An open letter to the writers of Lempicka on the weekend of its closing

Dear Carson and Matt,

We don’t know each other, like super well? But every time we’ve spoken you’ve both been nothing but kind and generous and gracious. In that spirit, I wanted to tell you congratulations, as your Broadway show closes this weekend. I thought the work was magnificent. Within minutes of its start, I was suddenly and sincerely reminded of a time in my youth when I was first discovering musicals and saving all of my allowance money to buy cast albums. When literally every show I discovered, (no matter how old) was new. I remembered the excitement of tearing plastic off of CDs and tapes, that lavender smell that floated up into my nose off the print when I opened the jewel case, following along the lyric pages (if they were fancy enough to pack those in) and wondering/hoping I might find a song that I’d enjoy playing or singing to. And I openly wept. I wept because I didn’t know I could still feel that way about our art form and because I think your show deserved better in our collective hands.

I knew it. You had me at the opening. I knew I was going to love it. I wept again when the nostalgia goggles faded and the genuine love I had for these characters, the way this story was told, and my god, these amazing performers pierced through. (Pierced through in fact, that remarkable set and next-level lighting design but more on this later.)

I wept because I didn’t know I could still feel that way about our art form and because I think your show deserved better in our collective hands.

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It’s not a secret, but you probably don’t know that adapting historical characters is something I rather love to do in my own work. I think back in 2020 when I was writing about the one time I did a show with a director who became historically significant, I created a little guide for myself which I was happy to see reflected in your show too. How meaningful that last night I was in a space with like-minded people, sharing in the beauty of your work, but also sharing an aligned value with its writers.

I mean… it might be impolitic, but I kept finding myself thinking “Okay, I can see how this might not be for everyone… but who could dislike it SO much that they would say it shouldn’t be for anyone? Who would look outside a window or turn on their TV or stare at their device and see what’s going on in the world today and ALSO think “this show shouldn’t be a part of that conversation?” It might just be collateral damage from someone who buys ink by the barrel who has also never written a play in their life, but it’s still tragic. That sings to me as institutional failure and I lament that. I’d say I shouldn’t give those people too much power, but I kind of feel like somebody already has. If I was like, super petty? I’d create a blog reviewing reviews. Laying waste to the ignorance or the presumptions or like, the notion that a critic’s job is to see everything from a lay-person’s point of view and not, as I see it, to create a larger context and simply trust that whoever’s reading already knows what they like.

I kept finding myself thinking “Okay, I can see how this might not be for everyone… but who could dislike it SO much that they would say it shouldn’t be for anyone?

It wouldn’t be that much work, would it? The shit ones tend to betray themselves anyways. But I also kind of wouldn’t wish that on anyone, no matter how much they wish it on themselves when they deal in that kind of currency. I don’t really know how else to put it, and I don’t mean to harsh your buzz but I feel like it needed to be said. Some might say if I was a better friend, I’d focus only on the positive: How your piece aches with poetry, irony, wit, heart. How you riffed in 7/4 like it was breakfast cereal. How you put a decade of your life into making something beautiful because you believed firmly that others would share in its beauty. Maybe I’m doing both.

Anyways, the longer I do this, the more futile it seems, the more necessary it feels that I continue to do it. Which is oddly appropriate considering that one song you made, late in Act 2, Just This Way. It really got its hooks into me… it took my breath away. How much of a flex was that, by the way? Usually turns like that are saved for the protagonist, and you sly devils… you flipped the script. You gave it to someone else, and still made it about her. About both of them. About all of us. And you broke my heart. You just ripped it in two, you bastards. What a wonderfully satisfying, humanizing counterpoint to a world that so frequently compared humans to machines. I see what you did there, you sly, sly devils.

the longer I do this, the more futile it seems, the more necessary it feels that I continue to do it

Anyway, I write this the day after I saw your show, (which by some beautiful poetry was also Tamara Lempicka’s birthday) and I’m still thinking about it. And lamenting the conversations we’ll have lost due to it’s too-soon closing. Which is the second highest praise I can give any show next to wanting to write about it- that I’m still thinking about it. So thanks for both of those things. And for reminding me that new musicals can be fucking awesome.

