Asian American Theatre and Drama

Male against female, tradition against the new age, and East against West are the main notions questioned by David Hwang’s rather unique approach in M. Butterfly. M may either refer to Madame (as the term usually associated with the opera, mostly by those who have already read the play), or to the traditional abbreviation for Monsieur. Regardless of the interpretation, Hwang has managed to set the tone of the play just based on the title: traditional gender notions are challenged - basic categorization interpretation, the ideal of ‘other’ beauty, gender identity, sexual orientation, traditional notions of gender and one’s sense of self. Hwang based this play on Puccini’s play Madame Butterfly and wrote it during the time of sexual revolution in the U.S. where he had lived at the time; this is reflected in a series of gender transformations within the very play, leaving the reader and Rene confused whether Song is a man or a woman.

This paper participates in the contemporary discussion about literary texts that speculate on the future(s) of humanity with a view to commenting on the fears, anxieties, and drawbacks of the present. It looks at Karen Tei Yamashita's "Anime Wong" through the theoretical lenses of scholars debating the identity configuration model of a posthuman world in connection with the ethnoracial discourse. "Anime Wong" imagines a posthuman future inhabited by an exclusively Asian population of cyborgs and aliens. The mythological foundation of this Asian posthuman civilization draws on the cultural pillars of Western culture. Subtitled "A CyberAsian Odyssey," Yamashita's "Anime Wong" borrows the Homeric Odyssean pattern, filters it through the 'mythologies' of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, and mixes it with political comments and references to Western philosophy and popular culture. It then impregnates the result with distinctively Asian elements and uses the mixture as a figuration of an ethnocentric posthuman future, thus commenting both on the cultural implications of cybernetic technologies and on the ethnic clichés and stereotyping predispositions at work within contemporary culture. The aim of this paper is to look into how "Anime Wong" filters the Asian ethos through the cultural products of Western imagination to provide a critical ground for engaging the techno-orientalist discourse.

Macbeth has a long and varied history of Asian-style enactments in the United States. Among the best known performances are Akira Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood (1957), Yukio Ninagawa’s kabuki-style Macbeth (1985), Wu Hsing-kuo’s Peking opera The Kingdom of Desire (1987), Tadashi Suzuki’s all-male The Chronicle of Macbeth (1988; English and Japanese versions), Shozo Sato’s Kabuki Macbeth (1997), Sato and Karen Sunde’s Kabuki Lady Macbeth (2005), and Charles Fee’s kabuki-inflected Macbeth (2008) (these last three in English), all screened or staged multiple times in North America. These works either map the English imaginary of Scottish incivility onto what is perceived to be equivalent Asian contexts (as Kurosawa’s film does), or create a new performance idiom from amalgamated elements from various traditional Asian theatre styles (as Sato’s production does).

In the art and entertainment industry, race is both visible and invisible in various forms of embodiment. Depending on the context, doing Shakespeare while a minority can invite different responses. It is one thing for Indian actors to perform Shakespeare in India, where the actor is not part of a minority. It is quite another to do Shakespeare in a country where one is perceived to be “non-mainstream” or different. It is important to tell the story of the making and reception of “locally grown” works that are somehow perceived as “global” or exotic because of the artists’ identities. Meaningful diversity is the key here. Diversity in the arts is not about checking boxes on some survey form, but rather about a wider range of rich narratives about the human experience. Enriched by multiracial and multiethnic casting and multilingual performance strategies, these performances are far from simple tales of black versus white, or the subaltern versus the authority (e.g. Shakespeare providing the universal theme, while black actors bring the music and dance; Shakespeare has got privileged poetry; black dancers have got “exotic” rhythm). Being black does not necessarily mean being tribal or believing in witchcraft. Diasporic Shakespeare is all about enriching our experiences with drama.

"I'm no messiah," says Frank Chin in this revealing essay/interview. "I don't present myself as a role model.  I don't recommend to anybody that they live like me.  Most of the time I wish I weren't living like me!  I want readers, not a cult.  I don't like the idea of writers as stars, writers as celebrities.  I think that is partly why I work so hard at being obnoxious.  I cultivate my rotten personality to distinguish it from the writing.  I am difficult to like as a person.  I do not encourage friendships, and this gives me the anonymity, the freedom of the writer to move about as I please. I have to be able to ride into town and ride out without leaving a mark; people will only later discover I've stolen all the silverware."

The center of this essay will be a critical reading of the
play Satellites (2006) by Diana Son where I will explore the
ways in which the playwright responds to and rearticulates
issues that are crucial to Asian American drama, and contemporary
Us racial debate more broadly. On the surface, the play
presents a typical contemporary New York social landscape in
its diversity, inclusivity, as well as racial conflict. However, I
would argue that the note of optimism and possibility on
which the play closes, and the questions it poses to essentialist
understanding of ethnic identity and ethnic theater, need to be
contextualized as specific to a post-racial “era” (at the eve of
the Obama presidency). 2006 was a time that today seems far
removed from the contemporary explosion of racial hatred
and the ensuing resurgence of identity politics and dichotomous
understanding of racial conflict.

