{"id":681,"date":"2018-11-29T19:50:32","date_gmt":"2018-11-29T19:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/?p=681"},"modified":"2022-02-06T20:44:12","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T20:44:12","slug":"where-%cf%84here-%ce%b9s-theatre-%cf%84here-%ce%b9s-hope-interview-with-elizabeth-wong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/where-%cf%84here-%ce%b9s-theatre-%cf%84here-%ce%b9s-hope-interview-with-elizabeth-wong\/","title":{"rendered":"Where \u03a4here \u0399s Theatre, \u03a4here \u0399s Hope:\u00a0Interview with Elizabeth Wong"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Savas Patsalidis<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n

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Elizabeth Wong<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Elizabeth Wong is a Los Angeles-based playwright and theatrical director acclaimed for her unique blend of comedy and social justice issues. Her most recent play Code of Conduct<\/em>, about a soldier deployed to Guantanamo Prison, was named a 2018 O\u2019Neill Theatre Center finalist. Other award winning plays are: Kimchee and Chitlins<\/em> (Victory Gardens), Letters to a Student Revolutionary<\/em> (Pan Asian Rep), Dating and Mating in Modern Times<\/em> (Theatre Emory), and China Doll <\/em>(Northwest Asian-American Theatre.)<\/p>\n

In 2017, East West Players commissioned Wong to write Tam Tran Goes to Washington<\/em>, a TYA play about an undocumented dreamer who becomes a student activist. Other commissions include: The World\u2019s Strongest Librarian<\/em> (Winner of the 2017 Distinguished Play Award) and Does My Head Look Big In This<\/em>? (Dramatic Publishing), among others.<\/p>\n

Wong is a recipient of the Tanne Foundation Award for Artistic Achievement. She was a Disney Writing Fellow, a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed columnist and a staff writer for the ABC sitcom All-American Girl<\/em>, starring Margaret Cho.<\/p>\n

She holds an MFA in dramatic writing from New York University\u2019s Tisch School of the Arts. She\u2019s been a visiting artist-in-residence at Harvard University, Texas A & M, Bowdoin College and at Illinois State University.<\/p>\n

She is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and at the University of Southern California, where she teaches playwriting. Her memberships include: PEN, Dramatist Guild, and Writers Guild West.<\/p>\n

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Does My Head Look Big in This?<\/em> Courtesy of Rachel Harry and
Hood River High School Drama Department<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How did it all start? I mean, your playwriting career?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My playwriting career started when I met August Wilson in a stationary store. I had just quit my newspaper job at The Hartford Courant<\/em>, where I covered aviation and transportation, and had moved to New Haven, CT, to be closer to New York City and the Yale School of Drama. I started sneaking into classes there. So, while in New Haven, I was introduced to August Wilson and he was told I was a playwright, which was embarrassing since I hadn\u2019t written a single word.<\/p>\n

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From Letters to a Student Revolutionary<\/em>. Photo: Elizabeth Wong<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My first produced play was a play I wrote at NYU about a ten-year epistolary friendship between a Chinese-American girl and a Chinese girl, Letters to a Student Revolutionary<\/em>, around the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre and a U.S. election in which the Rev. Jesse Jackson was the first black candidate for president.<\/p>\n

Your first produced play was also the first play of yours I taught at the university; my 18- and 19-year old students loved it. I am just wondering: what is the market for this particular kind of theatre (for young audiences, I mean) in the United States?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Theatre for Young Audiences is thriving. Nearly every theatre has an education department, and nearly every theatre awards commissions to playwrights to write original work for family and young audiences.\u00a0 Nearly every city has a theatre dedicated to performance for young audiences, for profit theatres find it to be very lucrative. And both for- and -non-profits find it\u2019s a way of tapping into a potential pool of theatergoers.\u00a0 It is not only a way to educate and entertain, but also to foster a love of live performance.<\/p>\n

Oftentimes, the playwright doesn\u2019t receive the same kind of attention or accolade, as kids don\u2019t care who wrote the play, they care about the story. Young people are the toughest audiences. . . . If they are not engaged or if they can\u2019t relate to the story, they get restless and vocal about their confusions. Of course, in my plays, this never happens.<\/p>\n

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From the first scene of Letters to a Student Revolutionary<\/em>, when Bibi, a young American of Chinese ancestry, visits China for the first time. She’s at Tiananmen Square and about to meet Karen, a Chinese girl on a bicycle. Bibi is played by Mieko Beyer and Karen is played by Miji Svensk-Fllsk. Photo: Elizabeth Wong<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To what extent has your Chinese background affected your way of writing, your ideas, your reflections on life?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My culture is American, but my heritage and my brown skin, my almond eyes, my long black silky hair has informed everything I have written or will write. My experiences as a Chinese American, who grew up hearing the Cantonese language, but not being able to speak it fluently, who grew up bowing to the ancestors, but also attending Christian churches, whose mother survived the Japanese invasion and showed a strength of character and pioneering spirit, while I lament not going to Disneyland at least once a year, all this and more informs my writing. And because I am considered the \u201cother,\u201d I grew up feeling different, marginalized by the patriarchy and insidious institutionalized racism inherent in a fear-based culture like ours.<\/p>\n

America has its growing pains, dealing with the wounds of slavery, or not dealing with it. Not acknowledging the damage is the underlying problem; we can\u2019t heal a wound if we won\u2019t admit the injury.<\/p>\n

You are absolutely right about \u201cadmitting the injury\u201d before healing the wound. In the age of globalization, many people (at least the more optimistic ones) talk about interculturalism as a kind of \u201chealing process.\u201d Do you think there is a promising intercultural exchange between Chinese theatre and American theatre?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