I spend a huge amount of time these days reading and “evaluating” new musicals, more so than I do writing them, regrettably. This was never my ambition, but whenever I’m asked to evaluate, I don’t feel I have any choice because “what if the guy they wind up getting doesn’t know when he doesn’t know? What if his response to a show that is entirely out of his experience (or heaven forbid was not even made for him) is to downvote it?” It’s happened before. It’s happened to me before. I can’t have it happen again any more than I can’t not jump to my feet and cheer when the curtain goes down on one that has made it to the Great [and very] White Way. Which is where you’d have found me last night at 9:45pm. On my feet, cheering my god damn face off for the two of you and your incredibly gifted cast and creative team. Yes, your run was pre-maturely cut short. But you ran. And that is everything. I won’t forget that. So congratulations again, and thank you.

Love,

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Post Script:

You must tell me someday how your lighting designer made that gorgeous blue happen at the end of Act 1. It was mesmerizing and magical and I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about it. I thought I’d imagined it until Laura and I talked about it at intermission. It was like I blinked, and then it was just happening. And then it was happened and I was left feeling vaguely blessed that I’d even seen it at all in the first place. Astounding and appropriate.

Time Capsule

The start of May and AAPI Heritage month always comes as a welcome reminder to me of the significant strides Asian and Asian-American artists have made in representation and in our agency as storytellers. So in that spirit, I wanted to tell you a small part of my own story. One of the perks of being both a veteran story keeper and self-appointed guidance-counselor-slash-cheerleader of the next generation is I get the benefit of hindsight coupled with a clarity of context with what’s happening now. To you, to me, to us. Ready? Ok!

So in 1999 I was puttering around town auditioning. I’d gotten my BFA and my Equity card two years prior and was doing a lot of workshops and such for new musicals. See, back then, there were three, maybe four canonized shows “for us.” You know the ones. They weren’t written by us, and they weren’t written for us, and some of us have wonderful ties to them to this day and that’s alright. Because they did a LOT. For one, they employed us. For another, they lent us some sense of professional credibility. They were something we could claim ownership over. But chief among the things they did not do well (for honestly, how could they) was provide us with the comfort that if we, as performers, were not right for any of them, we could find another show that we were right for. You follow? Someone who wasn’t right for Grease, might find themselves a track in The Sound of Music. If you weren’t right for Chess, you might be right for Merrily.

Back in the day for folks like me, if you weren’t right for the big three, you were S.O.L.

Back in the day for folks like me, if you weren’t right for the big three, you were S.O.L. This was very problematic for me. Some people trained just so they could be right for those shows. There were schools founded expressly to fill this need. I was maybe not so smart. I thought I should be able to act without prejudice and for better or worse what that meant in that moment was being cast in a lot of new musicals and workshops.

Some were fantastic. One piece, a little show called Making Tracks, (which I guess is a thing that people still talk about but don’t know I was in and maybe that’s interesting?) is how I met Woody Pak, Brian Yorkey and his other then-collaborator, Tom Kitt. These guys were dope. Smart AF and really approaching the work with unprecedented skill and with great and generous intention.

But others? Not so much. No names, but I’ll tell you I once found myself in a show that rhymed “chance” with “dance” no less than six times in the same song. And if memory serves, twice in another. Another time, there was a non-Asian writer who mansplained to Cindy Cheung (yes, that Cindy Cheung) what an internal rhyme was, as if she didn’t already know. (We all did, eyeroll.) He’d walk around rehearsal patting himself on the back for employing Asians with self-congratulatory quips like “maybe my next show should be called The Phantom of the Chinese Opera.” In today’s world that’s at best a micro-aggression and at worst a hostile work environment. A third time, a director offered me a role they then rescinded at the 11th hour because they had mistaken me and my 6’1” frame for Eric Bondoc. Yes, that Eric Bondoc. Who is not 6’1”. Years later, Eric would tell me they had mistook him for yet a third cookie-cutter Asian, but couldn’t return to the well again for fear of… I mean, you get the idea.

He’d walk around rehearsal patting himself on the back for employing Asians with self-congratulatory quips like “maybe my next show should be called The Phantom of the Chinese Opera.”

