PC: Shawn Lee

As a Chinese immigrant, I identify a great deal with Afong, the main character of THE CHINESE LADY by Lloyd Suh. The play touches on so many of the same issues I experienced as a young man. I arrived in the US when I was just turning 16 — my naïveté and my enthusiasm for coming to live in this new country that I had heard about so much in my childhood. Like Afong, I would truly find myself only after a long gestation period and then awakened to the political reality of being a gay Asian man living in America: my body, my look, and my sex are constantly subjected to the ever-present “gaze,” which also took on different “flavors” as I moved across the country from the East Coast to Middle America to the end of the Oregon Trail. I could be considered a member of the model minority in one instant, and dismissed as a bad Asian driver in the next; or I could be assumed to be quiet and submissive, or considered effeminate, not because I am gay, but because I am an Asian man. Sometimes, the “gaze” also makes me feel invisible or erased. Like when I visited a predominantly white gay bar. In another incident, I was mistaken as a Chinese food deliverer when visiting a friend in his Greenwich Village condo building.

PC: Shawn Lee

When I moved to Portland in 1994, I was surprised to discover a wealth of Chinese immigrant history in Oregon. The artwork at the lobby of Ellyn Bye Studio came from two of my previous projects on the topic of Chinese immigrant experience: A Pilgrim’s Progress (1995) and China Wall (1998). The works are updated as a special installation to complement the questions and ideas elicited by the play. A Pilgrim’s Progress represents a search for identity for Asian Americans in the West. The portraits mounted on scrolls, depict my light-hearted pilgrimage through the Oregon landscape posing as famous classical nudes of Western history of art. They chart a personal journey through the labyrinth of identity politics of contemporary art, and the bewilderment of cultural dislocation as a gay Asian man living in the American West. The costumes from China Wall pay tribute to the Chinese laborers of the Old West and surmise their dreams and yearnings. The design on one of the two period costumes is created out of tea leaves, which is essential to Chinese daily life and can be enjoyed by both emperors and laborers alike. The other costume is covered with gold leaf — in reference to the gold mining activities performed by the Chinese miner. These works are about discovering the collective identity and the transformation of the individuals through immigration experience.

PC: Shawn Lee

Artist Biography:
Horatio Hung-Yan Law is a Portland-based installation and public artist who focuses on making creative projects with communities. The core of his art stems from his Asian American identity and his experience as an immigrant. His projects explore the effects of our current culture of consumption and issues of identity, memory, history, and the meaning of community in a global culture. His ongoing Instagram project, Urban Studies, which began just before the Covid-19 shutdown, documents his daily exploration in the urban environment and encounters with beauty, mystery, and simplicity in these complicated but strangely hopeful times.

It’s still hard to process that 18 months have passed since our last production ended its run, just three days before the pandemic closed theatres all over the world.

While we have done our best to pursue our mission during this time by producing audio dramas and short films, offering online classes, and developing dozens of new scripts via Zoom, the fundamental theatrical element–gathering together and sharing space—is irreplaceable.

The process of making a play begins by assembling a community of artists who agree to create something together, but the purpose of the play can only be achieved when audiences gather to witness and respond. For most of the past 18 months, we’ve not known when it could be safe to gather. We began rehearsals and the creation of the play’s design elements not quite knowing if we’d be able to achieve our purpose, to share the performance with you, in a theatre.

“And yet, here we are,” as Barbie Wu, in character as Afong Moy, will soon say to you when the house lights fade, the stage lights glow, and the curtain rises.

Founded in 1982, Artists Rep is quickly approaching 40 years of thought-provoking, challenging, daring, complex, complicated, sometimes controversial—always emotionally resonant—theatre experiences. This amounts to more than 260 plays and thousands of performances. The pandemic canceled or postponed approximately 10 plays and nearly 300 performances that would have been added to the numbers above and Artists Rep’s storied history. Many of the plays that were planned for production in 2020 or 2021 will never be produced. It’s both a practical matter, and one of timeliness. However, one of the plays that endures is The Chinese Lady. Written before the pandemic, and set largely in the 19th century, playwright Lloyd Suh’s extraordinary text is simultaneously about our nation’s past, present, and future.

