Out of Time at the Public

Mixed Asian Media - March 11, 2022

By Sam Tanabe

Five new monologues by five award-winning Asian American playwrights. Each monologue performed by an Asian American actor over the age of 60. At a time when hate crimes against and attacks on Asian Americans are on our minds, in even the most liberal cities, I was incredibly moved watching these stories and performances rise from our community.

Directed by Lee Walters, and commissioned by NAATCO, Out of Time runs at The Public Theater in NYC through this weekend, with its final performance on March 13. Four out of the five playwrights are of mixed Asian heritage, and MAM couldn’t miss the opportunity to feature their works. Read how Anna Ouyang Moench (My Documentary), Jaclyn Backhaus (Black Market Caviar), Naomi Iizuki (Japanese Folk Song), and Sam Chanse (Disturbance Specialist) answered my interview questions to gain some insight of each work.

If you haven’t already, rush to see Out of Time before the cast takes their final bow this weekend!

MY DOCUMENTARY

By Anna Ouyang Moench

How does your piece, My Documentary, relate to the title of this production, Out Of Time?

I think we all understood the title in a different way than we might have before the pandemic. So many of the ways people understand time are rooted in community gathering. Holidays, celebrations, religious rituals, weddings, funerals, back to school season, summer camp, etc. When those markers are gone, time starts to lose meaning. I had been thinking about how disorienting it is to be out of time in this way, and decided to place my character in the experience of grief during the pandemic, as a way to push her experience even further out of time. I imagined that for this character, grieving alone and in limbo would stunt her ability to grieve at all. So this project, for her, is how she will begin.

Is your character Woman (played by the brilliant Page Leong), based off of someone from your life? Yourself? Or is she completely fictional?

Like all of my characters, she is fictional and also informed by my life, my perspective, and the people I know and love.

When writing this dialogue, what were your thoughts on balancing her humor, wit, cynicism, and hope?

In my writing I always aim for a balance of light and dark. I use writing to explore some of the most painful and confusing experiences that people face, but there is often incredible absurdity and laughter in those experiences too. Jokes and laughter are especially effective tools in dramatic writing, in that they can be used to soothe, to puncture, to evade successfully, to evade unsuccessfully, to unintentionally reveal something, to make the audience feel ok, to make the audience uncomfortable… and then the way the joke is received in the scene has a whole other semiotic menu that layers onto the first. Anyway, the older I get the more deeply I understand that it’s within my power to frame how I experience my life, and I try to experience it with a sense of humor. Especially the hard parts. In thinking about this character, who has decades more experience than I do, I knew right away that she would have a keenly developed wit and sense of perspective on her life, but that she is no Pollyanna. This is a person who has experienced suffering and built an artistic career by illuminating the suffering of others. She sees the world clearly. She can also joke about it.

Is the woman’s relationship with physical touch, grief, death, and realism influenced by Asian American perspectives in your life?

Perhaps they are, though it’s hard to untangle what is an “Asian American” perspective and what is just the perspective of my own family or myself. I am not opposed to hugging as the character in my play is, but I do find it strange that it’s become customary to hug a stranger you are meeting for the first time in a workplace setting. I don’t have a particular aversion to it, but if you think about it, it’s a strange thing to set as the norm. Is that Asian American? I don’t know. I know that my family tends not to be very sentimental. My grandmother, in particular, was incredibly pragmatic. She was also deeply loving and warm. I’m sure she was informed by her life experience and culture, but isn’t it also possible that she just was that way on her own? I probably lean more towards sentimentality by nature, but it can be overwhelming and at times debilitating. I prefer to channel that impulse through my writing. Everything I write is by definition from an Asian American perspective, but I hesitate to say anything sweeping and concrete about what that means. Asian American is a term that is so broad, it’s easy to exclude or erase members of the community by saying that my experience is representative of the collective experience.

BLACK MARKET CAVIAR

By Jaclyn Backhaus

How does your piece, Black Market Caviar, relate to the title of this production, Out Of Time?

Black Market Caviar is in some small way a time travel play, and in writing it I asked myself the question — what if we could step out of the linear timeline in which we experience our lives and visit former versions of ourselves, in order to impart advice on them or connect with them?

Did you always imagine this monologue being delivered via live stream on a video monitor, or was it inspired after writing began?

The livestream element came after early drafts of the script, but it was derived and inspired by the script. In what ways could we imagine a portal where a younger self back in time could be accessed by their future counterpart? After a few years of zoom as our only portal of connectivity, experimenting with the livestream felt in many ways a sci-fi version of our own recent reality, and it was very thrilling to see how it brought out so many new connections in the text.

Carla is dissecting family history, secrets, and genealogy, as much as she’s able. Is this curiosity inspired by your own?

I would say that elements of Carla's timeline are in many ways a mirror of my own experience, and her own dig into her history and lineage is something I have explored many times in my writing — the quest for more information that is lost to history. So it some ways, it is an alternate reality, a false fictional version of a very true journey I am exploring.

Would you like to receive a message like this, from the future? From yourself or another person with knowledge you don’t possess now?

In some ways, watching Rita Wolf and her powerful performance of the piece, I feel that through the screen I am already experiencing that sensation. It's trippy! I feel so lucky to see a message of hope from the future, no matter how fictional it is. I'm sure that I would have many questions for me, if I were actually being contacted by my future self. I hope that my future self would be proud of who she saw and how far she's come.

