{"id":3958,"date":"2014-05-22T04:47:36","date_gmt":"2014-05-22T04:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/?p=3958"},"modified":"2014-05-22T05:03:37","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T05:03:37","slug":"alice-tuan-the-los-angeles-american-playwright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/alice-tuan-the-los-angeles-american-playwright\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice Tuan: The Los Angeles-American Playwright"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Los Angeles-American Playwright, Alice Tuan<\/h1>\n

By Lovell Estell III<\/h2>\n

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Photo by Patrick McPheron<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u201cTheater is often looked upon as the ugly stepchild of film and TV,\u201d says playwright Alice Tuan, as she emerges from a moment of quiet reflection during a dress rehearsal for her new play Hit, <\/em>being presented by Latino Theatre Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center through June 22.<\/p>\n

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It is now six days to opening night and the energy and enthusiasm of cast and crew is infectious within the cavernous interior of the LATC\u2019s Theatre 2. Tuan is upbeat and animated as she chats up cast members, makes suggestions, and snaps photos of costumes with her phone. She is thoughtful and alert, and gives the inescapable impression of being a meticulous taskmaster, a perfectionist. Her strikingly youthful bearing, soft-features, and playful smile are more like that of a teenage girl than a woman of 50. Clad in a green floral-striped print dress on this hot, windy day, she is unabashedly forthright \u2014 and even boastful \u2014 about her passion for theater, and in particular, for Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI love this city,\u201d she says. \u201cI think of Los Angeles as the 21st<\/sup> century American city, much like New York was the 20th<\/sup> century American city.\u201d \u201cThere aren\u2019t too many places where you\u2019ll find a play written by an Asian gal featuring a multi-ethnic cast, produced by a Latino theater company.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Like for so many other artists, the road Tuan traveled has been filled with peaks and valleys, and more than a few detours. She received her BA in economics from UCLA in 1986 but wasn\u2019t too interested in the field. \u201cI always saw myself as an arts person,\u201d she explains. Tuan acknowledges that she selected the major to make her parents happy. There was a stint as a secretary at an import\/export company, a job teaching ESL in Glendale, and graduate school at Brown University, where she earned her MFA in creative writing in 1997.<\/p>\n

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\"Photo<\/a>
Photo by Patrick McPheron<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Since then, her plays have been produced in cities across the country (as well as in Toronto and Melbourne), and she has garnered an enviable cache of awards and honors, including a Dramalogue award for her play Ikebana<\/em>, The Richard Sherwin Award from the Mark Taper Forum, and A Colbert Award for Excellence from New York\u2019s Downtown Arts Project. She has also taught in China, and has chaired playwrighting workshops throughout the United States, including MFA candidates at the Michener Center for Writers<\/a> at the University of Texas, Austin and CalArts, where she currently heads the Performance Program at the School of Theater. \u201cBut,\u201d she says emphatically, \u201cI am above all else, a playwright.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Much of Tuan\u2019s work focuses on the Asian-American experience, and she has worked closely with East West Players, the city\u2019s premiere Asian-American theatre troupe. Her principal motivation for writing was that she didn\u2019t see enough portrayals of the Asian-American experience, or as she puts it, \u201cI didn\u2019t see myself in the culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Tuan\u2019s first play was Last of the Suns<\/em>, an attempt to make sense out of what she defines as the schizophrenia of growing up American in a Chinese household. \u201cMy first lessons in playwriting were from the self-imposed challenge of writing the first draft in six months\u2026by rewriting this play 13 times, I went through the back door of learning how to write plays, not through structure, but through intuition and play, and a need to vent.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ajax (por nobody) <\/em>Tuan\u2019s tale about porn actors and actresses, is, to trot out an old clich\u00e9, a horse of another color. Tuan says, unreservedly, that it \u201cscared the shit out of me.\u201d When she wrote it, she felt that she had brought \u201cevil into the world, so I stuck it in the drawer for two years.\u201d Arts Critic Wayne Brenner of the Austin Chronicle<\/em> called it \u201ca sick and twisted work of brilliance,\u201d going on to colorfully describe it as \u201cfunny as hell, in a perverse, utterly bleak sort of way, like a malignant tumor that forms itself on your genitals in the shape of a smiley face.\u201d<\/p>\n

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One of her more recent plays, Cocks-Crow<\/em> is about Americans trying to start a business in Shanghai, but they encounter difficulties because they don\u2019t understand Chinese business practices While she was in China in 2008, she learned that No\u00ebl<\/em>Coward<\/em>wrote Private Parts<\/em> in Shanghai in 1930 while bedridden with influenza at the Cathay Hotel, so Tuan calls her second Shanghai work Private<\/em> Rivals<\/em>, and updates Coward\u2019s play with a divorced western couple, who are now with Chinese people. The action unfolds in the same Shanghai hotel. (The play was commissioned by Yale Repertory Theater, and was workshopped in New York last December.)<\/p>\n

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Justin Huen, Taylor Hawthorne and Kahyun Kim in Los Angeles Theatre Center’s production of Alice Tuan’s “Hit” (Photo by Ed Krieger)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Hit<\/em> has been a long time in the making. The play was commissioned in part by New York\u2019s Public Theater and was completed in 2003. Being a Los Angeles-centric work, it has not one center, but many.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI wanted to write a play where there were characters of different races involved in an intense drama together, not just the usual mix of color without meaning. I started by writing five scenes where each scene had some sort of hit in it; hit by a car, hit on by an older woman, hit of a joint, a hit in the eye.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Director Laurel Ollstein, herself a playwright, performer, and veteran of the early Actors\u2019 Gang, says the project has been a joy, a great collaboration, and she is very excited about it. It\u2019s a play which Tuan says holds a mirror up to our times.<\/p>\n

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So what does the future hold for this self-described \u201cLos Angeles-American? Writing more new plays, and rewriting those unfinished plays in the drawer. \u201cI plan to continue my thoughts about Los Angeles, trying to observe and think of it anew \u2014 I am interested in ‘Uburbia’ — the \u00fcber suburbs, and also how culture and literature might be a part of the living pulse of the city, not just tract houses and malls (the cathedrals of our time).\u201d<\/p>\n

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Hit is being performed at the Los Angeles Theatre Center through June 8. (866) 811-4111,<\/em> www.thelatc.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Read Steven Leigh Morris’s review of <\/a><\/em>Hit<\/a> on <\/em>Stage Raw<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

L.A. playwright Alice Tuan’s “Hit” is currently playing at Los Angeles Theatre Center. Through her life and career, Tuan has been trying to reconcile what it means to be of Chinese ancestry in America. “Hit” is one expression of that attempt, a play, like its L.A. setting, with many centers. BY LOVELL ESTELL III<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_custom_body_class":"","_custom_post_class":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-column","entry","has-media"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3958"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3978,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3958\/revisions\/3978"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stageraw.com\/oldStageRaw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}