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.
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!”
fog they say can dissipate like rain and humidity back to the clouds it does not linger – unlike night sweats that soak the bed linens drenching you cold or hot depending on the season it’s the sporadic discomfort of momentary confusion i hate when i wake to my body sweat-soaked in full on visceral self questioning of how this outside the shower wetness is a wet all over wet, that needing a towel wet that checking for pee wet ’cause it can’t be sweat wet but it is even the palms of my hands are wet, closed tight and almost clammy wet
they tighten – my hands – when i sleep laying down but only at night perhaps due to the dream voyages i wake hands always clutched around some invisible treasure so tight i have to pry my fingers open i look expectantly eyes straining to see what i am holding if i check before i am fully in waking consciousness, i might be able to see what it is before the day hides it because i still feel things in my hands just before and there’s a faint image visible just before there isn’t
what is in my hands?
and that is when i discover i am holding my breath too as if i were deep diving without gear and need to inhale because there is no air in my lungs
when dad died, a year to the date, i passed out on my couch from the held in grief and when i awoke four hours later, i gasped for air as if i had been coming out of something or someplace where air was not there, as if raising from the dead
it’s the same feeling and the fog rises grey and grainy enveloping the room hovering till i force myself to remember the day of the week, the time of day, and what i need to do next
We don’t always know how our work affects others. We hope it inspires. We hope it bears witness to the thing, any…thing, some…thing. We hope it marks time or opens the windows to let time out. We hope, yet can only speculate.
In January of this year, Los Angeles was burning. Sleep was a luxury for those outside the fire lines; prayer was a necessity for those inside. Food was an afterthought. I called a friend, “Can I come to you if I have to evacuate?” Otherwise, where would I go? The urgent evacuation alert told us to pack important items and be ready to go. My car would not start. No matter how many times I turned it over, it would not catch. Time slowed like a scene from Inception. Streets were blocked, curfew was in effect, and there was no one to come get me. It was a long night of praying the evacuation order didn’t go into active status, praying the fires didn’t turn toward me, praying the wind would just stop blowing. I spent the night checking funds and rental car agencies in the area. In the morning, I walked to a car rental agency and rented a car.
I packed water and more water, copies of my work, funeral programs, Bibles, important papers, and clothes I could re-wear over and over again.
I packed the lump in my chest and the memory of what it’s like to be physically on fire. After all these years, I could feel ten-year-old me running through the house, screaming as my terry cloth robe burned. Where was I going? Freakin’ flashback.
Even though I was affected on the outskirts, there were friends in the thick of it who had to leave because the fire was upon them. Friends who lost some and friends who lost all. Nevertheless, they are alive, and that was my biggest prayer for them. Loss is always devastating. Reconciling yourself to what is left is a long, hard task.
I wrote a poem for one of these friends ten years ago. It was on my mind to replace the framed copy I gave them. I don’t know why. A few days ago, I received an email from another friend who said that of all the things this person lost, they mentioned the poem. This other friend wanted to know if I would mind them reframing it for our friend. Imagine.
The poem took me ten years to write. It was a conscious, subconscious project that I mulled over, making mental notes while checking the air for signs of shifting timelines. After all that mulling over, the poem did not come to the page until the night before the reading. Printed, framed, and stuffed in a bag, I made my way to the event. I did a quick read-through with another friend outside the venue. The reading was a success. And now, ten years after that, the words are still speaking.
I am honored, humbled, and encouraged.
Lately, I have been wondering if my work counts, and by extension, do I? Guess that’s an all-around “Yes.”
Words count…even the time it takes for them to be born matters…
In The Women of Brewster Place, one of the characters discusses the constants in her life as “beige bras and oatmeal.” My late mother loved oatmeal; she talked about it like it was a delicacy. I can’t digest it well, but I promise that after an oatmeal conversation with Mother, I would invariably try it again, only to have it refuse to go down my throat.
The constants for me have been storytelling, dreams of becoming, and disappointments… I have dreamed of adventures so vast they seem otherworldly. Now those dreams play out like parallel world delusions. Calloused by loss and trauma, I spend more time healing than moving into a dream. I’ve lost time, as if it were a bunch of quarters sitting in an unused purse. I have suffered so many disappointments, I am unable to see the silver linings anymore.
I am fighting myself. I’ve got a horror story in me that I don’t want to write, but it’s blocking anything else I want to write.
