Review:Asian American Plays for a New Generation

Asian American Plays for a New Generation
edited by Josephine Lee, Don Eitel and R. A. Shiomi
SBN-10: 1439905169 | ISBN-13: 978-1439905166

There's a double meaning behind this title of a new anthology of Asian American theatre. There is the literal one, given to the first major new collection of Asian American theatre pieces in several years. And there is a more metaphorical take, not readily apparent to the casual eye, where the generation refers to their provenance and gestation, as offsprings of Asian Americans not from the usual places of the West or East Coast.

The three editors all hail from Minnesota: Josephine Lee is a professor at the University of Minnesota, Don Eitel is Managing Director of Mu Performing Arts (which many people call the hub of Asian American theatre in the Midwest) and Rick Shiomi is the Artistic Director of Mu. The seven plays comprising the anthology are very much a reflection of a midwestern Asian American mindset, and not just because six of the seven plays were premieres of Mu (which is the second largest producer of new Asian American works in the country).

These plays are both a look backwards at the past of Asian American theatre and a glimpse forwards to its future. Some of this rises from the demographic background of midwestern Asian Americans. Unlike the two Coasts, the dominant ethnic groups are Hmong and Korean Americans--and the bulk of Korean Americans are adoptees by white American families. And both of these groups are very young, in comparison to Chinese and Japanese Americans; where Chinese and Japanese have built up institutions over many generations (dating back to the 19th Century and before), the Hmong and Korean Americans have been building them from scratch.

Thus, you have many plays, such as Sun Mee Chomet's Asiamnesia and May Lee Yang's Sia(b), which are very reminiscent (for better or for worse) of the early works of Asian American theatre. They revolve about issues of identity and the realization of a voice that must be articulated (in the case of Asiamnesia, it is about Asian American women, in the case of Sia(b), it is about the Hmong). While the territory has been travelled before, the urgency of the need to articulate themselves is something that well known to Asian American of any generation. And this familiarity is a necessary step a nascent artistic community goes through in its development on their way to someplace else.

This artistic journey is obviously in its earliest steps (many midwestern artists freely say where they are now is where West and East Coast Asian Americans were in the 1980s and 90s). But a hint of where they may end up is seen in other plays, such as Aurora Khoo's Happy Valley and Lauren Yee's Ching Chong Chinaman. Khoo takes on the traditional themes of otherness and examines through the lens of the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997; Yee totally upends notions of Asian American identity by having an assimilated Chinese American family take on an indentured Chinese servant. And it's not only subject matter, but treatment that suggests interesting things in the future, as Clarence Coo's lyrical treatment of a Chinese American woman's century of life in Bahala Na (Let It Go) points to new expressions of old and ever present truths.

As a new anthology of Asian American work, New Generation is an important collection of new plays. But as a marker of a new generation of Asian American artists with new viewpoints (did I say how you will ALWAYS meet an enthusiastic Minnesota contingent at national Asian American theatre gatherings), this work has significance beyond the works themselves.