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Kristina Wong for Public Office
Political comedy in a post-satire world
By Deborah Klugman
Performance artist and social justice crusader Kristina Wong has been delivering scathing satire to Los Angelenos for two decades, employing irony and wit to lampoon racism, sexism, and the do-nothingness of armchair progressives, among other targets.
Wong began honing her art as a student at UCLA. For her senior class project, she set up a fake mail-order bride website, Big Bad Chinese Mama, that catered to males looking to meet up with Asian women. Once at the site, men were rebuked and upbraided by Wong’s “Chinese Mama” and challenged by profiles of real women that belied the stereotype of the subservient female.
Over the years, Wong has made numerous appearances as “Fannie Wong,” an obstreperous beauty pageant contestant whose antics have served to satirize conventional beauty standards for Asian women. In Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (later made into a film), she sought to illuminate the pressures placed upon and subsequent mental health issues that these women wrestled with in their lives.
The Wong Street Journal, which debuted in 2015, poked fun at people who limit their cries against social injustice to messaging each other on social media. Wong, counting herself among them, wanted to do more, and undertook a 3-week stint with an NGO in Uganda, a country still suffering the aftermath of a horrific civil war in 2006. The tales she recounts in Journal underscore the cavernous divide between privileged Westerners and the Third World citizens she met there, who were barely surviving
Now streaming from the Kirk Douglas Theatre through November 29, Kristina Wong for Public Office builds around her experience as a winning candidate (and subsequent representative) for her local neighborhood council in Koreatown. Several years in the making, it comes contemporaneous with the affronts to democracy that Americans have been enduring since Trump’s taking office — outrages that have stirred many of us, artists and non-artists alike, to take action as we have not before.
Stage Raw spoke with Kristina about her newest work.
Kristina Wong for Public Office
All photos by Annie Lesser
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“We used to listen to politicians and laugh at comedians; now we laugh at politicians and listen to comedians.”
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STAGE RAW: How was Kristina Wong for Public Office birthed?
KRISTINA WONG: There’s a quote that started going around after the November 2016 election: “We used to listen to politicians and laugh at comedians; now we laugh at politicians and listen to comedians.” It hit me that the world had flipped upside down and the subversive way I used to address things as an artist weren’t working anymore. If politicians were going to take my job as a spectacle-creating performance artist, I would take theirs.
SR: How long have you been developing it?
KW: I was working on a couple of plays before the November 2016 election — not thinking that we’d be in the reality we are today. Neither of the plays went to full production and didn’t feel satisfying to me because what was the point of making an absurdist play that basically said “Look how crazy the world is now” when we already know this about the world.
I also had a reality TV pilot that didn’t go to series right when about Trump took office. A lot of what didn’t make the pilot successful was that the show I had pitched when Obama was still in office was about me as a wayward activist trying to stop political apathy. That really wasn’t the case when Trump took office. I wasn’t clear how to respond to the world as a once “wacky” artist anymore.
I woke up one morning in late 2017 after reading about another devastating executive order Trump signed and said, “I’m going to run for office”. That’s when it clicked that that was the approach I needed for this piece about this moment to work — to fully insert myself into politics.
SR: When did you and your director Diana Wyenn begin to collaborate?
KW: Diana and I were Dandy Minions in Taylor Mac’s 24-Hour History of American Music in February 2018. I had always admired her directing and how she’s able to work with performance artists, musicians and playwrights. There are so many directors who don’t do dramaturgy or just move actors around on the stage, and that’s never been useful to my process as I make a lot of my work in the rehearsal. I turned to her in the dressing room and said, “Can we talk?” And then she helped me put the show together for a June 2018 showing I had.
SR: Did the substance of the piece change/was it impacted by events?
The show premiered for a live audience in February. With the exception of a few sentences acknowledging the pandemic, the script didn’t really shift much at all. This is surprising to a lot of our audiences who believe that the writing shifted to reflect the more apocalyptic circumstances [of today].… Nope! I had written for that.
SR: Do you see this piece as an extension of your prior work?
KW: Absolutely, every piece I do is definitely a conversation with the previous work I’ve made. I had attempted writing two different plays addressing the strangeness of our times since the election events in 2016 but neither piece was really working. Writing a play that pointed out “Look how crazy the world is” didn’t really seem that urgent.
In most of my work, I play a character named “Kristina Wong” and report back on her misadventures in trying to save the world. And in every show, I seem to get closer and closer to playing a version of her that is closer to who I am. In each iteration, she has more and more impact on the rest of the world. I know this sounds semi-delusional, but that’s the thread that connects my work to each other.
SR: In the piece you talk about your experience as a member of a neighborhood council. How much of what you relate in the show actually happened? How much license did you take?
KW: Everything in the show happened. But because it is local government that I’m talking about, I edited out the hundreds of tedious hours of meetings and bureaucratic details that aren’t as interesting.
Unfriendly Fire
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“In most of my work, I play a character named ‘Kristina Wong’ and report back on her misadventures in trying to save the world.”