What I was witnessing in these moments though, was how performers of color were leading double lives. Triple, if they had corporate day-jobs. On one side, we were getting submitted by our agents for commercial work where we either were delivering food, or running gambling/prostitution houses or were seeing America for the very first time…. and on the other, we were doing low- to no-pay work for artistic fulfillment and the idea that these two lives could ever be synthesized was inconceivable. Sure, it wasn’t great rhyming “chance” with “dance” six times a song for eight shows a week, but it was an opportunity to make my own tracks in fresh powder, where no one had tread before. To wit, there was a moment in the aforementioned Making Tracks where the generous Mr. Yorkey gave me latitude to write my own lyric into a recurring segment of leitmotif. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to nod at that other show, so I worked in a chance/dance rhyme of my own. (see below) Not clever, but it was a thing I got to participate in. Those kinds of opportunities were few and far between.

A scene from Making Traks (1999) featuring Welly Yang, Thomas Kouo, Rodney To and myself.

You might not know by looking but two of the four guys in the above clip had already made their Broadway debuts in Miss Saigon. To them, that was their day-job. This too, became a thing I’d notice. That those gainfully employed Broadway Asians were often bored out of their rice-picking minds. I guess one can only “see America for the first time” so many times before it loses it's luster.

So, I started writing in earnest for my new friends. It wasn’t good writing? (I wouldn’t learn to write well till many, many years after finishing my MFA, late-bloomer’s gonna late-bloom.) But it had heart. And it was attractive.

The very first show I ever wrote, which I actually never talk about, was called So Far So Good. I called it that because whenever I would tell colleagues I was writing something they’d ask me “how’s it going?” Inevitably their curiosity would land them in my studio in Washington Heights, singing music for hours (and for no pay, sorry friends.)

It wasn’t really about anything. Just young people in chaos, bouncing off of each other and trying to find common ground. But each piece of music gave its character a specific want, and a lot of room to play subtle or broad choices. Each workshop we had, I’d use my Asian-American friends because I knew how thirsty they were to sing something that hadn’t already been sung to death by twenty of their closest frenemies.

There wasn’t a language for it. There wasn’t a context. It was just like, people making super gross assumptions about everything and expecting us to go along with it.

At one such workshop, the father of a Caucasian friend of mine came to watch and when I pressed him for feedback, very respectfully said “But why are they all Asian?”

You cringed a little reading that right? I’ll admit, so did I. But back then there wasn’t a precedent for characters of color in musicals who didn’t have to justify their presence with an in-narrative connection to their parent culture, their parent language, or a set of radically opposing moral values to contrast Western sensibilities. There wasn’t a language for it. There wasn’t a context. It was just like, people making super gross assumptions about everything and expecting us to go along with it. And when we didn’t we were left behind.

An early demo from Death and Lucky, featuring the great Ali Ewoldt.

This would become a recurring theme for me and the stories I wanted to tell: There was never a language for the “why” in musicals until it would get forged first in other media. It was 2005 when I started writing about the Tiger-mom and her estranged daughter who found themselves living under the same roof again, coming to blows over how best to care for their neuro-divergent son/brother but the book which coined that phrase “Tiger-mom” wouldn’t be published until 2011. Nobody knew what that was. People asked “Shouldn’t that be enough? Why bring in the Autistic kid? What is a ‘lazy Susan?’”

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Britney Coleman, Dan Urness and David Epstein

I remember once, after we premiered The View From Here at NYMF, an actor in a Broadway show I hadn’t seen emailed me through my website saying. he “saw my work” and “liked my sound” and thought it might be a “good fit” for a show he himself was writing. I met with him at 4pm at the Lunt-Fontanne theater, chatting with him about his piece in one of the empty seats. The show I wrote had been a jazz piece, which involved a little bit of improvisation where the singer traded eights with the pianist and trumpet player. This guy’s show was about Asian immigrants. Which I found to be a little disturbing only because to this day I’m still not sure how my ethnicity or my parent culture qualifies me to orchestrate for erhu or pipa. Like… where does that even come from? Even back in 2006 there had been a dog-whistle code for “I am looking for political cover.” But this guy was using very different language. Caught me off guard. I politely declined.

