“We’re in for a future of provocateurs”: An Interview with David Yee on Asian Canadian Theatre

In a New York Times article from May 21, 2020, poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong lamented the “nine productions of works by playwrights of Asian descent that were cut short or canceled in New York City . . . because of Covid-19.”¹ Of course, the pandemic resulted in cancelations or postponements of productions all over the world, including two major theatre conferences and festivals that would have centered Asian Canadian and Asian American performance: one to be hosted in Toronto and the other in Hawaii, respectively, during May and August 2020. Indeed, it would have been a banner season for performances that featured minor Asias!

The following interview with David Yee, the artistic director of fu-GEN Theatre, tries to capture the energy and logic that animated this moment, now a pregnant pause, that challenges the demographics of theatrical production in the Great White North. Fu-GEN is the longest-running professional Asian Canadian theatre company in Canada, and the first-ever International Conference and Festival on Asian Canadian Theatre, GENesis, took place under its auspices in 2010. Now closing the first decade of his leadership of fu-GEN, Yee has remained active as an actor and playwright in Toronto and elsewhere across and beyond Canada. His plays have been produced on both sides of the US–Canada border; four of them––Acquiesce, paper SERIES, Lady in the Red Dress, and his Governor General Award–winning play Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave––have been published by Playwrights Canada Press. [End Page E-19]

SM:

In May 2010, fu-GEN together with the University of Guelph hosted GENesis, the first Asian Canadian Theatre Conference. The second such event was initially scheduled for May 18–24, 2020 before being postponed for a year due to coronavirus. Why do the second one now? Can you also discuss how and why fu-GEN has taken the lead in this endeavor?

DY:

In the final days of the first GENesis, people kept asking us “When’s the next one?”—some of them even suggesting the next year. I think those people had never produced a conference and festival before. The timing of the first GENesis coincided with the launch of Love and Relasianships, which was the first anthology of Asian Canadian drama ever published. It felt like a real watershed moment for the community. So ten years later there hadn’t been any real organized effort to gather again . . . but a lot had changed. Canada had just awarded its second Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama to the second Asian Canadian playwright ever. A Korean-Canadian TV show based on a play that fu-GEN had developed was going into its fourth season as the number one comedy in Canada; companies like Hong Kong Exile were gaining international prominence, and ten [years] just seemed like a nice round number to get together again and track how far we’d come in a decade, and maybe set new trajectories and new goals. (Figs. 1–4.)

Fu-GEN takes the lead because it’s why we’re here. I think what’s been critical to our success as a company has been our focus on the holistic well-being of our community of artists. So if we have to step back from the traditional production of plays in order to facilitate a community gathering where the practitioners and the researchers can get together and engage in dialogue about the work and the field, then we’ll all be stronger for it.

SM:

Although the conference and festival have been postponed, can you discuss some of the considerations in the curatorial process of producing this event? Are there synergies between the previous conference and this one that you were hoping to emphasize or changes in discourse or production that you wanted to implement?

DY:

Curatorially, we were looking for work that really spoke to the future of Asian theatre . . . theatre in general, really. There’s a lot of work that looks at the current moment really well or examines the...