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Alice Tuan.
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Alice Tuan: A Voice Roaring in the New Millennium
By Terry Hong
Special to AsianWeek
During the last year, Alice Tuan wrote five plays. “That’s what happens when you don’t get produced, you just keep writing more plays,” she laughs.
While it’s hardly true that she hasn’t been getting produced — her works have played at such prestigious venues as the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles — Tuan has done her fair share of waiting in the wings. After a decade of making waves in the theater world, Tuan is poised to become an ‘overnight sensation.’ Next Friday, her latest play, 4 Days in Red Gulch, will get its first workshop at the Taper’s New Work Festival.
A Taper commission, the play takes place on four separate days, in the Victorian-made, modern residence of a beautiful, wealthy, Great Gatsby-esque couple, Mary Ellen Yang Yu Chang Fine and Benedict Walker Fine. The four days in question are June 30, 1919, the first day of Prohibition; a day in 1924 when the last case of the bubonic plague in L.A. resulted in a quarantine; May 17, 1926, the day before Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, a controversial evangelist, disappeared [she allegedly ran off with her married lover to Carmel for a month and tried to convince her public that she was abducted]; and Oct. 19, 1929, when the stock market crashed. As for Red Gulch, the name refers to the Echo Park section of L.A. — which Tuan calls home — which was a busy hub of Communist activity in the 1920s.
“When I was called by the Taper to direct 4 Days … I leapt at the opportunity,” said Diane Paulus (creator of The Donkey Show and Swimming With Watermelons). “I’m a huge fan of Alice’s. Her writing is smart, sexy, funny and raw. Her words leap off the page. There is an immediate physical life to her characters, and the worlds she creates.”
Creating worlds has kept Tuan so prodigiously productive that already — she’s been writing plays for barely a decade — she’s able to talk about four different “eras” of her work: her Asian Pacific American era, which includes Last of the Suns, Ikebana and its sequel Iconana, and Some Asians; her Virtual Hypertext era, which blends technology with the physical stage “in order to juxtapose artifice with humanness,” and includes Coastline, mALL and F.E.T.C.H.; her Pornography era, which includes Ajax (por nobody) and Hit; and her Historical era, which includes Roaring Girle and her current 4 Days in Red Gulch.
Tuan recalls two defining childhood moments that directed her toward writing: being forced to sit through Chinese operas (“I inevitably fell asleep after the first 40 minutes”) and seeing her first Broadway show, Beatlemania (to which she reacted, “Is this all theater is? Imitation? Fake? Wow. Theater’s uninventive.”). So out of “sheer will” to see if she could do it, Tuan decided in her late 20s to create her own kind of theater — after detours in economics, teaching and import/export trading.
She got herself into the Taper’s Mentor Playwright Lab in 1992 and a year later, had her first full production — critically acclaimed, no less — of The Last of the Suns at Berkeley Rep. She continued to learn about playwrighting at Brown, got her MFA, and has been creating ceaselessly ever since. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel, with whom Tuan studied at Brown, talks about Tuan’s ability “to create wonder in the reader: to break rules, to take us on flights of fancy, to play with language and to forge theatrical spectacle.”
Tuan’s spectacles abound in the current season. Next month, Tuan heads to McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., to participate in “Key Word: Alien,” a project in which seven writers, including Tuan, will present short pieces based on their individual interpretations of the word “alien.” Tuan’s Bai Li Wong Liebling is an amusing, disturbing look at a Chinese adoptee who returns to her home village as a woman in her late 20s — but with a Tuan twist: the first four pages are what seems to be Chinese-inspired gibberish. “The Asians don’t quite get it, the Americans don’t quite get it — that’s my definition of Asian American,” Tuan says.
And there’s always more to look forward to: Tuan’s Some Asians, goes up in late February at the New WORLD Theater in Amherst, Mass. One of Tuan’s earlier works, Some Asians is a twisted three-fold look at the relationship between the West and East: exemplified by the relations of Britain and Hong Kong; the West and Marco Polo; and the West and a fictional dilapidating dynasty.
Then in April, Tuan returns again to re-work her first full production, Last of the Suns, loosely inspired by Tuan’s grandfather who was a lieutenant general in Chiang Kai Shek’s army. Suns goes up at New York’s Ma-Yi Theater Company, directed by Chay Yew (A Language of Our Own, Red). Says Yew, “Last of the Suns is an acrobatically lyrical, perversely intelligent and highly theatrical work. Alice completely reinvents and deconstructs the Asian American play with Suns: she fuses Chinese mythology, her personal family history, her wicked sense of humor and American kitchen sink drama brilliantly in this play that assaults every one of the five senses.”
Next September, Melanie Joseph, producing artistic director at The Foundry Theatre in New York, will direct Tuan’s adaptation of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s 1611 work, The Roaring Girle. The play is a story of a woman of notorious exploits, Moll Cutpurse, who keeps butting heads with the social powers-that-be.
Also in the 2003-2004 season, expect to see what Tuan refers to as her “breakthrough play,” Hit, a rollicking adventure with a highly dysfunctional family at its core. Originally commissioned by the Public Theater in New York, Hit will hopefully be hitting sooner rather than later. The Public’s associate producer, Bonnie Metzgar, enthuses about Tuan’s “incredible delight” — her sense of mischief mixed with her sheer intelligence. “I can’t wait to see what she does next.”
Ditto.
4 Days in Red Gulch will be read on Friday, Oct. 25 at 8 p.m. at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Boulevard in Culver City, California. Call 213-972-7389 for information. For tickets or go to www.taperahmanson.com.
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