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When the culture finally caught up, and I was shopping American Morning around, one potential producer read it and said “this is great, but do both of the cab drivers have to be Asian? What if one was white?” He could still be an immigrant, they qualified, but what if he was an Eastern European immigrant? This was 2011, when it was okay to have Asians in lead roles, but apparently not okay to have JUST Asians in lead roles. I thanked them for their time and politely declined. (I will, however, take this time to thank everyone who DID have the courage to meet it where it was and help it grow.)

all I ever need do is get on social media and look at everything that you’re making. And really, at the end of the day what you’re making is history, so keep at it.

Which is kind of the whole point of this novel I’m writing to you now. Thanks, by the way, for sticking around. These days, whenever I fall into the quagmire of “what-about-me”, all I ever need do is get on social media and look at everything that you’re making. And really, at the end of the day what you’re making is history, so keep at it. Normally I’d take this opportunity to name check a ton of high-profile projects that really great people are making, but I’m growing. I trust you know what those are, and I trust you see their value. And to some degree, I trust you see your contribution to them.

But maybe the thing you’re making isn’t getting recognized. Maybe your gifts are undervalued. Maybe, like me, there isn’t a language or context to properly understand it yet. I hope nonetheless you’ll trust in the universality of its worth. That somewhere, some time, the light will shine on it. There is no good excuse not to make the thing. Always, always make the thing. Remember Gandalf:

This is where I leave you. Thanks again for sticking around. Your reward? A tiny time capsule 1999 Tim buried in a salt mine twenty meters below sea level so 2024 Tim could share it with you. Because he thinks you need to hear it. He hopes you don’t. But better safe than sorry. Also, call your parents, they miss you. Tim out.

If I could take the whole world’s dreams, if I could take my good intentions and wrap them all around you

If I could promise you no pain, a life less weary than your own, could I relive the day I found you?

There are things we can’t control. There are choices we must make. You must step back to see the whole. If not for mine than for your own sake.

You have come so far, so good. And it’s all just as I knew you would.

See the work that you have done. Measure strength in who you are, all you’ve won. So good, so far.

An Alan Muraoka Appreciation Post

This is an Alan Muraoka appreciation post. (Which to clarify, is not to say I do not appreciate THIS GUY. I do. Not the same guy.) But if you're friends with the former on Facebook you'll maybe know that he received his fourth (?) Emmy Award in the mail recently. And while this on its own is an enormous flex, my wife and I were discussing the broader implications and I just wanted to commit something to writing because... writer's gonna write.

But by the time Alan took over as the proprietor of Hooper's Store on Sesame Street, his predecessor (an equally generous human named David Smyrl) had been in that role for eight years. It's a good and healthy run. In the moment, when we found out Alan won the slot, a lot of us thought "Good for him! A steady gig!" Not realizing he'd occupy that space for the next twenty-six years, or that his "steady gig" would actually be low-key revolutionary. But that's exactly what it is, and I don’t think enough people acknowledge that, so hello! Welcome.

Alan with fellow famous Asians James Seol, Ann Harada and Francis Jue. No wait.

For the last twenty six years, Alan has been a face on TV. You know there's a rather common notion among our community that we had to wait literally twenty years between All American Girl and Fresh Off the Boat to see an Asian face on prime time TV. And yes, that's both horrific and celebratory, but it's tempered with the truth that Alan was there the entire time, representing to the MOST IMPORTANT demographic. And now, those kids are having kids and are watching him right along side my own kid.

And I don't mind telling you, you have not lived until you've taken your kid to the Lunar New Year celebration at the Met and Alan says to your kid from the stage "Hi Haven! Keep dancing!" and your kid runs back to you and says "HE SAID MY NAME!!" (Like, yeah Haven, you've met him before… Doesn't matter. HE SAID MY NAME. ON A STAGE.) If you don't speak toddler, I'll translate: He sees me. Others see him. Therefore, others see me.

Alan with famous Muppets Elmo, Abby Cadabby, and Cookie Monster. No wait hold up.

There's something cosmically humbling about this. See, I've spent twenty five years of my life writing stories for people who look like me because when I was coming up, the air was so thin in that rarified space only two or three very “classic” stories were allowed to breathe. And I daresay, they weren't written for us or by us. We could only be three things and we all knew we were so much more. I didn't do badly. I could've done better. And between you and me, I’m kind of killing it right now with my new project. But when you think about the impact of a single face on TV... it's cosmically humbling.