When do you give up? Like when do you finally throw in the towel and call it quits? Being an artist is hard work these days. We face constant rejection at an alarming rate, oftentimes with no real understanding as to why we were rejected in the first place. Art centered establishments who have the power to change lives are underfunded, overworked and sometimes even corrupt. The world has broken and will a poem fix that? Can a play help it heal properly? Will the film adaptation evoke change in the necessary hearts and minds of those who can undo the very policies that broke the world in the first place? It’s all so strange being a creator these days. Our biggest competition has become AI. I wanna be like Dwight from The Office when he outsold the website in a single day. Like with hard work, focus and dedication, I too can beat technology. But what if I can’t. And to be honest, I don’t know if I even want to try. Like if a robot writes a play better than me? Or paint a picture better than Amy Sherald, what can I do to stop that? Where would I even start?
“I’m weary of the ways of the world”
How could I not be? I’m constantly (disarmed) distracted by social media. Doom scrolling content to make sense of it all but only confusing myself more. “Post something idiot” a voice in the back of my head that pressures me to contribute to the madness. Believing I got something to say that the people need to hear and that if I really wanted to, I could easily get in the creators fund. I’m smart. Funny. Passionate and creative enough right? I could go “viral” or whatever the kids are doing. “Why not?!” that same voice justifying why I spent two hours on social media calling it “research”. Still not posting what I want to. Just regurgitating what has already been said while believing I’m saying something different. Thinking that if I wanted to be heard, this is the way to do it. And if I’m not heard here, I’m not heard anywhere. So what’s the point in speaking at all?
Is there a point to defeat?
I’ve been overwhelmed lately with the feeling of wanting to be important. To be someone that people will listen to for real. I don’t know if it’s because I lost my parents but for some reason, the last few years I’ve been thinking heavy on my legacy, how I want to be known in the world when I’m no longer in it. How will I be known? As a failed artist or as an artist who stopped trying?
“I have hopes for myself”
But I lack hope in the rest of life. The world has broken (again and again) and I’m struggling to know how I can help fix it. I’m just a writer, which I know is no small feat. But when will I get to write about love and not war? Kindness and not hate? When will the human experience be soft for me (Black folks) instead of constant protest and creative efforts to fix a world I ain’t even break? I wrote out 31 of my favorite plays to read and all 31 centered gender, class and race. I wonder if Black people have ever gotten the stage to write about anything different?
This shit is hard. When do you give up? Take your losses and find a quiet lil life for yourself? Turn around and head yo ass back home? You tried it in the little city and couldn’t cut it. When do you give up? Find a better role to play?
I believe the fundamental job of an artist is to create. To make. To offer another perspective at something we’ve looked at before but never in that way. But damn, all these rejection letters got me feeling like I’m saying the same shit. Making me feel like there is nothing new to say because it’s all been said before since Black people’s work is only celebrated when it centers a limited range of topics (gender, race and class). Is it time to write about keeping myself and my plants alive?
“Struggling through the work is extremely important – more important to me than publishing it.”
Toni Morrison is always right. If this is the work, then giving up sometimes has to be a part of the process; at least contemplating it…deeply considering it.
But I’ll never be romantic about how hard this is. If it weren’t hard, would it be a struggle? But do we always have to struggle to do the work?
In my dreams the other night, I met my twin aunts. They were happy together; they were young again – just turned thirty – the age where I first took note of them and mother, who was thirty-two. I had wanted to make sure I remembered them as they were because they were getting old. They were no longer in their twenties. I was too young to know thirty is not old. They were laughing and asked me what I was doing there. “Visiting,” I said.
I am not sure why I dreamed of them. I will look into it further later. This is the second dream I’ve had in as many months where I was seeking out someone in a hidden place and being asked, “What are you doing here?” Again, I was visiting.
The places were nearly identical in that they were located in some sort of festival-like place, either underground or in a hidden realm. The atmosphere reminded me of the festivals we used to have in my school gymnasium when I was in grade school.
My biggest questions are: why am I visiting the dead, and why are they at festivals?
I am wondering if it has anything to do with my break from writing plays. While reworking some pieces, I have not started anything new outside of my deep inner process. Which, as I think on it more, may be where the dreams are coming from.
I am also wondering if it is time to shift back to writing plays again. Lately, I have been delving into alternative poetic styles of expression. I am also starting to lose interest in things other than story. I’m obsessed with research, knowing that the fodder will be used in something one day. I have got to get away. I need to get away lest I drown in an overabundance of stories cutting off my air, lest I bust due to the worlds growing within me fighting to be born.
Anticipating the many new branches growing from my tree of life, I am excited for the coming days. I look forward to many new birth dates and an answer to why I am visiting the dead in my dreams…
There have been earthquakes over here, shaking up my house of cards. Strange how they aren’t actually falling from their perches one upon the other, row upon row. Almost as if glued in place, they stand. Yet in the background, I can hear glass shattering from my past Northridge earthquake memories, leaving shards of glass on the bookshelf from the one broken item – my high school prom token. The glass shattered from the sheer sound of the earth shifting. The wine glass read, “Looks like we made it” from the Barry Manilow song by that name, it’s words lingering in the air:
Looks like we made it Left each other on the way to another love Looks like we made it Or I thought so ’til today…
I kept the shattered token for months till I just couldn’t anymore. It was like the shattering negated something – like it stopped it in motion and throwing it away would make it final…
The past is either haunting me or resurrecting the unfinished need-to-be-finished things.