I believe The Chinese Lady is one of the most delicately crafted, incisive, and potent plays I’ve ever read. When I first encountered the script nearly three years ago, I shared it with brilliant Portland actor and ART Resident Artist Barbie Wu, to see if she felt as strongly about the play as I did. She committed to playing the title role almost immediately upon reading it, and we began planning the production. Following two postponements during the course of the pandemic, I am thrilled to finally share this vital and beautiful work–in person–with you.

Warmly,
Dámaso

As a designer, what captivated your attention about WOLF PLAY right away?  

I think it had to do with the inherent theatricality that Hansol uses in the text from the very beginning of the play. We know that we’re in a theater. We know we’re hearing a story. The next part for me then begins with understanding the theater space that we’re in at Artist’s Rep to see how the play can relate to it. When visiting the space I was struck with how long, tall and hollow it is – a big empty box with the audience at one end. In my consideration of the design I didn’t want to hide the theater, but embrace it in conversation with the text of the play. I’m struck with how this play explores the ethics of adoption and the idea of home. I wanted to create a space in which there was a strong contrast between natural and domestic.

How do you begin a design process? 

My typical design process begins with reading the play. Rather than trying to deconstruct it through long practical lists of what the play’s needs are I like to just read the play and listen to how it makes me feel. When I have a sense of my feeling about the play and have done some general research regarding the content of the play I am then am able to share in a conversation with the director.

Sometimes directors come with very specific ideas of staging, but more often directors are open and invite a designer’s response to the piece. This is a particularly fun aspect of new plays when the playwright can be more involved in the conversation. I try to listen to those simple impulses or images that come to mind when processing the play. Sometimes a play could feel like a shape to me, or a color. Over many, many passes and conversations the design will make itself shown, and I find that to be a beautiful aspect of the process. The design is there, you just have to listen to the clues and sometimes you have to wait on it.

What was the most challenging aspect of this project? 

I find the most challenging aspect of this project to be how we deal with the ‘shared domestic spaces’ scenes.  Hansol has created a really exciting experience through the dialogue in those scenes where the characters are in their own locations, but the action overlaps, therefore creating a more psychological experience in a real location.

The specificity of the action and dialogue makes it challenging to figure out how much information to put onstage, because you don’t want to get in the way of what the dialogue is doing. I’ve been lucky to work on two other premier’s of Hansol’s plays –No More Sad Things with Sideshow Theatre Company in Chicago and Cardboard Piano at the Humana Festival. Through her writing I observe that the negative space is equally as important as the positive space onstage and that they both have to inform each other. She doesn’t want us to forget that we’re in a theater, and through the play, likes to turn that concept on it’s head as we begin to observe the complexity of the characters experiences more fully, almost like poetry unfolding itself. In this scenario the scenery needs to find a balance of supporting the action.

Is there a specific way that you believe a play’s text and design are in conversation? 

I imagine a play kind of like building blocks.  The blocks can be different shapes, made from different materials, sound differently when clanged together, come from different places.  All of this to say that the style of the dialogue can really help inform the aesthetic shape and physical form of a play’s design and how it moves.  For example: If a play’s text is super realistic you are given the choice to push against that realism or mirror it through the design. It all ends up with where you’re wanting to hold the tension in the production. If there’s no tension in the text of a play then most often you have to push against it with your point of view on the piece with some abstraction to lift out some life in the play.  Ultimately I see design as a facilitator for the action of a play and there’s a million ways that could look depending on what the play is wanting to do.

How do you think the design affects the way an audience takes in a play? 

The design of a play is pretty far up there with how an audience receives a play. I like to ask the question of ‘what is the set doing?’  How does it motive the action? Does it create obstacles? Or is the tension that there are no boundaries? These are all questions that the creative team asks together to help create the most effective way of telling the story clearly.  The design is influenced by the text, but it’s also influenced by the audience and it’s important to consider the exchange when laying the groundwork for the design elements.

How do I get unstuck creatively? 

Usually by going out in nature. I live in Chicago and like to go to the Garfield Park Conservatory during the winter. During the summer I’ll spend as much time down by the lake as possible.  Nature is unlimited in it’s inspiration and education and strongly influences how I see design relating to human experiences in created spaces onstage.