Add to that, the fact that these multiple Emmy (and Producer's Guild and NAACP Image) Awards encompass his work not only on-camera but off, as a director? Come on. Let's talk about this. In 2020 when the world was burning, my wife and I were raising a newborn. Everyone was confined to quarters, kids needed to be entertained and a FLEET of courageous arts educators and kids TV makers started making stuff from their homes. Alan was no exception. Our then-sitting President (who actually disbanded the national pandemic response team in 2018) was openly calling COVID-19 the “China Virus” and by extension pointing an accusatory orange finger at all Asians everywhere. Then a few months in, George Floyd was murdered, Griffin Matthews was calling out Institutional Racism at large, and we all found ourselves trapped indoors with nothing to do but reckon with our own complicity. For many, that manifested as public protest. For some it went the other way. For me it meant carrying a baseball bat with me on the subway during grocery runs after being attacked by a really weaksauce crazy guy who “just has a lot of feelings about China, sorry.” (SMDH.)

What did Alan do? He co-directed a special episode of Sesame Street called The Power of We, which put emphasis on cooperation, and community and how diversity in our world can be a strength. In short, it was a guidebook for young eyes when all their role models were letting them down.

I mean, was I surprised by this? Not at all. My personal Alan story involves asking him to sign a headshot for a friend’s two daughters back in the early 2000s, with a request from their mom that he write something to sway them from hitting each other. His solution to this was to just ask the question. “You don’t hit your sister, do you? That can’t be true!” And while I can’t speak for him, it seems to me his guiding philosophy is centered around this idea: Ask the question. Make no assumption. You’ll be happy to know that sister one is now in her second year of law school and sister two studies Elementary Education. They do not hit each other anymore. They are lovely humans making a difference.

So here he is, on my feed this morning, quietly celebrating in a private post (and if he’s reading this, wondering if I’ll get to the part where throughout all of it he also balances a career as a Broadway stalwart, a top-tier baker, and a mentor) but really low-key changing the world. And that’s it. That’s the post. Congratulations, Alan. You’ve come a long way, and we’re all super grateful for your leadership, your mentorship, your kindness, your patience.

If you’re seeing this, and you know him, I’d love to hear your Alan story. Comment wherever comments are enabled. Which is not here. Because I’m like, never here. Cheers.

A Letter to My Daughter On the Eve of Our First Big Move

Dear Haven
As we move out of our tiny one bedroom on Riverside and 135th, I can't help but forget an entire lifetime of memories here. I can't help but forget about the night I wrote Drive from American Morning in one sitting after hearing The Shadowboxers open for Indigo Girls at the Beacon, singing quietly to the midi playback of my laptop from my couch at two a.m. I can't help but forget when Marlo, EJ, Hansel, Jaygee, and Jose came over to shoot testimonials for the crowdfunding project that brought that show to the public mindshare. Jose, out on the fire escape, cutting a dashing silhouette. EJ and Hansel at the kitchen table, being EJ and Hansel. I can't help but forget the first meal I cooked for your mom, when we were still just friends, and how I asked her to zest a lemon, and after twenty minutes of holding it, her telling me she didn't know what that meant. I can't help but forget the Super Smash Bros tournaments I held here, where we all played with Mii versions of Sondheim, Andrew Lippa, Lynn Ahrens and David Henry Hwang. I can't help but forget the show posters I hung on the wall, or the framed picture of me smiling next to Jen Eng's pregnant belly, or sleeping on the couch when my mom and dad would come visit.

I can't help but forget them because my entire life here started when the world shut down, and you arrived in February of 2020. Everything before that was preamble. What perfect timing you had. What better time to be shut inside a tiny cubby than with you? You who said "I love you" at one. Who said "goo goo gah gah ironically" at one and a half.

