AATC presents Bikini Boy

San Francisco - Asian American Theater, in association with Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA) Theater, presents a reading of Bikini Boy, by Dan Taulapapa McMullin. The reading will be held on Monday, July 12th at 7:00 p.m., at the Japanese Cultural andCommunity Center of Northern California, 1840 Sutter Street, between Webster and Buchanan in the Japantown neighborhood of San Francisco.

In Bikini Boy, a young research writer, at an American right wing think tank, pens essays justifying the bombing of a U.S. territorial island in the Pacific, not knowing that it was the homeland of his mother. She prays daily in her prayer closet in her new found home in Minnesota for the salvation of her son through the ex-homosexual movement: Home is not home. His journey takes him from cities of the plain to islands of the sea, and a banned past.

Dan Taulapapa McMullin is a Samoan writer from Los Angeles, living in American Samoa, finishing a screenplay Bikini Boy under option with Diwata Productions and in development with Sundance Lab. Bikini Boy was produced on stage at Theatre Mu and Soho Rep. He has also performed at New Zealand International Arts Festival, Pacific Festival of the Arts in Samoa, Highways in Santa Monica, La Pena in Berekeley, the Walker Art Center and on TVNZ in New Zealand. His stories and essays have been published by Bamboo Ridge, Cleis Press, Evergreen Chronicles, Wasafiri UK, Colors and Resistance in Paradise. He attended Cal Arts and was nominated for an L.A. Area Emmy Award. He will be the NEA Millenium artist-in-residence in Samoa in 2000.

Asian American Theater Company was founded in 1973 as a playwrights' workshop sponsored by the American Conservatory Theater. The company is dedicated to the production of New American plays by dramatists of Asian Pacific Islander descent. Throughout its history, AATC has served as a home for numerous Asian Pacific Islander American playwrights, directors, actors and designers, including Frank Chin, Margaret Cho, Dennis Dun, David Henry Hwang, Philip Kan Gotanda, Amy Hill, Momoko Iko, R.A. Shiomi, Wakako Yamauchi and Judi Nihei. After more than a quarter of a century of pioneering Asian American theater arts, AATC is poised to chart new directions for Asian Pacific Islander American theater arts into the new millennium.