Other times when I’m stuck I’ll go on a random trip to an art museum or check out the art magazine section at Barnes and Noble or go to a used bookstore.  Looking through art magazines after having done a lot of period research for a play is a great way to see how ideas from times past make their way visible in our current culture, ultimately inspiring fresh interpretations to bring to the table.

I also am trying to practice writing some every day by writing about my personal experiences. When I’m connected to my own experience I’m able to better articulate the expression of a play because my mind remains open to inspiration, and that’s the most thrilling aspect of the design process for me.

In Ibsen’s drama, the young wife Nora forges her father’s signature and takes out a secret loan to pay for the treatment her deathly ill husband requires. After covertly saving Torvald’s life, she spends several years quietly repaying the loan by scrimping on household expenses. When he finds out what she has done, Torvald is outraged, and – ignoring that she saved his life— he declares that she has disgraced him and is morally unfit to raise their children. Realizing that he never has – and never will – regard her as more than a doll/child, Nora hands back her wedding ring and walks out the door, slamming the door behind her and leaving her comfortable, bourgeois life for an uncertain, probably grim future. (You can see why it was a thrilling piece to perform at fifteen – forgery, false accusations, noble self-sacrifice, and door slamming!)

When it premiered in 1879, that slam was heard round the world. Audiences were shocked. Shocked! How dare Ibsen question the appropriateness of men lording it over the little ladies? How could Nora possibly be a decent, moral person if she wants recognition as a thinking human being, and not just as the little wife and mother? What would keep the chaos at bay if men weren’t The Deciders? Well. Lo, all these years later, we still haven’t satisfactorily answered these questions.

A Doll’s House, Part 2 is Lucas Hnath’s puckish riposte to Ibsen. Part 2 starts fifteen years after the Grand Slam with a knock at the very same door. It’s a playful, feisty philosophic sparring match, testing propositions about marriage, power, gender roles, and fairness. The delight of this play is that all four characters are bracingly honest, nimble thinkers, equally capable of lobbing trenchant bombs of wit. Into this fizzy brew of Ibsen’s provocative notions, Lucas Hnath adds a new, highly combustible ingredient: self-actualization. Nora left her family so that she might become her best self, leading her best life – a distinctly 21st Century notion. All fine and dandy, but at what cost and to whom? She returns to discover that her lofty goals are not universally shared, and when the chickens come home to roost there’s a lot more poop to contend with.

I’m delighted to be spending time again with Nora and Torvald (and now Anne Marie and Emmy, too). At fifteen, I may have missed some of Ibsen’s finer philosophical points, so it is delicious to wrestle now with Lucas Hnath’s marvelous follow up. Like Ibsen, Hnath asks big questions about what we owe to each other and to ourselves – questions that apply equally in our private and social lives. If you are as weary as I am of the infantile blurting that passes for public discourse lately, I hope you’ll find it refreshing to hear adults engaged in passionate, articulate, persuasive debate.

DR: Teenage Dick is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Why Richard III, and how did you go about modernizing it?

ML: The play was conceived as a commission from Gregg Mozgala who runs a theatre company called The Apothetae. We were longtime collaborators at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, and found that the advocacy work that Gregg does on behalf of the disabled community dovetails well with what I’m trying to do for the Asian-American community. The deeper we got into questions about representation and our personal responsibilities as artists, he hatched an idea to commission plays that would reexamine the disabled experience. So he’s the one who came to me with the idea of adapting Richard III in a high school, and calling it Teenage Dick, and I just jumped at it. The idea of it was so compelling to me. I think that the high stakes of royal ascendency smashed into the feeling of high stakes in American high schools worked well to make the situation in extremis sing from a modern context. We also were interested in looking at the archetype of Richard III and his inherent evilness and the way that Shakespeare ties that into his disability, and connecting that with how we treat people with disabilities today. So those contrasts, and the language of high school slang vs. Shakespearean dialogue sort of swirled into this new play.

DR: The way Richard in particular speaks feels both Shakespearean and like a high school student trying to use elevated language. Did you have an instinct for that going into it?