American popular culture easily embraces the exoticism of faraway places, which is an idea I explore in my play China Doll<\/em>. It\u2019s harder to look in the mirror. So, I do make a distinction between what happens when Chinese Americans tell their stories within an American context, and when Chinese Americans tell their stories set in a foreign context. But, to answer your question, since Nixon helped to open the doors, there\u2019s been a steady stream of Chinese films and filmmakers, cultural exchanges, theatre and playmakers. So, the exchange is more than promising; it\u2019s a promise realized and ongoing.<\/p>\n

The door is wide open, even if the current political climate with the Republican Administration under Donald Trump doesn\u2019t reflect that. There is great interest in Hollywood now, thanks to the success of Crazy Rich Asians<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In your play, Letters to a Student Revolutionary,<\/em> you seem to \u201cflirt\u201d with a third term. Neither the \u201cChinese-ness\u201d of Karen, the girl who chooses to stay in China, nor the adopted \u201cAmericanism\u201d of Bibi seem to offer a way out. What is your idea about these hyphenated people? Is this a more general reflection on the situation of Chinese people living in the US?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My characters aren\u2019t looking for a way out; they are looking for a way to fit in. The world is being populated by hyphenated people; as we cross-pollinate DNA and as we cross-pollinate cultures. The general reflection of the play is that our governments and the constructs of government actually have sway in shaping our lives and who we are. So, how do we find and keep and maintain our humanity? One of the questions being asked, in my own sneaky way, in Letters to a Student Revolutionary<\/em>. Two women developing into citizens of their respective worlds. Will they change history? Will they make history? Become a part of history? Or be overwhelmed by history?<\/p>\n

By extension, I\u2019m asking these questions of everyone in the audience to ponder as they sit in the theatre and as they walk out of the theatre . . . \u00a0and maybe when they are at home too and settling into their lives.<\/p>\n

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A scene from the end of Letters to a Student Revolutionary<\/em>, when Karen decides to join the student protest movement and go to Tiananmen Square. State University of New York in Albany. Photo: Elizabeth Wong<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You were born in LA. Do you visit China often? Do you relate to contemporary China? What is China for you and, particularly, for your creative imagination?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

China is my ancestral homeland and where my mother and father were born, where my grandmothers and grandfathers were born, where my family came from. But I am American. When I visited China, I knew very clearly I wasn\u2019t Chinese. And the Chinese I met knew very clearly I was American, which is a notion that serves as the inciting incident in the play Letters to a Student Revolutionary<\/em>. Two girls who could be sisters, who will be friends, who might even look alike, are nothing alike, shaped by their culture and upbringing and the land into which they were born.<\/p>\n

However, even my pure Chinese ancestral lineage came into question after I took a DNA swap test as part of a Silk Road Rising theatre project theatre project that included six other playwrights \u2013 David Henry Hwang, Philip Gotanda, Shishir Kurup, Lina Patel, Velina Hasu Houston and Silk Road Rising Artistic Director Jamil Khoury.\u00a0 Based on our DNA results, which traced our matrilineal lines for deep ancestry, I discovered in the Ancestry.com database that not only did we all hail out of Africa, but that I had \u201ccousins\u201d who were Ashkenazi Jews. I was surprised as I thought my lineage was pure Chinese. I was American by citizenship and by birth, but I thought I was genetically pure Chinese. I was wrong. And it occurred to me that perhaps all of us, being copies of copies of copies of copies, may be more hyphenated genetically or spiritually than we realized. Which is why I wrote Finding your Inner Zulu<\/em> for the DNA Trail project.<\/p>\n

I was in China, in October 2018, attending Wu Zhen Festival, and there I felt that the issue of what it means to be Chinese or whether there is a distinct Chinese aesthetic in modern Chinese theatre is very much at the forefront of the discussions of local theatre people. Does this concern ever enter your own reflections on China when you write your plays?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s awesome. I cannot speak to the contemporary aesthetic, except for what I know through their films and what I know of their theatrical traditions, as represented by visiting troupes of Beijing Opera or dance troupes. I can tell you that my play Amazing Adventures of the Marvelous Monkey King<\/em> was born because my friend Lee Chen-Norman was a stage manager for a mainland performance troupe touring the United States, so I saw some wonderful excerpts from famous Chinese opera stories of which I was unaware, I saved the program and began to devise a play that would marry the ancient with the modern.<\/p>\n

My Monkey King<\/em> version blends Chinese Opera with Hip Hop and anime. Later, I happened to see a production at the Huntington Theatre, in Boston, of Mary Zimmerman\u2019s adaptation, Journey to Tthe West<\/em>, because a close friend of mine, Lisa Tejero, a prot\u00e9g\u00e9e of Zimmerman\u2019s out of Chicago, was in the play. I went to see it and was inspired to do my own version for young audiences. Denver Center Theatre for the Performing Arts had asked me to write a play for them for family and young audiences. They gave me carte blanche to write whatever I wanted. So, the convergence of all those factors seemed very serendipitous, and thus I wrote Amazing Adventures of the Marvelous Monkey King<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What does it mean to be Chinese-American? Do you feel the need to develop a distinct subject position where you can also place your art?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s a label, and it\u2019s accurate, but it\u2019s not all that I am. It can be limiting, speaking as a writer, because people assume that I can only write about Chinese-American subjects, from a Chinese-American female perspective, with only Chinese-American female protagonists. And I do feel drawn to write characters I can relate to, who look like me. I embrace this.<\/p>\n

However, the label can also be confining creatively; this limit isn\u2019t my personal demon; the demon is with others who would place constraints and delegitimize my creativity and my imagination, and the depth of my understanding of human nature, male or female, Chinese-American or other.<\/p>\n