulist.” In a sense, the play itself refuses to capitulate to expectation, and it is precisely that resistance that makes it so delightful, which is the only way to describe the audience experience.

The live in-person reading revealed just how humorously all the wordplay and banter translated. I found myself laughing from start to finish. I laughed when Bjorn, Bar’s half-Swedish, half-Chinese son became seemingly possessed by spirits; When Sven, Bar’s husband, tried to assert his parenting style so as not to raise a child who is too soft, too indulged, or too uncouth as other Americans; When Ma, the sisters’ mother, forgot Bea’s birthday and felt zero remorse for it; When Sven and Bar fought over a cotton-top tamarin taxidermy as home decor. For me, the characters were so well drawn out that I was simply watching them in their elements interacting with each other. Ask me what happens in the play, meaning, what is the plot? and I don’t think I could definitively answer. So much happens, but none of it is tied to a driving plotline. Instead, it is an amalgamation of conflicting desires, feelings of being misunderstood or not seen, endeavors to help or heal, between people who know and care for each other so intimately while being themselves, flaws and all. Yet and still, by play’s end, I felt full and satisfied. I could feel a transformation for both sisters as they came together, closer and freer than when we began.

This satisfaction has everything to do with what Alice has coined the Last Third Dramaturgy, in which the playwright can utilize the last third of the play to “take a moment to think about the world you want to live in.” It is an opportunity for the playwright to consider “What is the best possible outcome for these characters?” and too, for the audience to consider how the play may impact their own visions of a better world. At play’s end, Bar and Bea are on a mountaintop doing just this, amidst the external pressures on their lives, envisioning their best outcome and celebrating their bond as sisters.

I look forward to seeing this play again in full production. To me, it is a distinctly Asian American play as well as a political play (my words, not the playwright’s) without attempting polemic or faux edginess. I learned something about playwriting—how process informs content—from watching the growth and evolution of this piece. Experiencing the play and talking with Alice got me excited to jump back into my own playwriting. As a dramaturg (or a play doula as some have called her), Alice is always wearing the hat of teacher, mentor, and advocate. Reflecting on her own journey of development with the Buckle Sisters, Alice says “If you keep at it, it will pay you back, not in rent, but maybe in unbridled joy.” So there you go playwrights. Carry on!

World Premiere of THIS IS NOT A TRUE STORY Re-presents / Represents

playwriting, ,

By Alison Minami

This past weekend I had the pleasure of going to see the World Premiere of “This is Not a True Story” produced by Artists at Play in partnership with the Latino Theater Company.  Playwright Preston Choi tackles the white man’s stereotypical representation of Asian women in three works: firstly, in the “canonical” (note quotations) opera Madama Butterfly and musical Miss Saigon, and in a more modern iteration of the Asian female, in the movie “Kumiko the Treasure Hunter.” All three works portray the central protagonists as damsels in distress, ones who need saving, ones who cannot endure the tragedy that befalls them by the American lovers who jilt them, and instead, succumb to suicide.

The women–CioCio from Madama Butterfly, Kim from Miss Saigon, and Kumiko (or Takako, the real woman for whom the movie was based on)—are cursed to live out their lives and deaths over and over again in a liminal purgatory where their true voices contend with the stories that were written for them. The play opens with CioCio, played by Julia Cho, gutting herself with a dagger, once, twice, one-hundred, nine-thousand times and so on. Every time she kills herself, she is condemned to live again and experience the birth and loss of a child, the agony of heartbreak, and the pain of a self-inflicted death. Every time she attempts to challenge her given circumstance or to deviate from the way she has been written, a booming, God-like voice overhead reprimands her “THAT IS NOT YOUR LINE!” When Kim, who was a character adaptation of CioCio, played by Zandi DeJesus, lands herself in the same space, she is simultaneously defiant with and reliant on CioCio to cope with the miserable repetition of her own story’s tragedy.

While CioCio and Kim, characters in the most widely produced works with Asian female leads, clash over how to deal with the hellish nightmare of being trapped in the scripts in which they were written, Kumiko, played by Rosie Narasaki, enters the liminal space with a desire to seek the truth, to distinguish the movie character Kumiko from the real-life Takako, the former being portrayed as a naïve caricature who was purported to have been looking for money buried in the snow of Fargo based on the Coen brothers film by the same name. So the mythology of Takako goes, though in real life, she could not have been that stupid, and such a story was more likely to have come from the police officers who deemed it reasonable to call a Chinese restaurant to assist in translation with this young, Japanese woman traveling alone. It is the arrival of Kumiko/Takako that compels the three women to move beyond commiseration and to strategize an escape. But what does escape look like? And can they ever be truly free?