Steampunk performance interrogates dominant narratives of history through theatrical, science fictional stories that focus on the various socio-political interplays between retro-futurist technology and society. For the marginalised, such performances can renegotiate paradigms of historical Western imperialism, Eurocentric colonialism, and whiteness by centring the experiences of the oppressed. This article examines the artistic risk and imaginative potential associated with steampunk performance by marginalised voices when confronting historical trauma. Included with this analysis is the one-person play Analog Incarnations. Originally written between 2011 and 2012 at New York University, this science-fiction pulp performance blends historical fact, alternate history, and speculative fiction to relate the origins of Ay-leen the Peacemaker, a mysterious assassin who shoots Indochinese Governor-General Paul Armand Rousseau on 10 December, 1896.

This course introduces student to the history of world theatre and corresponding dramatic literature from the eighteenth century to the present day. The student will be introduced to the ways in which the theatre played and continues to play a crucial social, political, and cultural role during this time. The course will also examine the various lenses that effect the writing of history and problematize the idea of a singular and linear historical narrative.

"I'm no messiah," says Frank Chin in this revealing essay/interview. "I don't present myself as a role model. I don't recommend to anybody that they live like me. Most of the time I wish I weren't living like me! I want readers, not a cult. I don't like the idea of writers as stars, writers as celebrities. I think that is partly why I work so hard at being obnoxious. I cultivate my rotten personality to distinguish it from the writing. I am difficult to like as a person. I do not encourage friendships, and this gives me the anonymity, the freedom of the writer to move about as I please. I have to be able to ride into town and ride out without leaving a mark; people will only later discover I've stolen all the silverware."

(This is a sample syllabus for the University of California, Irvine undergraduate class, Drama 15 Performance Now.)
Theatre and performance practices are a study of the possible. They challenge the audience to dispel myths and to imagine creative possibilities and responses to our contemporary social, cultural and political environment. This course will explore how the society we inhabit and the reality we experience can be manifested, reflected or embodied as/through performance, focusing specifically on contemporary performance in Asia. By separating Asia from the notion of "tradition," this course aims at unfolding the contemporaneity of Asian performance and how it provides an insight for theatre-making. Students will also learn question the representations and the contentious issues that are portrayed either onstage or in real life. Through the introduction to contemporary Asian and Asian American theatre and performances by some of the most influential artists, we look forward to understanding contemporary performance culture transpacifically, interculturally, and transmedially. The attention will be drawn to the intellectual, artistic, social, political and cultural practice of theatre, and further rethinking how we perceive the world as well as how the world affects our experience of it.

The day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the recently formed Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the incarceration of 770 Japanese and Japanese American "alien enemies." 1 These arrests came two months before Executive Order 9066, which infamously called for the mass incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast of the United States. 2 Among these initial 770 alien enemies was the modernist dancer and choreographer Michio Ito. In the documents establishing his detention, the Alien Enemy Hearing Board found Ito to be "an artist of artistic temperament, striking appearance, fine manners, cultured, educated and capable of any and all sorts of propaganda, espionage and sabotage.

The problem with the new Broadway musical Allegiance is not just its historical inaccuracies, although it is riddled with them. It’s the fabrication of events that were impossible within the reality of America’s concentration camps. Unexpectedly, the one reality this show gets right is its portrayal of Mike Masaoka and the wartime Japanese American Citizens League — although making him the villain of the piece diverts attention from other, more uncomfortable truths. Part II of a series.

Taking its cue from Eugene O'Neill's questioning of «faithful realism», voiced by Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, this book examines the distant legacy of the Irish American playwright in contemporary multiethnic drama in the U.S. It explores the labyrinth of formal devices through which African American, Latina/o, First Nations, and Asian American dramatists have unconsciously reinterpreted O'Neill's questioning of mimesis. In their works, hybridizations of stage realism function as aesthetic celebrations of the spiritual potentialities of cultural in-betweenness. This volume provides detailed analyses of over forty plays authored by such key artists as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, José Rivera, Cherríe Moraga, Hanay Geiogamah, Diane Glancy, David Henry Hwang, and Chay Yew, to give only a few prominent examples. All in all, Labyrinth of Hybridities invites its readers to reassess the cross-cultural patterns characterizing the history of twentieth century American drama.

By slapping a happy ending on the staged version of John Okada's NO-NO BOY being pitched for a national tour by the Pan Asian Repertory Theater of New York, the adaptation reduces the author's  epic vision to sentiment and schmaltz, so as to leave the audience with a comfortable feeling of tidy resolution, complete with callbacks to isolated lines from earlier in the novel to support an outcome never intended by Okada.

Performance traditions such as Noh theatre of Japan or Kootiyattam of India are systematically practicing by certain families or particular communities as a professional job or service of the family from generation to generation. Asian performance traditions has got a critical place in the modern movement of theatre making and theatre actor training around the globe. Some of the celebrated theatre directors used various compositions of Asian performance traditions to create contemporary theatre performances and that opened a new market of exchanges between cultures of education for actors training. Many schools, theatre directors and theatre groups are focusing on Asian performance traditions to develop the contemporary actor training and performances. In this article it will explore the different approaches of contemporary actor training related with Asian performance traditions and this will introduce various levels of perspectives on the dosages of practices, theories, analyses of the inputs and outputs in terms of dividing the topic into three main situations in the intercultural theatre actor training & theatre making such as
1. Source cultural departure : the origin, starting point, identity
2. Middle cultural meeting: new, learning, transforming, mixing, negotiations, faire games
3. Stop-Start cultural end: objective, goals, results, presentation, performance, re-working, re-start