None of those before things compares to singing you the Emergency Hugs song when you couldn't sleep, or the Have Some More Nuggets song when you wouldn't eat, or pacing up and down the tiny hallway at 3 a.m. with you so mom could keep up her strength. Or setting you down on the play mat and doing your daily tummy time excercises. Holding you and spinning around to Neon Pegasus, watching you bliss out as the room spun, you at the center of it. Dancing with you to Try Everything. Hearing you ask Alexa for Better When I'm Dancing for the first time. Watching you watch Josh and Blue. Watching you watch him when he sent you a special birthday message, your eyes unblinking the whole time. Yes, Josh knows you! Asking you quietly in the kitchen at sunrise "what's this? What's that? What's this?" And hearing you whisper "microwave. Dishwasher. Paper towel. Garbage can." Your first words, your first steps, your first firsts. Outside, the world was burning but in here, the only thing melting was my heart, my ego, my need to be anything but the perfect dad and husband.

Sometimes, I'll stop and think about the PJ Masks playlist and how when it's on, you won't come to the dinner table and eat, but instead will dance or lie face up in the kitchen carpet, just singing along. And eventhough it happened earlier today, I'll get really sad. "Will she dance in the new apartment?" Someday, years after we've taken down the Doc McStuffins pictures in your room (finally, a room of your own), which today are brand new, you'll probably want to just go there to hang out by yourself. And I'll see it, and tell you it's cool. But because three years in a tiny space connected us supernaturally, you'll know the literal only thing I want is to sit on the couch with you and mom and watch a program. So you'll say "hey why don't we all hang out in the living room?" And I'll wonder if I'm being selfish if I say yes, but I'll say yes anyway. When that happens, I hope you know how grateful I am. For then, for now, for the first three years. Which were our last three years in this tiny, tiny universe of an apartment where we gave your stuffies check ups. Where we played the piano, did magnatiles and sang "we can rebuild it better together" if one of them fell down, where we had pizza party mondays and watched Friends in HBO, where not a lot happened but everything happened. So grateful. To new songs that we make up together, dances that we fake together, long form meta crossover roll plays that we do for days. To days and days and days.

All my love,

dad.

My Remarks at the 2023 Vivace Awards Honoring Sheilah Rae

I see a few familiar faces here, but for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Timothy Huang.  I’m the husband of former New York Theater Barn Artistic Associate Laura Brandel.  I’m a musical theater writer, I’m represented by the Bret Adams agency, and have had the good fortune of knowing and being friends with Sheilah Rae for about fifteen years.  Some of you probably knew that.  But what most of you don’t know is that Sheilah Rae officiated mine and Laura’s wedding in 2015.  Which is probably the main reason I get to speak at all tonight.   So in that spirit…

Dearly beloved

We are gathered here today at the Player’s Club in the presence of the spirits of Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson and John Drew, in the long shadows of Helen Hayes, Agnes DeMille, and Lucille Lortel, and perhaps most significantly in the warm, grateful embrace of Bret Adams and Paul Reisch to celebrate and applaud Sheilah Rae on receiving this very special Vivace Award, for her service and commitment to…

To what?  I mean, take your pick.  To the arts?  To the Bret and Paul Foundation? To the advancement and amplification of women in theater. To the advancement and amplification of women! To the writing and development of new musicals.  To the war against ageism, anti-semitism, anti-intellectualism. To her commitment to being a thoughtful and empathetic human. To her commitment to nurturing generations of theater artists.  The list is long my friends, and the night is young am I right?  If I’m right let me hear it with applause!

I'm being a touch dramatic but the point isn't lost on you is it? All of these things that each and every one of us knows Sheilah for are just a biproduct.  An after-effect. Evidence of the presence of a much larger idea that commitment to anything first demands a person be themselves committed.  And given that context, is anyone more worthy of tonight?

No one in this room needs to be told that service and commitment are two things that Sheilah has in infinite supply but I will say it anyway.  Service and commitment are two things that Sheilah has in infinite supply.  She embodies them.  And best of all she embodies them with humility and love and kindness. 

Anyone who has had even a passing conversation with her will recognize this immediately.  And I’m speaking from personal experience because literally the very first moment I swapped words with her, I knew it.  I KNEW I was in the presence of a remarkable human being.  And though in that moment I didn’t have the first idea of the extent to which that was true, I have been forever changed because of it. 