Julia Cho as CioCio

This play was delightful on so many levels. Firstly, I was in tears of laughter from beginning to near end. I say near end because in the final moments, the tears turned to sadness and a glimmer of hope. Having read this manuscript before watching the play, I was struck by how truly theatrical the piece was. The reading experience did not come even close to the audience experience, which included stylized Asian accents—we were instructed to laugh at them—and babies flying in on ziplines. The trio of actresses were superbly adept at the physical humor and at all the sharp turns in moods and voice. They were dynamic, compelling, and so fun to watch.

Despite my laughter, I found myself empathizing with their plight. As an Asian American writer, actress, and human, I have felt the projections of Asian female on my body through a white male gaze, a colonialist, imperialist gaze, a frat boy gaze, whatever—all the ways in which I did not get to choose how I was seen. I felt the import of the play, which I consider to be deeply feminist in its messaging, and this can only be credited to the playwright Preston Choi, who found a uniquely creative way to deconstruct a longstanding and oft discussed issue of stereotyping and objectifying the Asian female without hammering our heads with pedantry. I’ll just say it: someone is going to write their Ph.D. dissertation on this play someday.

I enjoyed the play so much, I reached out to Director Reena Dutt, who was first introduced to the work through an Artist at Play reading series. The play spoke to Dutt so viscerally that the seed of direction came to her in a dream (yes, the flying babies!) Dutt shares in the feminist reading of the play, saying that in terms of BIPOC representation, she is no longer interested in “gratuitous female pain” and instead seeks out art that celebrates “BIPOC female joy”.  An actress herself, Dutt knows all too well the issues of representation for Asian women, but she is clear-eyed about the changing landscape over generations. She says, “Tragedy with BIPOC women is not entertainment anymore” and “at what point do we gain agency?”

The answer to this question is not only in the play, but in the power of collaboration and the process of production. Dutt is quick to credit Artist at Play, a female-powered AAPI theater of which Julia Cho is also a founding producing partner, for their willingness to support her vision and to respect all members of the team, from designers to performers.  Dutt describes Artists at Play as “changing the culture of how we work in the theater.” It stands to reason that the best theater will be born out of a community of artists who feel heard and respected. As Dutt exclaims, “It takes a team to care about the story,” and in this case, the story delivered.

“This is Not a True Story” is playing through October 15 at LATC. Reena Dutt is currently the Assistant Director to Leigh Silverman for Hansol Jung’s play MERRY ME at the New York Theatre Workshop.

Decolonize Your Artist Identity: A Conversation with Maikiko James

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By Alison Minami

At a recent Company of Angels’ table read of a colleague’s play, I recognized one of the actresses. I had met her nearly a decade and half earlier at a different reading. That reading was in New York City where I had been one of the readers, and she had been the award-winning NYU Tisch screenwriter to have her work presented by Pan Asian Repertory Theatre and Asian CineVision. Maikiko James has since moved back home to California, eventually making her way to Los Angeles as an artist, activist, and arts administrator. She is now the Senior Director of Programs at Women In Film (WIF) —amongst the many hats that she wears.

After meeting up for a coffee re-connection, coincidence soon revealed itself as kismet. We connected right away as Asian American women and artists who have both struggled with the economic challenges and existential questions surrounding the moral imperative of an artist’s life and the convergence of art and politics. For Maikiko, to be creative is to be human; it is our birthright and intrinsic to our value as individuals and members of a collective. And yet, the current state of an artist’s life—as evidenced by the writers and actors’ strike—is aligned with capitalist interest; it is inherently “extractive” and “exploitative.” Maikiko’s philosophy on being an artist is very much a critique of the economic structures that prevent artists from thriving. She says, “artists should not be traditional workers making a product; art is something everyone should just get to do” and “when you commodify anything, it loses its spiritual value. Dehumanization is actually the outcome.”

Maikiko readily admits that she had to sacrifice much of her ambition as an actress and writer, so that she could make a viable living. She further shared that WIF has a help line for anyone who has experienced harassment, abuse or discrimination in the entertainment industry, and one of the recurring themes that comes up in calls is shame over perceived lack of success. The internalization of shame resonated so strongly with me. As someone whose pay-the-bills job has always been in low-paying part-time education gigs, I have felt so much shame for my life choices because, as I would say to myself, I could’ve or should’ve earned more/done more if I had only chosen a different professional path, or alternatively, I could’ve or should’ve pushed harder and sacrificed more for my art. The could’ve/should’ve game is very seductive, but ultimately, self-destructive. It is perpetuated by a hamster wheel of self-blame in a society that purports personal responsibility. Maikiko expressed and affirmed such a valuable truth for me and so many other creative compatriots: “We should not be ashamed for wanting to be artists, for being artists.”  It seems like such a basic truism that you’d think it doesn’t bear saying aloud, but I felt so seen and heard (and liberated) when she said it.