And I wonder why the cards weren’t falling…
Wonder how much more before the dam breaks and the cards come toppling down on themselves?
I keep wondering if the quake was stopping a motion or restarting something this time… if it’s a good, good or bad, bad vibration.
The heat is always sweltering before the quakes. I’ve been dehydrated for weeks. Forgetting to drink water. Forgetting to eat. Passing out. Not so much from the heat of the day as the heat of the memories, feeling I became nothing of what I dreamed I would. Feeling like sharded glass on a shelf. Hoping I will make it to another dream or the full awakening of an old one. Maybe that’s why the cards are still standing; we’re gonna make it this time, and Phyllis (Hyman) will be singing,
Old friend This is where our happy ending begins Yes, I’m sure this time that we’re gonna win Welcome back into my life again
And my house, this house, stacked upon itself, will no longer be built of cards…
I just spent money I barely have on books I may never read.
I know I’m not alone in that. I, like many of my friends, have a wide range of books in my personal library. I take pride in my unique and extensive collection of Black plays! Y’all, it’s wild. Some of my anthologies, readers and books are first edition, out of print, and just good ass books. I’ve read a lot of them because of college. I still have almost every play I had to read in school. Because I had to read them and write about them, they all offered some critical perspective that I often find myself going back to. Sometimes I just read my written notes in them. That’s why I don’t do audiobooks like that; where do I put my lil notes at? Like I gotta keep my opinion to myself!? No. I read in conversation with the writer. And as a writer, when I write, I write to someone. I write in conversation. So I talk back in my books. I just love books so much. I’m that friend who will send you a book because you told me something kinda relevant 3 years ago in the bathroom at the club. A good book be having me so obsessed. Like when I read Assata by Assata Shakur. I for sure was at the DMV, beach, coffee shop, honestly anywhere I may have had to wait for more than 40 seconds, I was pulling that thang out, turning them pages rigorously. I just couldn’t get enough. I felt like I got to learn from Assta personally. Same with Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals by MIMI tempest. These are books that had me reading cover to cover (which I do not do often).
But it wasn’t always that way for me. I’ve been reading Ntozake Shange’s Sing a Black Girl’s Song, a collection edited by Imani Perry (who also wrote the best autobiography about Lorraine Hansberry which is in my top 5) and she talks about how Shange grew up with books in her home. Her parents read and bought books for her to read too. Toni Morrison worked at the library when she was like 14. And got in trouble for reading more than she would work. Lorraine Hansberry was similar, very well read. August Wilson literally dropped out of middle school and educated himself at the library. He read everything. All my faves talk about all these good books they remember seeing on the shelves in their homes and engaging with at their local libraries. But not me. The only good book I remember in my home growing up was the good book. I remember my mom reading Fly Girl by Omar Tyree when that came out. She carried it with her everywhere she went and my sister got to read it after her. But not me. I was watching Moesha and Kenan and Kel. I swear the only thing I thought about in elementary school was how I was going to be on Nickelodeon. I wasn’t worried about no books. Mainly because, ya girl couldn’t read!
It’s wild, I know. I love books so much now but growing up, I had very low comprehension skills. Having ADHD is so distracting sometimes. And it made it hard for me to really understand written words. So during reading time, I just admired pictures. I always struggled in grade school. Teachers begged my mom to allow them to hold me back a grade, put me in special classes and send me to special schools (it was the 90’s so everything was special). But my mom wouldn’t let them. She’d be mad at me for not trying harder but she never let them hold me back.
It wasn’t until 7th grade in literature class when we were given the opportunity to have a pizza party if we all finished reading a book about a working poor family on the Southside of Chicago who wanted to move into a bigger home. At the time, my family was living with my paternal grandma and in total, there was about 13 of us in the 3 bedroom apartment (1.5 baths). And I never say no to pizza! So I read the first act and I remember loving it so much. How the words were laid out on the page made me feel smart. Every single time I turned the tiny page, I felt less… special. I remember no one in class taking it seriously but not me. I read every line. There were no pictures to look at, instead I saw a world I knew about.
I love reading now. And I wish I could say after that book in 7th grade I was one of those people who you always caught with a book in hand. But I didn’t. I got better. I did pick up Fly Girl, which felt like a rite of passage. And I did get heavily into the Bible in high school. But it was a very slow journey. But that journey eventually led me to a pen and paper. Allowing me to create worlds of my own.
