Asian American Theatre Research Articles

A negative Asian American theater: Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men and the aesthetics of “Asianness” on the stage of the new millennium

A negative Asian American theater: Young Jean Lee’s <i>Straight White Men</i> and the aesthetics of “Asianness” on the stage of the new millennium

“Moving Through and Beyond ”: Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies

Abstract: For decades, Theatre Journal has deeply engaged with different aspects of Asian American theatre and performance. This essay surveys a range of Theatre Journal articles published from the 1990s in order to map out this distinctive area of theatre and performance studies. Key articles by James Moy, Karen Shimakawa, and Daphne Lei grapple with the legacy of racial stereotypes and the aesthetics and reception of contemporary Asian American performance. Essays by Angela Pao, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Sean Metzger, and Ju Yon Kim emphasize the racialized bodies of actors and the history of yellowface and brownface acting, while Christopher Eng, Christine Mok, Megan Shea, and Dan Bacalzo emphasize the intersectional and transnational dimensions of Asian American expression. These and other scholars of Asian American theatre and performance continue to engage with new aspects of immigrant and refugee performance as well as gender and sexuality in Asian American theatre. At a time of changing demographics and cultural visibility, this essay helps us see how scholars have addressed the enormous diversity of Asian American experiences and perspectives as well as common preoccupations about visibility and representation, the persistence of orientalist typecasting, and the dynamic and complicated nature of Asian American identity.

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in <i>The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories</i>

Boring! The Performative Invisibility and Non-theatricality of Asian Americans in Higher Education

Boring! The Performative Invisibility and Non-theatricality of Asian Americans in Higher Education Daphne P. Lei (bio) Art objects occasionally perform an act of negation, some classic examples being Ce n’est pas une pipe (1929) by René Magritte and Le Vide (1958) by Yves Klein. The negation or lack of the object challenges the fundamental meaning of the subject’s gaze and complicates the relationship between the subject and object. Why does an object need to be negated, hidden, or erased in order to say something? What does the performative MIA (missing in action) tell us about the social and performance milieu? If the utterance of the missing object is not heard or cared for—that is, no one even notices its absence—does the object ever exist? On the eve of the pandemic lockdown, two site-specific installation performances at the University of California, Irvine—Looking for an Asian American Play (February 11–12, 2020) and Viral Compassion (March 5, 2020)—sought to examine the performative (in)visibility—and to challenge the perception of (non)theatricality—of Asian Americans on university campuses. While in the United States in early 2020 COVID-19 was seen as an Asian virus “over there,” I became aware of the renewed scapegoating rhetoric and increasing violence against Asians and saw the urgency of creating these installation performances as a form of activism. “Theatre” on a college campus is an institution with specific spatial, temporal, ideological, and bureaucratic restrictions, [End Page E-59] functioning as a generally unwelcoming space for BIPOC artists as a result of Euro-American theatrical conventions. The general lack of AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) representation in university theatre curricula and performance seasons not only is detrimental to the growth of Asian American theatre, but also affects the general ecology of theatre. My purpose in producing these installation performances in public space therefore was to confront the general public with Asian American existence/absence by temporally occupying a common space. Performativity and theatricality are interrelated in these two projects. In her Installation Art: Between Image and Stage, Anne Ring Petersen extensively discusses performativity and theatricality in installation performance. Performativity, she suggests, can be better understood by the German word hervorbringend, which Juliane Rebentisch used as a synonym for “performative.” Hervorbringen refers to the attempt to “bring out” (the intention of the artist) as well as “bring forth” (the viewer’s subjective interpretation).1 Claire Bishop describes the key characteristic of installation art as the experience of singular totality, which requires the viewers’ physical presence as well as their sensorial and embodied experience of both the space and the ensemble elements of the art.2 The performativity of an installation performance therefore depends on the viewers’ experience and interpretation. Theatricality, within the context of installation, can refer to the conscious staging, design, or choreography of the “scene,” or even “pathos-filled” artworks.3 Theatrical in design and content, the two works I discuss negotiate AAPI (non)theatricality through a dialectic and a performative process of engaging spectators. Looking for an Asian American Play took place in multiple locations on the UC Irvine campus, between the Langson Library and the Gateway Study Center, as well as inside the library. Langson Library is a large, five-story research library; the Study Center is a building of similar size comprising study rooms and other institutional spaces. Outside of these two big buildings are benches, tables and chairs, wide steps, and large concrete railings that can all be used as staging areas. The passers-by did not seem to notice that a performance was about to take place. The role of Professor (played by me) began by speaking to some students (actors and pedestrians): “Hello! Everyone! Attention, please. Today we are going to talk about Asian American plays . . .” Students (actors) interrupted her with various responses and questions: “Do Asians write plays?” “All the Asian people I know are doctors or engineers.” “Do you mean . . . like Bruce Lee or Peking Opera?” “Don’t you need to speak English?” (Together) “Asian American theatre does not exist!” A question was proposed by the crowd: “Where can we find Asian American plays?” Professor responded by setting up a...