ML: I find it really funny that even if we as adults are really far away from high school, a lot of times those stigmas and traumas from that time can be tapped into almost immediately. Especially because I’m in residence off-and-on for the year at La Jolla Playhouse, which is where I grew up, I’m having these flashbacks to my high school self and the armor that you put up as an adult gets stripped away so easily. So I found it very easy to get back into the mindset of feeling like intellectually, I was an adult, but in terms of body and responsibilities, I was not. So I think that smashing together of language is coming from a personal place of having some intelligence but not the temperance to know how to use it, and playing at being more mature than I was and the consequences of that.

DR: So the Teenage Dick premiere was produced by Ma-Yi Theater at The Public in June. Tell us a little about the rehearsal process, and how that production did or did not change the show.

ML: The play had a long development process, I think I completed the first draft in 2013, and it had lots of development around the country with readings and workshops. So to get into the rehearsal process and actually know that I was working towards a production did accelerate a lot of things. I just find it really funny because in some ways, play development is a little more about how much you trust the artist and less about if the play is objectively ready for production or not. You can have a script that seems like it’s perfect on paper but as soon as you put it in front of people, all of it flies out of the window. But for me, it’s a lot about adapting the play to the specific actors. It’s had a couple of consistent cast members and several that were different, which is part of why I’m really looking forward to the Artists Rep rehearsal process to continue adapting the script to this particular set of performers and seeing what will stay consistent and what’s going to be adapted. As far as specific changes that happened in this process, physicalizing everything was so new, so seeing how those dance scenes affected things physically, and seeing what the emotional ramifications of that were, was really useful.

DR: Can you talk either in general or specifically about what a second production does to a play, and how that relates to when you’re finished with a play, or whether you’re ready to move on from it?

ML: I think you’re never really done with a play. That being said, I think at a certain point because of life circumstances shifting, you can’t really write the play anymore. I’ve read old plays of mine and I appreciate them, but I don’t think I could write them now, because I was a different person when I wrote them. It’s not always the case, but to me I feel like in an ideal situation you would get two or three cracks at a play, because audiences in different cities are different, and actors are different, so I’m enormously grateful for and try to utilize rehearsal time in second and third productions. My previous play, Tiger Style!, for instance, premiered in Atlanta and then there was a production up at La Jolla, and my wife Rehana said she thought I needed to drop this scene in Act I. I was on the plane to Boston for the next production and implemented the change, and the Boston production from a script perspective was better because of it. So there were two companies doing it in different states with different scripts, but I just think that there’s so much you don’t know when you’re writing a brand new play that these opportunities to continue playing are really precious.

DR: I want to circle back to Shakespeare for a second. Did you feel any pressure to be true to Richard III? Were there any rules you were following, or was it just a jumping off point?

ML: I definitely didn’t feel beholden to Shakespeare himself, because that guy gets a lot of productions. It’s funny because even though I studied Shakespeare somewhat in college, I don’t necessarily love Shakespeare, so it’s not like I was coming from a place of reverence. But that said, it was interesting to take apart the play structurally. We’re trained to take it apart more thematically, or to approach it from a directing perspective in terms of how to make things work. But to think about how the play works structurally was an interesting exercise. I didn’t necessarily feel like I needed to follow the beats exactly, but I wanted to take the high stakes that are achieved in the original and see if I could make it work in a high school context. I think it does in that you don’t think of high school as life-or-death, but then there’s a lot of bad shit that happens in high schools that’s hard to reconcile with. Especially in media high school is portrayed as a sheltered time that feels inconsequential and everyone ends up okay. But, actually, a lot of people die in high schools these days! I also wanted to tease out the disability and gender politics of the play. Like, what do we do about the unsubstantial female roles in the original text, and what do we do about the assumptions made about the connections between Richard III’s physicality and morality – and see how that fits in a modern context. I also noticed from a structural context that there’s a lot of direct address in Richard III that devolves as the shit hits the fan, and I wanted to replicate that structurally. You’re initially brought in as a co-conspirator, but as Richard III has less control there’s less direct address and the scenes become more impressionistic, so I wanted to mirror that.