East West Players and Asian American Theatre: A Retrospective

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-241
Author(s):  
Josephine Lee
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
East West

The following essays were inspired by talks delivered at the 2015 Association for Asian American Studies annual conference, where we commemorated the fifty years since the 1965 founding of East West Players (EWP) in Los Angeles. Currently led by artistic director Tim Dang, EWP is known as the first and longest-running Asian American theatre company. It has played a crucial part in the training of Asian American actors and the formation of other Asian American theatres across the nation and in the development of new plays and productions that articulate and challenge how “Asian America” is understood and represented. Through reflecting upon the past, present, and future of EWP, our essays contemplate the most significant questions about Asian American theatre practice: how theatre engages the multiple and even contradictory aspects of what is “Asian American,” the panethnic racial category that is consistently challenged by the diverse cultural practices, communities, and identities it purports to describe. EWP's history illustrates the multiple dimensions of how Asian American theatre can challenge the limited prescriptions, labels, and packaging so often used in talking about race both inside and outside the theatre.

scholarly journals On Teaching Kim’s Convenience: Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Studies, and the Politics of Race in Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Kim Daniher
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Canadian Theatre ◽  
Canadian Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Politics Of Race

This article offers a critical overview and rationale for why and to what ends Daniher put a comparative Asian North American method into practice in her classroom on Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University in Spring 2016. In particular, Daniher focuses on pairing Ins Choi’s play-text Kim’s Convenience (2011) alongside a viewing of the made-for-PBS broadcast of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (2001) in order to broach the topic of anti-Black racism in both Canada and the US in the Black Lives Matter moment . Although Daniher describes here a course and learning experience from within a US-American institutional setting, she directs the following emergent queries to the field of Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies in light of its recent inauguration of the new “sub-field” of Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies: How should we frame Asian Canadian theatre and performance in the classroom? For what purpose and under what curricular conditions do we teach racialized “minority” repertoires of theatre and performance in Canada? Drawing on overlapping genealogies of Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, Daniher contends that a more rigorous engagement with existing theories, methods, and critical analyses of racial power is urgently needed if Asian Canadian Theatre Studies hopes to coincide with the larger political-ethical stakes of “Asian Canadian studies projects” writ-large.

Introduction

The Race Card ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Tara Fickle
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
Mobile Game ◽  
East West

The introduction traces the book’s main argument and previews its structure. It begins with a discussion of the mobile game Pokémon GO to illustrate popular games’ key role in the construction of modern racial fictions and emphasize the need for a more syncretic methodological approach to such cultural artifacts. After delineating the book’s particular focus on Asian and Asian American topics, the introduction situates the book within the broader fields of game studies, Asian American studies, and literary studies. It introduces a master concept, ludo-Orientalism, and offers an overview of how it functions as a nation-building discourse that defines America and the “West” in relation to abstract game ideals of fairness and freedom, shaping how East-West relations are imagined and reinforcing notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference

An Interview with David Henry Hwang

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-237
Author(s):  
Harvey Young
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Kung Fu ◽  
David Henry Hwang ◽  
Current State ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Flower Drum Song ◽  
East West ◽  
Complex Characters

Since winning wide acclaim and a Tony Award for his play M. Butterfly in 1988, David Henry Hwang (Fig. 1) has remained one of the brightest luminaries in American theatre. A playwright, screenwriter, and librettist, he regularly tells stories that center on complex characters and reveal their experiences with Western imperialism, American racism, and cross-generational family differences. His works include the plays FOB, Golden Child, Yellow Face, Chinglish, and Kung Fu; the revised book for the 2002 Broadway revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Flower Drum Song; and, most recently, episodes of the television series The Affair. In this interview, Hwang reflects on the longevity of East West Players, comments on today's culture wars, and shares his perspective on the current state of Asian American theatre.

scholarly journals SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN THEATRE: (UN/RE-)PAINTING THE TOWN BROWN

2008 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudipto Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The University ◽  
Indian Students ◽  
Overland Monthly

In his second year at the University of California, Berkeley, Arthur William Ryder (1877–1938), the Ohio-born Harvard scholar of Sanskrit language and literature, collaborated with the campus English Club and Garnet Holme, an English actor, to stage Ryder's translation of the Sanskrit classic Mrichchhakatikam, by Shudraka, as The Little Clay Cart. The 1907 production was described as “presented in true Hindu style. Under the direction of Garnet Holme, who … studied with Swamis of San Francisco … [and] the assistance of many Indian students of the university.” However, in the twenty-five-plus cast, there was not a single Indian actor with a speaking part. The intended objective was grandeur, and the production achieved that with elaborate sets and costumes, two live zebras, and elephants. Seven years later, the Ryder–Holme team returned with Ryder's translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, “bear cubs, a fawn, peacocks, and an onstage lotus pool with two real waterfalls.” While the archival materials do not indicate the involvement of any Indian actors (barring one Gobind B. Lal, who enacted the Prologue), its importance is evinced by the coverage it received in the Oakland Tribune, the Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.

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