In many ways, this is the core of her work at WIF, uplifting the voices and spirits of women and underrepresented voices in the entertainment space. It is so heartening to know that there is a deep and thoughtful philosophy that underlies her work beyond surface and obligatory nods to diversity and representation. And while Maikiko is honest about the bleakness of sustainability for artists in a capitalist structure, she is equally a visionary for what’s possible. Maikiko asks the essential question “What does the decolonized generative future of artists look like?” I love that she is even asking the question at all, and I wish more artists could first feel how these words land on their body, and secondly, consider their role in answer to this exact articulation. The starving artists—the strikers, the minimum wage workers, the freelance hustlers, the drivers and servers–are suffering, yet paradoxically, it is they who will get us through to the other side of the madness that is brimming all around us in the current climate of neoliberal fascism. It’s not the billionaire class that is going to save us or preserve our humanity. Maikiko is not just hopeful, but resolute, that “the artistic mind can change how our systems work and how we engage.” These words were very inspiring and made me feel less isolated as a tinker in my workshop. Maikiko affirmed that we as artists are part of something bigger and that our work is not just about expression for, say, personal catharsis or self-interested gain, but truly a moral and spiritual imperative for the survival of our humanity. It’s easy to dismiss this sentiment as hyperbolic or lofty, but it reminds me of Amiri Baraka’s poem “Young Soul” in which he writes: “First, feel, then feel, then/ Read, or read, then feel, then/ Fall, or stand, where you already are” and “Make some muscle in your head/but use the muscle in yr heart.”

Meet Emily Brauer Rogers

playwriting

By Alison Minami

Emily Brauer Rogers grew up on a farm in Indiana with a large brood of siblings and cousins. Often left to their own devices (and imaginations), the children put on their own shows. As the eldest of the clan, Emily wore all the hats, serving as playwright, director, and star of the many theatrical productions they put on. This was the early beginnings of Emily’s life in the theatre.

Since graduating from the Master’s in Professional Writing Program at USC, Emily has been steadily writing for nearly two decades. Thematic to her work are “stories of strong women” that serve to answer the central question “How do we tell the stories of heroines we haven’t seen?” In her work “Bringing Iraq Home” Emily interviewed women who had been affected by the Iraq war, whether as veterans, family, or partners, examining both their struggles and sacrifices. Emily wanted to examine what it meant to go to war for women, and the lasting reverberations of wartime trauma, whether the women had been in combat or on the periphery.

I know Emily through the Company of Angels’ Playwriting Group, and I have read and admired her writing for over two years. Her play “Monstrous Women” explores the resilience and sisterhood of oppressed and unfairly maligned mythological female figures, including Siguanaba, a supernatural siren from Central American folklore with the head of a horse, or Yamauba, a mountain fairy from Japanese mythology, who seduces hunters before killing them. In another work “Undine”, Emily tells the story of a water sprite who is helping to alleviate drought while facing the wrath of her father. True to Emily’s words, these plays examine “stories that are bigger than life.” Emily is expert at teasing out the allegories of the patriarchy—the psychological traumas on women, their survival strategies, and their deep reserves of strength and empathy for each other as well as, yes, their capacity for betrayal and vengeance.

“Bloomer Girls” staged reading at Macha Theatre on April 15, 2023

Her play “Bloomer Girls” follows the lives of women in baseball in the late 1800s and today. A play structured in innings, the scenes move back and forth in time as two central figures, Liz and Gwen, played by the same actress, must make difficult decisions surrounding their careers. Liz, a baseball player in 1800s, must decides whether to stay with her team or get married, while Gwen of modern-day struggles with being objectified as a female softball player in a PR stunt in exchange for the opportunity to be scouted for the National Softball League. Most recently “Bloomer Girls” had a professionally staged reading at Macha Theater in Seattle, directed by Anna Claire Day.

As a mother of two young girls, Emily continues to push the stories of women from the margins to the center as an artistic and moral imperative. This is something that she does in big and small ways, not just in her writing, but in her role as a mother, writing professor, and community artist. Emily has been a member of the Vagrancy Theater playwright’s group, Playground LA, Company of Angels, Hunger Artists of Orange County, and our very own Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative.