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Introduction Josephine Lee Tam (as a Bible Belt preacher): Born? No! Crashed! Not born. Stamped! Not born! Created! Not born. No more born than the heaven and earth. No more born than nylon or acrylic. For I am a Chinaman! A miracle synthetic! Frank Chin, The Chickencoop Chinaman O ne might well ask whether “Asian American plays” are more than a collection of works that just “happen” to be written by Asian Americans . What follows by way of introduction are some reflections that argue for more than just this casual connection. My argument is that “Asian American plays” first and foremost comment on the distinctive relationship between racial and theatrical performance. Thus, drama, while often thought of as a subset of literature more generally, really deserves its own space for discussion , as it references theatrical enactment—the live encounter of performers and audiences in a particular time and place and the perception of individual and collective bodies. In May Lee-Yang’s Sia(b), a young Hmong woman, her mouth and tongue undulating over each significant syllable, gives the audience a lesson on how to say her name. Sun Mee Chomet’s Asiamnesia opens with a re-creation of the 1834 display of a real “Chinese lady” (Afong Moy) at the American Museum in New York. Lauren Yee’s Ching Chong Chinaman features a spectacular tapdancing sequence that sparks a furtive love affair in the laundry room. Through the staging of specific instances of human expression and encounter, these plays provide a focused way to examine more generally the cultural politics of racial perception and interaction. In this way, Asian American plays, such as the seven collected here, present a unique opportunity to think about how racial issues are engaged through physical contact, bodily labor, and fleshly desire, as well as through the more standard elements of plot, setting, characterization , staging, music, and action. 2 • Josephine Lee At the same time, we ought to be careful not to assume that plays simply represent Asian Americans, simply showing a re-creation of real-life experience. Rather, theater is both presentational and representational; it might “hold the mirror up to nature,” to use Hamlet’s famous expression, but it also creates experiences unique to the stage. Thus, the versions of racial behavior and interaction shown here are clearly plays, driven by theatrical devices as much as by social agendas. From the intimacy of the one-man show of Indian Cowboy to Walleye Kid’s nod to Broadway glitz to the history lessons given by Happy Valley and Bahala Na, these plays highlight both the possibilities of imaginative staging and the day-to-day workings of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have called “racial etiquette” off the stage.1 Reading plays teaches important lessons about what it means to think about race. Carefully analyzing the work of theater production, rather than just enjoying the fruits of theatrical design, rehearsal, and production, exposes a certain kind of artifice that teaches us something about the construction of social performance more generally; just looking at acting reminds us how we labor to manufacture and sustain our own various social identities. This is particularly relevant in the case of Asian American identity, which is notoriously unstable. To quote Tam Lum, the protagonist of Frank Chin’s play Chickencoop Chinaman , “Chinamen are made, not born.”2 Asian American theater highlights the work it takes to “make” an “Asian American”—to formulate this single racial category out of so many distinct ethnic, generational, class, gender, religious, cultural, and political attributes. But just as it exposes the fallacies of lumping so many different people together, theater presents the possibility of productive collaboration. While theater shows how people certainly do not act alike, being together in the theater does give opportunities for them to act together. Theater not only presents visions of offstage relationships and communities; it actually creates its own human bonds and interactions in both rehearsal and production. Thus, it has the potential to forge alliances, to rally individuals to collective action, or to create a more modest sense of connection. This has long been the case with Asian American theaters and plays. From the collaborative work of such Asian American theater companies as East West Players in Los Angeles, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre and Ma-Yi Theatre in New York, and Mu Performing Arts in the Twin Cities to a host of less formal collectives , such as Slant, Peeling the Banana, and Here and Now, the making...

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