A History of Asian American Theatre (review)

A very welcome addition to studies about Asian American theatre and politics, Esther Kim Lee's book is most significant as an archival resource that honours the pioneers, theatre companies, and breakthrough artists whose work bears the paradigmatic imprint of Asian America. In past few decades, critical configurations of "Asian America" have centred on diasporic connections and American orientalism in transnational frameworks, engaging questions of cultural nationalism, identity, citizenship, and racial formation. While mindful of these intersections, Lee's approach is based largely on a paradigm of Asian American theatre that takes as its geographic locus the mainland of the United States; it considers all who are involved in any aspect of Asian American theatre production within this location part of its history. Written in a linear chronology, Lee charts a history of this theatre from 1965 to 2005, seeking to fill the historical gaps with "basic facts of Asian American theatre" (2). She calls this introductory survey about the who, what, when, where, and why of Asian American theatre formations "long overdue" (and rightly so!) and does an admirable job with it. Readers can find a wealth of information, gathered from over seventy interviews and archival resources in and around four metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle.

The overall impulse of the book is documentary and encyclopaedic as Lee sketches out the broad connections, stories, and trajectories of Asian American theatre. This necessary contribution, like the evaluation she gives of the corpus of work produced in the 1990s, "should involve more questions than answers, more cautious observations than conclusions" (224). Lee's prose throughout the book seems to exemplify this open-ended and cautious stance, as she analogizes her role as a scholar of Asian American theatre history to that of the woodcutter in Rashomon "who ultimately narrates his version of the story to whoever is willing to listen to him"(4). There are also traces of feminist theatre scholarship in the way she ruminates on becoming "part of the story" as the interviewer and in her structuring of Asian American theatre history into first-, second-, and third-wave developments.

The book begins with a short survey of sightings of the Asian in U.S. entertainment media aligned with the orientalist logic and exclusionary laws of the state prior to 1965. From ethno-spectacles in the circus and Cantonese opera for Chinese labourers to "oriental" shows, Lee offers a succinct history while discussing a wide variety of notable figures, venues, and productions. These include the "Chinese Lady Afong Moy," the Tong Hook Tong Dramatic Company, Sessue Hayakawa, Anna May Wong, and Peter Hyun, as well as the Forbidden City and Broadway musicals and films such as The World of Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song.

Though she does not explicitly explain why 1965 might be a historic threshold, Lee implies in the next chapter that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was the bedrock of political organizing that transformed "oriental" actors into Asian American actors. This era marked the onset of first-wave Asian American theatre artists, who struggled with lack of employment as well as with issues of discrimination, stereotype casting, visibility (who is the "real" Asian?), and mainstream acceptance. The "shared treatment and frustration" of their racialized "personal experiences" – rather than a "common political and aesthetic belief" – generated a context for the establishment of such activist actors' coalitions as the East West Players (EWP) in Los Angeles and the Oriental Actors of America (O.A.A.) in New York City (25). In her discussion of O.A.A., Lee highlights the group's protest against yellow-face practices on Broadway. The casting of white actors in Asian roles that were already stereotypes was a lightning rod for activists. The musicals in question included Where I Belong (1968), in which a white actor was cast in the role of a Chinese servant, and The King and I (1968), in which eight out of nine...