AsianWeek

When he was just a child, a wide-eyed Isaac Ho informed his family of his intentions to become an actor. He remembers a conversation with his aunt, who was an actress at the time. She said, "Well, Isaac, if you're going to become an actor, here's what you have to do: get plastic surgery, fix your chin, and learn kung fu."

Never easily satisfied, Ho didn't follow his aunt's advice. Instead, the 30-year-old playwright, actor, director, and producer has committed himself to the sort of personally enriching and artistically appealing dramatic theater that typically eludes mainstream approval.

"I decided I didn't want to wait for someone else to hand me ... the roles I wanted to perform," he explained. "Let me just do it. It's far better for me to go ahead and push this production ahead than to sit around and wait for Don Johnson to call me up and let me get blown away on the next episode of Nash Bridges."

The production Ho has pushed through is Along for the Ride, a new play that just opened in San Francisco. He wrote the script and also directs, produces, and acts in it. Reflecting his individuality and astute point of view, Along for the Ride explores the ins and outs of crumbling ambitions and life in a ceaseless vacuum of expectations, dreams, and realities.

"The characters in the play represent hitting that point in life where they realize that certain decisions they earlier made are now unsatisfying, so they have to adapt or change," he said. "Life doesn't lay itself out so well and so cleanly."

Over the years, Ho definitely has witnessed the curveballs of life. As a student at the School of Arts at New York University, he became cognizant of where he stood in the broad spectrum between art's sublimity and commercial entertainment's vacuousness.

But beyond that, and closer to his own interests, Ho encoun-tered the challenges between people of color and the entertain-ment industry.

Ho broke into theater with a role in acclaimed APA playwright Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die, but still faced ceaseless adversity as an Asian American. Besides whispers and murmurs about Ho as "the affirmative-action student" coming from his classmates, he didn't get cast in a whole lot of roles. "Everything I did get cast in," he said, "it was like, 'Can you play the nerd?'"

But as Ho neared graduation in 1990, an event occurred that would forever alter the complexion of minorities in American theater. During the process of planning the Broadway production of Miss Saigon, producer Cameron Mackintosh chose Englishman Jonathan Pryce to play the leading role of the Eurasian "engineer." The move caused an uproar among many in the APA community; at issue were Mackintosh's and Pryce's wholesale comments denouncing Asian acting talent. Though Miss Saigon did shed light on certain inequities in theater casting, seven years later it remains little more than a large asterisk in history.

"You can say Miss Saigon happened in 1990, then you read Steve Park's thing and you wonder, how much has the industry changed?" Ho said, referring to Park's recent "mission statement" ("What Hollywood Should Know," AsianWeek, April 18, 1997) outlining the state of Asian Pacific Americans in mainstream entertainment.

Ho believes that the relative success of a prominent APA actors like Steve Park is indicative of the show-business industry. As one of the few APA actors to gain roles in Hollywood productions, Park still has not had the opportunity for "breakthrough" mainstream roles that many of his white peers are given.

It is a combination of this inequity and an appreciation for the events of the past which inspires Ho to vigilantly pursue the rich traditions of the canon of Asian American literature--plays by writers such as Gotanda, Wakako Yamauchi, Frank Chin, and David Henry Hwang.

In rehearsal: Ho directs the actors on the set of Along for the Ride.

"[Along for the Ride] is a result of seeing what they've done and being inspired by it, and wanting to continue that and push as hard as I can so that their plays won't be forgotten."

After receiving an AT&T/Asian American Arts Foundation Theater Grant in April and launching Icicle Productions, his own production company, Ho finally was in the position to say what he felt like saying.

But the process of bringing Along for the Ride to the stage has been a learning experience as well. "[The cast] is helping me fulfill something that has only been in my imagination. ... On the one hand, they're learning from what they see on the script, but I'm learning from what they're giving back."

Departing from the recognizably Asian American themes of internment and discrimination, Along for the Ride touches upon the dissolving formulas for success and how a young group of APAs cope in today's society. He reflected, "We all grew up with the idea that if you follow these steps ... go to high school, go to college, get a good job, settle down, and get married ... and you'll be happy. That is your key to success."

This disparity between depth of aspiration and degree of satisfaction was a confusing moment in Ho's life.

"When I left college, there were all these dreams and things I wanted to do. ... We sort of came out of college on fire and charged on out. And then, as you grow older, you realized, I'm doing this job ... and it's kinda like 'What's in it for me?'"Even in his beloved profession of the theater, Ho faced challenges in finding something that enriched his soul.

Ho's experiences dealing with this momentary displacement were the main impetus for the situations presented in Along for the Ride. Though not a biographical tale, the dilemmas, crises, and epiphanies reflect the growing weariness of Ho as a member of the younger generation coping with the flux of responsibility. Fortunately for Ho, the production has been a therapeutic experience, helping nurse the wounds that confusion and struggle once wrought.

And he hopes to continue the lineage of Asian American theater talent--albeit speaking to a slightly different audience. "I feel that because of where I am in life, I have something different to offer than they [veteran APA playwrights] have. It's something I've taken to heart and tried to run with further. If in a year [the play] is dated, so be it.

"I wanted to write something that meant something to me as a writer, to express right now, immediately, here, as a writer in San Francisco, 1997--for someone like me."

Along for the Ride by Isaac Ho runs through Aug. 19 at Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy St., San Francisco. Tickets are $10. Call 415-773-9991 for more information.

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Acting Like an Auteur