“Not the time for fighting but for taking care of each other”: Portrayals of the Second World War in Two Asian-American Plays

Most of humanity’s recorded history has been indelibly marked by armed conflicts in various places around the world, yet the scale and effect of the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century were unprecedented. Both wars remapped the geography, politics, economies, and consciousness of prior realities, and echoed deafeningly throughout the modern works of literature of diverse nations. Anglophone literature overtly portrays wartime atrocities and human ordeals, and concurrently raises awareness of, and agitates against, the savagery of warfare. It does so through its poignant Trench Poetry, the anti-war novels of the Lost Generation, dramas of the Holocaust, and theater of genocide, among others. Another, relatively recent, a subgenre of Anglophone drama also addresses the subject of armed conflicts and their consequences, although its critics and reviewers mostly focus on identity politics, minority and ethnic studies, and the mix of ideas and images that are features of Asian-American theater. Within it researchers can find arresting examples of how an English-speaking theater represents conflict-induced displacement and migration and other repercussions of the Second World War, while dealing with one of the most discomfiting events in recent US history. This paper examines Wakako Yamauchi’s representation of the state-controlled relocation of Asian-American citizens and their consequent experiences, in her play 12-1-A; and Velina Hasu Houston’s portrayal of the Second World War’s ideological and socio-economic repercussions in the Japanese community, in Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken).

Revisiting theatre of the minoritarian in neoliberalism: The Embodied Memories in Denise Uyehara’s and Dan Kwong’s Auto-performances

In a neoliberal multicultural landscape, minoritarian artists tend to, deploying various forms of self-media or virtual platforms, create their artistic spaces for their identitarian performances. While self-media has been more and more entrepreneurially dominant, the aura of theatrical performance of the self seems to be now obsolete. Moreover, in view of neoliberalism as an increasing hegemony that has insidiously marginalized theaters of minoritarian performances (such as the New WORLD theater) in the past decade in the U.S., “minoritarian subjects” (to borrow José Esteban Muñoz’s term) are experiencing a predicament in which they are becoming more and more visually contingent owing to the neoliberal representational violence. With an urge of reviving such distant aura, this paper revisits the solo performances of Denise Uyehara and Dan Kwong staged in the Highway Performance Space, a generative site of what Meiling Cheng calls the “heterolocus”. By exploring auto-performance as a minoritarian genre, the paper examines what Diana Taylor calls the “embodied memories” in the works of Uyehara and Kwong, and further argues that these performances should not be simply understood as an individual aesthetic and political expression, but also be rendered as a powerful epistemological repertoire to perform cultural politics for the communal Asian American theater.