JAPANESE FOLK SONG

By Naomi Iizuka

How does your piece, Japanese Folk Song, relate to the title of this production, Out Of Time?

The character of Taki exists out of time. He's a fictional invention based on a real person. He's played by an actor in the present moment who embodies and conjures into existence someone who has already passed away. Taki is a kind of ghost, vivid and present for the 20 minutes or so that he's on stage, but existing in this place that is in a very literal sense outside time — or at least, time as we understand it in our daily lives.

Was Taki inspired by anyone in your own life?

The character of Taki was inspired by my father who passed away in 2020.

What motivated the integration of your specific references like jazz music, scotch, cigars, and the story of yuki onna?

My father loved scotch and cigars. When I think of him even now, I associate my memory of him with the smell of cigars. The element of jazz music was inspired by an old photograph of my father and mother dancing when they were much younger and newly married. I remembered my mother talking about how she and my father had gone to clubs to dance and also to hear live music when they were younger. After that, I came across Thelonious Monk's Japanese Folk Song, and I was curious about what it was based on, and that led me to older versions of the song which led me to thinking about the way in which the original melody is always present, but sometimes hidden or unrecognizable inside of the jazz version of the song. That idea really resonated for me, that there's a melody underneath our daily lives that we sometimes forget about but is always there. The story of yuki onna is related to that idea. There are many versions, but at its core it's the story of a traveler who is saved from a storm by a mysterious figure, but eventually that figure that saved him returns and unravels his life. I've known that story for a long time. Like many fables, it can be interpreted in so many ways, but I think in this piece, this mysterious figure functions as a kind of reminder of one's mortality.

How is Taki up against the limitations and struggles of memory in this piece?

I think we all in different ways struggle to make sense of our lives. Part of that process involves memory. You look back and you try to piece together a coherent narrative of the events of your life, particularly as you get older. You look for causality. You struggle to make meaning. Taki does that in this piece. And it's not a predictable process. How we remember doesn't always adhere to a straightforward logic. Like many of us, Taki remembers in bits and pieces. He's sometimes surprised by a memory he hasn't thought about in years, and that memory takes him to a recognition or awareness of larger, existential mysteries.

DISTURBANCE SPECIALIST

By Sam Chanse

How does your piece, Disturbance Specialist, relate to the title of this production, Out Of Time?

When NAATCO reached out about the project in 2020, we (playwrights) were commissioned to write pieces that would be “of this particular moment.” A lot that came up for me that was of that/this particular moment was pretty massive and multifaceted... the murder of George Floyd and BLM, and increasing demands for change and accountability; a shit show of a press and administration, and the chillingly large numbers of those supporting them (later, the insurrection); the climate crisis; of course the pandemic, and immense loss. When I start plays, I usually do a lot of reading and exploring and following impulses and associations down different rabbit holes. I landed on this volcano mouse and the concept of a disturbance specialist. And this character, Leonie, finds herself at in a reckoning, in the midst of all this.

So that’s how the piece relates to the title of the production, Out of Time —

Disturbance Specialist came out of this particular time, this particularly devastating and terrifying and enraging and chaotic and profound time (not that we’re now in a less devastating time, unfortunately… the devastation obviously, horrifically continues).

Your character, Leonie is tough and opinionated, while also accomplished and experienced. Although she’s been successful, she’s made mistakes. Why was it important to you to touch upon the topic of “cancel culture” vs. accountability?

In the last few years there’s been more awareness about the need to hold powerful individuals accountable for abuse, and seemingly a greater will to try and do it. Overdue and not nearly enough, but great that it’s (occasionally) happening. Of course, plenty of folks still not being held accountable who should be. But there’s also been this backlash, people deriding accountability and dismissing it as “cancel culture.” There’s so much resistance to challenging existing power structures, and the right has been so effective in invoking this idea of “cancel culture,” and undermining these necessary efforts to hold people accountable.

So that was part of my interest in exploring accountability. But I didn’t want the piece to be about whether or not the criticisms were valid. I wanted to explore the experience of finding yourself wrestling with this kind of reckoning — and I was interested particularly in the experience of a woman writer of color who’s lived for quite a while and lived through quite a lot, who finds herself suddenly vulnerable and destabilized like this. I’m interested in how we have an idea of who we are — we think we’re one thing — a good progressive open minded person, a good daughter — but then we are faced with the suggestion that actually we’re not — maybe we’re not the good person we thought we were, maybe we have blind spots, maybe we’re actually a pretty crappy kid sometimes.

And I was interested in the discomfort of being blamed… how it makes us squirm, lash out, justify, try to hold onto a solid sense of self and get some ground. And what it feels like to go through all those stages — hold on to what we think we know about ourselves, defend ourselves, attack our attackers… but then arrive at a place where we recognize some deeper truth about ourselves. What happens when we stop struggling, and think about what it — what real accountability means, on different levels.

What’s your opinion on the idea that youth are the ones who dictate who can “sit at the table?”

It’s sort of an insane idea (to think younger generations call the shots); youth generally have less access to power, not more. And power’s largely concentrated in specific institutions and super wealthy and connected individuals, not specific generations. Of course the character Leonie is suggesting this because she’s lashing out at those (she believes primarily younger) individuals who have criticized her and (she also believes) are damaging her reputation and career. She’s feeling attacked and cornered and squirming because of it. If she weren’t in so much pain (and blinded by it), she’d probably realize the absurdity of that statement, herself.