A Piece of Raw Humanity

Playwright Lloyd Suh debuts Masha No Home

By Terry Hong
Special to AsianWeek

Lloyd Suh is about to receive a fabulous holiday present: the Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) — one of New York City’s most important stages, considered by many to be the top developmental theater in the country — will present a full production of his new play, Masha No Home, which goes up Saturday, Nov. 30.

The play, which is being produced in association with Second Generation (2G), one of New York’s youngest Asian Pacific American theater companies, features a fractured Korean American family mourning the loss of their beloved mother. Masha, still a student, lives with her older attorney brother, Whitman, and his FOB wife, Annabell, in a shell of a house stalled in mid-construction. The family is further compromised after Annabell shares with Masha the discovery of a large amount of money.

“This is what is called a kae,” Annabell tries to explain to Masha. “Is secret money; secret for community. People who are come to America, not have many money. Is way to share between family. Put into kae, money that they are have, so they can sharing. Take turn, get more money. Share for investment, for building of life. Now. Your mother is start this kae. She is start to helping family to finding way to making life in America; she is so good she is do this. But when she is dying, she is leaving this money behind.”

Born in Detroit, the second son of immigrant parents from Taegu, Korea, and raised on the south side of Indianapolis, Suh went straight to New York City with an English/creative writing undergrad degree in hand and landed at the Actors Studio Drama School at the New School, where he studied with lauded playwright Romulus Linney. In less than a year, he hooked himself into New York’s APA theater world, in care of Second Generation and Welly Yang, its energetic founder and artistic director. Suh acted, wrote, read, workshopped and dreamed. He got himself into the prestigious Youngblood program, EST’s resident company of young playwrights, and wrote his first full-length play, which became Masha No Home.

“It’s a precariously exciting time — essentially my professional debut,” Suh admits. “It’s so exciting, nerve-wracking and scary, but all in a really good way.”

AsianWeek: So this relationship with language — English major, creative writing, playwriting — tell us more about that.

Lloyd Suh: One part of that was, like most second generation immigrants in the States, I always had a strange relationship with language — both the language of my parents and the English I was learning in school. It’s important to note here that there aren’t a lot of Asian Americans in southern Indiana. What this means, unfortunately, is that the typical angst that every teenager inevitably feels was sort of compounded in my case. But I found a certain solace in the act of reading, and eventually, writing. My childhood fantasies included being a cowboy, an astronaut, president of the United States, a professional basketball player, or a writer. The others didn’t work out, but writing was always there. So that’s what compelled me to study English — and creative writing, specifically — at school; and it was an ideal way to channel the kind of searching I was otherwise engaged in.

AW: Please talk more about your involvement with 2G.

Suh: I first got involved with 2G as an actor. I went to an open call for a staged reading of a play called Karaoke Stories, by a good guy named Euijoon Kim, and they cast me. It had a huge cast of more than 20 roles for Asian American actors. Straight out of Indiana, dropped into the NY theater scene, and who is there to meet me but over a dozen Asian American artists doing what I want to do? You can’t beat that. Two of those actors, incidentally, are in Masha No Home — Cindy Cheung and James Saito. I met them at that first reading. So even more than anything else, the benefit is truly in feeling a part of a real community.

After that, I worked with 2G a couple more times as an actor, and as a writer on a couple of developmental readings as well. It’s really wonderful for me to have this production be put up with 2G and EST as co-producers because the two of them really have been the most important organizations in my professional life.

AW: How does your Korean background inform your work, both on and for the stage?

Suh: I think ideally, it’s completely unconscious. Because it informs my life in a holistic way, it’s not something I think about in those terms. So in that sense, I would say it informs my work completely and immeasurably, because it informs everything.

AW: How did Masha come about?

Suh: Through a series of free-writes on a character named Masha — sort of her adventures. I rarely start that way. But the bulk of what’s in the play came well after those initial free-writes, and the true seed came about when I became interested in writing about the way people, in the aftermath of tragedy, will search for and try to build a home and family, and how different notions of what that looks like can conflict and be reconciled.

AW: What do you hope audiences will get out of Masha? Do you think APA audiences will react differently from non-APA audiences?

Suh: I hope they’ll look at it optimistically. I think it’s a hopeful play, and I try very hard to be a hopeful guy, so I’d be thrilled if audiences walked away with those sorts of feelings. I’m a bit wary of how I respond to this question, because the truth is that I have very grand ambitions in terms of showing an audience a piece of raw humanity, and that can sound very haughty and ridiculous when it’s discussed flippantly. But I do hope they’ll find some of that when they see it. As far as how different audiences will react, I honestly don’t know, and feel weird about trying to anticipate. It’s certainly an Asian American story, so I very much hope it has a specific appeal to Asian American audiences. But at the same time, I think audiences are sophisticated enough to identify parallels that can cross cultural differences. So the best way to answer is, I guess, to say that I think and hope everyone can get something out of it — especially Asian Americans.

AW: What’s it like to be young, Asian American and working in NYC?

Suh: The answer’s in the question; that just sounds unspeakably cool.

Masha No Home runs Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Nov. 30 – Dec. 22 (except opening night Monday, December 2 at 7 p.m.) at Ensemble Studio Theatre, 549 W. 52nd Street, New York City. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at Smarttix, 212-206-1515 or www.smarttix.com.