White Pearl by Anchuli Felicia King

Reviewed by: White Pearl by Anchuli Felicia King Jenna Gerdsen WHITE PEARL. By Anchuli Felicia King. Directed by Desdemona Chiang. Studio Theatre, Milton Theatre, Washington, D.C. December 13, 2019. In the final moments of White Pearl, a smartphone and fried chicken flew across Studio Theatre’s stage. Desdemona Chiang’s staging of Felicia Anchuli King’s play literally left Washington audiences with the gross impact of globalization. The production explored the violent and unchecked reach of globalization through the perspective of diasporic Asian women. Chiang and King demonstrated Asian women’s influence on the global economy, provided a nuanced dramatization of diasporic Asian women, and highlighted Asian American theatre’s ongoing global turn. The play follows six Asian and Asian American female employees of Clearday, a Singaporean cosmetic company, as they furiously address a leaked skin whitening cream advertisement that uses blackface in a poor attempt at humor. This public relations nightmare becomes intertwined with their own interpersonal conflicts and cultural values. An online debate ensues about the ad’s level of offensiveness, which creates chaos among the women and illuminates the internalized misogyny, intra-racism, and anti-blackness found across Asian communities. King’s satirical commentary on global capitalism and the beauty industry (which she based on a racist 2016 ad for a skin whitening cream from a Thai cosmetic company) fills an important gap in Asian American theatre and is a much-needed contribution to Western theatre. Although King is not Asian American, her collaboration with an Asian American director invites critical discussions of Asian American theatre and its global trajectory. In 1993, Asian American director Roberta Uno stated that Asian American theatre has changed from a fine, nearly invisible thread to a sturdy one, stretching across the Pacific and acting as a dynamic cultural continuum. Asian American theatre scholars such as Josephine Lee and Daphne Lei have challenged the geocultural boundaries of the genre. Lee has analyzed Asian playwrights of Hawaii, many of whom do not identify as Asian American, while Lei has examined the work of Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang in a transnational context. Scholars have questioned the productivity of exclusively using cultural and national boundaries to define Asian American theatre because it relegates it to an ethnic or minority theatre within American multiculturalism. The occasion of Studio Theatre’s White Pearl allows for a reevaluation of Asian American theatre’s development within the context of globalization, where there is more opportunity for actors and flexibility around representing Asian-identifying people. White Pearl extends the cultural continuum first established by Asian playwrights of Hawaii and the US mainland. Not only does King undercut assumptions of Asian homogeneity, but she also shows Asian and Asian American women as intermediaries of a Black/White paradigm. The collaboration between the Chinese American Chiang and Thai Australian King deepened this continuum by magnifying how Asian women exist in a troubling, liminal state between perpetrator and victim of racism and sexism. Click for larger view View full resolution Jody Doo (Sunny Lee), Diana Huey (Built Suttikul), Shanta Parasuraman (Priya Singh), and Resa Mishina (Ruki Minami) (l-r) in White Pearl. (Photo: Teresa Wood.) In this production, “Clearday” was projected onto a gray wall upstage and framed by a plexiglass double door. The projection signified the company’s pledge to “make skin clear and bright,” and the wall emphasized the women’s racial in-betweenness, positioning them in a moral gray area. This door acted as an insightful signpost, informing the audience that this pledge was present with every step they take. The set displayed the performers’ reflections and shadows, embedding them in the [End Page 347] building like phantoms. The office became their haunt, and a haunting reminder that Asian women have unconsciously become subject to ideology and are complicit in upholding whiteness as the ideal standard of beauty. Under Chiang’s direction, White Pearl highlighted the problematic inbetweeness of Asian women. Previously, Asian American plays like Julio Cho’s BFE and Diana Son’s R.A.W. have critiqued the racism underlying Western standards of beauty and cast Asian women as victims, but King shows Asian women as perpetrators and complex figures in a warped industry. Indian...

The Inception of Asian American Theater and Asian American War Plays

Asian American theater had a political goal at its beginning. It intended to overcome racial discrimination in theater by providing non-stereotypical roles for Asian American theater artists, and such a purpose was realized with the establishment of Asian American theater companies that encouraged Asian Americans to write plays about Asian American issues. The political features gradually waned over time, but Asian American playwrights’ approach to three Asian wars in the 20th century, which the U.S. was deeply involved in, has still been political; they dealt with issues of Japanese American incarceration during World War II, ideological conflicts and atrocities in the Korean War, and Orientalism and controversies over Vietnam Veterans Memorial during and after the Vietnam War. The plays shed light on often-overlooked history of racial oppression during the wars that should be remembered and criticize the ways in which Asian or Asian American stereotypes can institutionalize racial discrimination against Asian Americans.

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

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.

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

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.