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SR: You also talk a little about being targeted by a white supremacist group. Can you tell us a little about that? Was it scary?
KW: Was being targeted by white supremacists scary? Um, YEAH! In my show, I tell the story of how I got targeted by them in late 2018 when Radical Cram School, my web series for kids where I teach them about social justice and revolution. The series was discovered by Alex Jones and other right-wing commentators and decried as “communist indoctrination for kids”.
Essentially, for about three weeks, I was the target of a concerted “cancellation” effort by people who follow them. They were pretty relentless and went through every commentable social media thing I had out there. They spewed racist, violent, attacks on me. They called my agents, downvoted all my videos on Youtube, and made commentary clips on my work. It was so bizarre because they seemed to really convince themselves that this web series was a real-life re-education camp and that somehow I was holding the kids hostage without their parents knowledge. Um, how do you think the kids got to the set? And when are hostages this professionally lit?
It was totally terrifying because it didn’t go away even after a week. I still have people from that world just discovering that web series now who send me scary messages. But I guess it would be more concerning if white supremacists were fans of my work.
The Art of Infuriating Alex Jones
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“I kind of feel like this current political situation has killed satire for many of us who used to use it a lot.”
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SR: Tell us something about the children’s web series you put together that inflamed Alex Jones. Is that ongoing?
KW: Yes, Radical Cram School launched a second season in January. We galvanized on the bad attention to do a really successful fundraising push. My producing team and I have been exploring options to shoot more. We were recently semi- finalists in the “Yes, And Laughter Lab” which focuses on comedy that forwards social justice where we got to pitch it to industry. We’ve been shooting bipartisan GOTV content with kids, some from the series, for an initiative called #HTownVotes.
SR: You deal a lot with racism and sexism in your work. Have those themes evolved in your work?
KW: I don’t know if they have “evolved” but I still deal with it and still find myself reporting on it in my work.
There was definitely a time when I thought if I made casual references to “rape” (ie “If you don’t recycle, you are raping the planet”) or “sexually harassing men” (ie “I’m sexually harassing Jeremy Lin so that I can empower Asian men”) that my audience would know that I was joking or being satirical.
Now the current cultural climate around #meToo has made it pretty clear that audiences aren’t game for that humor. So I find myself leaning less into satire [on subjects] that I assume everyone is on the same page about. I kind of feel like this current political situation has killed satire for many of us who used to use it a lot.
SR: Has your experience as an Asian-American performer changed at all?
KW: I’m not sure how to answer this question because I know I’m in a very specific category of Asian-American performers who is able to makes her own autobiographical performance work and tour it, so my ability to work as an artist isn’t as limiting as say, an Asian American actor who is at the mercy of auditioning for roles for TV/ Film.
For many years in my career, I had hoped that my original work would bridge towards more commercial success, and while I definitely have had more success commercially in the last few years, it’s become clear that relying on mainstream Hollywood to give me a platform to be an artist would be giving away all my power. I will say that over the last ten years, I’ve grown personally as an artist and so have my opportunities to work and sit fully in my own voice. So I feel confident that as rocky as this line of work is, that I’ll be able to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep making art until I drop dead.
SR: I first watched the show performed in your living room. What was that experience like?
KW: At first it seemed daunting to invite people to see my house and also, be at full on performance energy inside my home, which is where I tend to loaf and sleep. But it’s actually become quite normal, to go down to the living room, turn on the lights and get ready to perform for a computer.
Diana and I reworked the show in August for the living room, and once I got my set hanging up in my house, it was easier for me to “click” into show mode.
SR: In the show you pose the question: Do I really think I can change the system by becoming the system? Do you have an answer?
KW: I’m still wrestling with this as I decide if I am going to run for re-election in April 2021. I run a sewing group called the Auntie Sewing Squad which has been sewing and distributing masks during the pandemic. This group has been so effective in filling the aid gap that government has left behind.
That said, as slow and seemingly ineffective as legislation can feel, it’s what we have to create structural change in this country. And I do think there’s a way that artists can learn to be artists who hold onto their voice and also work with this bureaucratic system. That’s where our creativity comes in.
SR: What’s the main message you want the audience to carry away with them?
KW: Please fucking vote. You may not like the options you have or think your opinion matters. But just please fucking vote.
KRISTINA WONG FOR PUBLIC OFFICE | Written and performed by Kristina Wong | Directed by Diana Wyenn | Devised by Kristina Wong and Diana Wyenn | Dramaturgy by Diana Wyenn | Scenic, Costumes and Props by Kristina Wong | Sound by Mark McClain Wilson
Kristina Wong for Public Office is filmed Live at the Kirk Douglas Theatre exclusively for the Digital Stage and presented in partnership with The Broad Stage
TOTAL RUN TIME: 75 minutes (pausable)
For tickets, visit https://www.centertheatregroup.org/digitalstage/videos/kristina-wong/
For more detailed information about the artist, please visit https://kristinawong.com/
