Asian American Theater - Asian-American Playwrights

Asian-American Playwrights

Before the 1960s, Asian-American plays were virtually non-existent, but various initiatives, including East West Players' playwriting contest, encouraged Asian-American writers to adapt their short stories and novels into plays and to write original plays. The first wave of Asian-American playwrights included Wakako Yamauchi, Momoko Iko, Edward Sakamoto, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, and Frank Chin. Common themes in plays by first wave writers were Asian-American history, generational conflict, cultural identity, cultural nationalism, and family history. In 1972, Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman became the first Asian-American play to be produced in New York City, and since then, Chin has become a major spokesperson for Asian-American playwriting. He founded the Asian American Theatre Workshop in San Francisco to promote original playwriting by Asian Americans. The most commercially successful Asian-American play was David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly, which became the first Asian-American play to be produced on Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1988. The success of M. Butterfly created a national interest in Asian-American plays, and regional theatre companies around the country began to produce plays by Hwang and other second wave Asian-American writers such as Philip Kan Gotanda and Velina Hasu Houston. Such interest also promoted the publication of first anthologies of Asian-American plays in the early 1990s. The mainstreaming of Asian-American plays increased with works by third wave writers such as Diana Son, Sung Rno, Han Ong, Chay Yew, Rick Shiomi, and Ralph Peña. These third wave writers felt that race and ethnicity were mere jumping off point in addressing multifaceted experiences of being an Asian American and wrote about any topic that interested them. All three waves of Asian American playwrights continue to produce works that define not only Asian-American theatre, but also American theatre and global theatre.