M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang

Reviewed by: M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang Esther Kim Lee M. BUTTERFLY. By David Henry Hwang. Directed by Julie Taymor. Cort Theatre, New York City. November 4, 2017. David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly is one of the most famous plays of the theatre canon. It has been included in anthologies, syllabi, and discussions of race, Orientalism, sexuality, gender, and performance. Its New York premiere in March 1988 was an instant hit and ran for 777 performances, a record number at the time. Hwang received the Tony Award for Best Play in 1988 and went on to become the most visible Asian American playwright internationally. When it was announced that the play would be revived on Broadway in fall 2017 and be directed by Julie Taymor, there was much anticipation over how Hwang and Taymor would reinterpret the play for twenty-first-century audiences. In 1988, the play generated much controversy over how a man can be deceived into falling in love with another man who pretends to be a woman. How could he not know? Many audience members, in shock, would ask the question while leaving the theatre. In 2017, such a question was not as shocking as it was in 1988, partly because many advancements have been made in understanding how sexual identity is fluid and performative. The scandalousness of the original production had worn off after almost thirty years, and it was no longer surprising to see the scenes in the play that made the 1988 audience gasp and shudder. Hwang may have felt that he needed to update the play and make it more relevant to the 2017 audience, or perhaps he wanted to tell a different story in the revival. He rewrote parts of the play and changed the relationship between the two main characters. The original play was based on a New York Times article about a French diplomat who had an affair with a Chinese opera singer for twenty years. He claimed that he thought the singer, who turned out to be a spy, was a woman. For the original play, Hwang deliberately did not do further research of the actual people and chose to imagine how their relationship could have been possible. For the revival, he reversed his position and included what he discovered about the real French diplomat and the Chinese opera singer. I took my undergraduate class on Asian American theatre at the University of Maryland on a field trip to New York City to see the play, and all of my twenty-five students and I sat eagerly to find out how it had been changed. Before seeing the play I stayed away from reviews, because I did not want to know in advance about the changes that Hwang made. The surprise came early, when the gender pronoun used for the Chinese opera singer was monsieur, not mademoiselle. My students and I looked at one another in confusion, and by the intermission we agreed that the layering of gender identity was made even more complex in the rewrites. The opera singer was a woman onstage though a man offstage, but s/he was actually a woman raised as a man. Click for larger view View full resolution Jin Ha and Company in M. Butterfly. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.) In directing the revival, Taymor compared the play to a Chinese puzzle and wanted to highlight the layers of identity, deception, and relationships. The set design by Paul Steinberg utilized large panels to represent the puzzle-like element of the play. The panels were manually moved by stagehands and folded up and down to reveal different images. Taymor stated in interviews that she did not want to use any of the cutting-edge technology that she, as the director of The Lion King and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, is most known for. Perhaps because of [End Page 560] her reputation, the manual movements of the panels and the bareness of the set were unexpected. Hwang’s play is about the theatricality of identity, and metatheatricality is key to its staging. The fourth wall is frequently broken, and at one moment Gallimard, the protagonist (played by British actor Clive Owen...

아시아계 미국 디아스포라 연극에 나타난 ‘아시아성’, 문화상호주의적으로 읽기

아시아계 미국 디아스포라 연극에 나타난 ‘아시아성’, 문화상호주의적으로 읽기

Rhythm of the Trans-Pacific Waves in Asian American Theatre

During the 1960s a handful of Asian American artists struggled to establish a foundation for Asian American theatre and attempted to make themselves...

Ntervention of the Invisible Drama: Discursive Strategy of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.

The 1980s might be the breakthrough decade for Asian American theatre due to the phenomenal success of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly on Broadway. Hwang was one of the new voices in Asian American playwriting in the 1980s. Dramaturgically, Hwang uses the elements of performance convention of Oriental theatre such as the play within-the play, a bare stage, the accumulation of episodic scenes and transvestism. Hwang’s theatrical style of M. Butterfly encourages the stage to struggle and play with the so-called hierarchial dichotomy of West/East, man/woman, inside/outside, and theatre/world, etc. Hwang’s theatrical goal is two-fold: one is to provoke the actors to experience the characters on stage objectively by virtue of transvestism, the other is to secure the ideal audience with imagination who can see both the dramatic world inside of theatre and the real world in society outside of theatre. Hwang’s M. Butterfly intervenes the Western theatre through the mediation of the Asian dramatic convention and the Western romance.

Fifth National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival

Fifth National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival

East West Players and Asian American Theatre: A Retrospective

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.

East West Players and After: Acting and Activism

“Where are all the Asian actors in mainstream New York theatre?” What began as a plaintive status update on Facebook launched a full-scale investigation by Asian American actors that culminated in a report titled “Ethnic Representation on New York City Stages” and the formation in the fall of 2011 of an advocacy group, the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC). AAPAC's findings were disheartening. In the preceding five years, Asian Americans had received only 3 percent of all available roles in not-for-profit theatre and only 1.5 percent of all available roles on Broadway. The percentage of roles filled by African American and Latino actors, in contrast, had increased since 2009. According to the report, “Asian Americans were the only minority group to see their numbers go down from levels set five years ago.” The data AAPAC compiled were both surprising in their concreteness and unsurprising in their bleakness. The Facebook query sparked an active digital conversation that touched a collective sense of discord just below the surface for many Asian American theatre artists, especially actors. Ralph Peña, artistic director of Ma-Yi Theatre Company, invited key Facebook commenters to hold a more formal conversation about access, embodiment, and Asian American representation. This group, many of whom were artists in midcareer, trained at top conservatories, and fostered in New York City's vibrant Asian American theatre community, became the Steering Committee of AAPAC. The members of the Steering Committee channeled their frustration and anger into archive fever by researching and documenting ethnic representation on Broadway and in sixteen of the largest not-for-profit theatres in New York City over a five-year period. In front of an audience of three hundred, members of AAPAC presented their findings at a roundtable at Fordham University on 13 February 2012 that included prominent artistic directors, agents, directors, casting directors, and producers and was moderated by David Henry Hwang. With the report in hand, AAPAC members roused the New York theatre community with a series of town hall–style meetings and urged theatrical production gatekeepers to do, if not better, then, something.

