The Los Angeles-American Playwright, Alice Tuan

By Lovell Estell III

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’s 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 — and even boastful — about her passion for theater, and in particular, for Los Angeles.

“I love this city,” she says. “I think of Los Angeles as the 21^st century American city, much like New York was the 20^th century American city.” “There aren’t too many places where you’ll find a play written by an Asian gal featuring a multi-ethnic cast, produced by a Latino theater company.”

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’t too interested in the field. “I always saw myself as an arts person,” 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.

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, The Richard Sherwin Award from the Mark Taper Forum, and A Colbert Award for Excellence from New York’s 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 at the University of Texas, Austin and CalArts, where she currently heads the Performance Program at the School of Theater. “But,” she says emphatically, “I am above all else, a playwright.”

Much of Tuan’s work focuses on the Asian-American experience, and she has worked closely with East West Players, the city’s premiere Asian-American theatre troupe. Her principal motivation for writing was that she didn’t see enough portrayals of the Asian-American experience, or as she puts it, “I didn’t see myself in the culture.”

Tuan’s first play was Last of the Suns, an attempt to make sense out of what she defines as the schizophrenia of growing up American in a Chinese household. “My first lessons in playwriting were from the self-imposed challenge of writing the first draft in six months…by 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.”

Ajax (por nobody) Tuan’s tale about porn actors and actresses, is, to trot out an old cliché, a horse of another color. Tuan says, unreservedly, that it “scared the shit out of me.” When she wrote it, she felt that she had brought “evil into the world, so I stuck it in the drawer for two years.” Arts Critic Wayne Brenner of the Austin Chronicle called it “a sick and twisted work of brilliance,” going on to colorfully describe it as “funny 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.”

One of her more recent plays, Cocks-Crow is about Americans trying to start a business in Shanghai, but they encounter difficulties because they don’t understand Chinese business practices While she was in China in 2008, she learned that NoëlCowardwrote Private Parts in Shanghai in 1930 while bedridden with influenza at the Cathay Hotel, so Tuan calls her second Shanghai work Private Rivals, and updates Coward’s 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.)

Hit has been a long time in the making. The play was commissioned in part by New York’s Public Theater and was completed in 2003. Being a Los Angeles-centric work, it has not one center, but many.

“I 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.”

Director Laurel Ollstein, herself a playwright, performer, and veteran of the early Actors’ Gang, says the project has been a joy, a great collaboration, and she is very excited about it. It’s a play which Tuan says holds a mirror up to our times.

So what does the future hold for this self-described “Los Angeles-American? Writing more new plays, and rewriting those unfinished plays in the drawer. “I plan to continue my thoughts about Los Angeles, trying to observe and think of it anew — I am interested in ‘Uburbia’ — the über 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).”

Hit is being performed at the Los Angeles Theatre Center through June 8. (866) 811-4111, www.thelatc.org

 Read Steven Leigh Morris’s review of Hit on Stage Raw