An Interview with David Henry Hwang

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.

Breaking Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes on the American Stage: National Asian American Theatre Company’s 25th Anniversary

Entretien avec Mia Katigbak, co-fondatrice et directrice artistique de NAATCO (National Asian American Theatre Company). L’entretien, realise en aout 2015, consistaient en un echange de courriels

The Theatre of David Henry Hwang by Esther Kim Lee

Esther Kim Lee. Theatre of David Henry Hwang. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Pp. x + 207. $29.95 paper, $94.00 cloth. Like the other volumes in the Critical Companions Series, this study is pitched to appeal to a broad range of readers, providing various kinds of contexts--biographical, historical, and theoretical--for understanding the work of an important figure in theatre. Lee describes Hwang's development as a playwright, summarizing and interpreting his plays from the first, written when the author was a senior at Stanford in 1979, right through to his latest, scheduled for publication in May 2017. volume also contains essays by Josephine Lee, Dan Bacalzo, and Daphne Lei, each providing a more detailed analysis of an individual work. It closes with an extremely useful chronology of Hwang's life and writings, including lesser known projects to which he contributed, such as libretti for stage and film musicals. Readers who chiefly know Hwang as the author of M. Butterfly will be surprised by the size and scope of his contribution to American theatre and the global reach of his latest work. Lee's study is scrupulously researched: she interviewed Hwang personally in 2015 and is fully informed about statements he has made about his plays in prefaces and conversations with journalists. sequencing of the chapters, described in the introduction, reflects phases in his development, drawn in part from his commentary, in part from her own sharp analysis. These are phases in his struggle to honor his ethnic heritage while avoiding marginalization as an Asian-American writer. Chapter 1, The Trilogy of Chinese America: Magic Realism and the Californian Cool, presents three early plays--FOB, Dance and the Railroad, and Family Devotions--that she believes carried him from his first, assimilationist phase, with its exploration of Asian self-loathing, into his second, isolationist-nationalist phase, in which he began a sometimes uneasy relationship with the Asian-American theatre movement of the late 1970s (12,22). Here Lee also points out the seeds of themes and techniques that would come to fruition in his later, better-known works: creative use of autobiography and family history; blending of realism and the fantastic; meta-theatrical breaking of the fourth wall; the use of masks and faces as metaphors for the performance of race and gender; music and dance as structural elements; parallel, contrasting opening and closing scenes; and ambiguous endings that invite multiple interpretations. This isolationist phase continues in chapter 2, Beyond Chinese America: Love, Death and Resurrection, in which Lee discusses four lesser known plays written between 1981 and 1988. refers to Hwang's desire, while staying within the broad subject of Asian-American identity formation, to move beyond semi-autobiographical explorations of the Chinese immigrant experience. As Japanese popular was starting to catch on in the West, he chose to draw upon traditional Japanese story and theatre for two one-acts: Sound of a Voice and House of Sleeping Beauties. end of this period saw Hwang attempting to establish himself as not only an Asian-American playwright but also as a disciple of Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, and Pirandello. Rich Relations, a non-ethnic, American family drama, failed with audiences and critics--largely, by Lee's account, due to their inability to recognize and appreciate the author's satiric intentions. Not surprisingly, given this series' focus on important theatrical figures, these first two chapters are mainly a prelude to the discussion of the work that chiefly earned Hwang's inclusion: M. Butterfly, the subject of Lee's third chapter. This play belongs to the phase Lee calls multicultural, in part because this time Hwang succeeded in writing from a non-Asian protagonist's point of view (50). Lee quite handily summarizes the play, situates it among the culture wars of the 1980s, and notes several critical approaches to its analysis in the years that followed its 1988 premiere. …