I’m telling you this because tonight I’m your avatar.  Tonight, I get to speak for all of us.  Our lives are changed because of her.  Whether it’s in the form of being invited to work on one of her many groundbreaking shows.  Or getting to sit and chat with her and Elliott over dinner.  Or if you’re lucky enough, to have her standing at the altar beside you when you marry your best friend.  Every single one of us is changed because of her.  Where’s the lie?  If I’m right let me hear it with applause!!

It was Sheilah who invited Mark at the Bret Adams agency to come see the show we worked on together.  Without which I’d have no agent.  It was Sheilah who first suggested I might reach out to Joe Barros about possibly participating in the New York Theater Barn’s New Works concert series.  And, in turn, it was Joe who recommended I meet with his Associate Laura Brandel to walk me through how that concert would go.  And when I immediately and completely fell in love with her it was Sheilah that took her aside in the middle of rehearsals for her musical The Belle of Tombstone, to say “Yes, here’s a guy who is way too intense, who is an entire decade older than you who is unapologetically into you.  I get it, it’s scary.  Why be afraid of that? What have you got to lose by embracing it?”  Y’all I cannot over state how committed Sheilah was to my personal happiness.  I can’t.  She was selling me to Laura Brandel like it was her job.  And you know what?  Maybe it was.

Maybe she knew that in the cosmic tapestry it’s always someone’s job to be that person for someone else.  To see them.  To validate them.  And to say to them “I get it.  What you’re facing now is scary.  But how is fear a better choice than humility and love and kindness?”  Maybe that’s not just her north star, but her mandate to everyone she comes in contact with.  That it’s all of our jobs to be that person.  Maybe in the truest sense, we are not just changed by her but we are made better. 

I could be wrong.  But if I’m right will you please let her hear it with applause?

"Why You?" Or That Time the President Called My Dad

“So, Tim is going to meet the President this week” my wife said, in the days leading up to a bill-signing I was invited to.  We were at a playground with our daughter and two friends who also have a child her age.  My wife had been doing this to everyone we’d encountered that day, as I had only been invited the day before.  Among the more playful responses she’d received, the most common was “…of what?.”  I would chime in on cue with “of the United States as a matter of fact.” And stretch my imaginary suspenders for high fallutin’ effect.  Sometimes I would substitute pretend suspenders for dusting invisible cool off my left shoulder with my right hand.  Eventually it would come out that President Biden would be signing a bill, and that I’d be witnessing it.  So, it wasn’t like me and Uncle Joe would be hanging out in the Blue Room, swapping stories from Delaware. However we played it though, the follow up question was always the same: “Why you?”  Why me indeed…

I was half way down the Northeast Corridor with a half bagel and a dozen butterflies in my stomach when that question would hit me the hardest: Why actually me? Me and suits didn’t mix.  Me and politicians didn’t mix.  Me and fancy occasions and good behavior and representing my family, and representing all Asians everywhere on a national stage did not, in general, mix.  So why me?  I’d been in such denial about it as a matter of fact that I’d subconsciously omitted mentioning it to my parents. No love lost there, my two beautiful parents were dyed-in-the-wool Regan Republicans.  And why wouldn’t they be?  They were Taiwanese immigrants who came to the U.S. in the early 70s with as much goodwill as their four pockets could hold. They learned a new language in their 30s, created their own community and eventually carved a path that would put my brother and me through college and graduate school.  I’m not saying they didn’t have their share of privilege, these are the same folks who, when I jokingly posted on social media that they have weekly dinners with the Taiwanese President, chastised me because “it’s only once a month.”  Regardless, if there’s a more acute, “more-perfect” American narrative, I don’t know what that is.  So, yeah.  Didn’t call the parents.  I mean, even if I wanted to… where would I begin? 

Forgot to bring a phone charger. Had to buy one at the train station.

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In April I’d received a call from a good friend and mentor.  I’m going to drop his name now, but only because it’ll be important later on.  It was David Henry Hwang.  “Hey Tim,” said Tony-winning, living-legend and godfather of Asian American theater arts, David Henry Hwang.  “The AAPI caucus really loved your video from the Lunar New Year celebration and we’re running out of people we can ask to do free stuff.  Would you write a song for us for Heritage Month?  It pays nothing but the bright side is it probably won’t do anything for your career.” 

Well with an invitation like that…

So we talked a little bit about what we wanted the song to do- which was fundamentally to galvanize voters to turn out for the mid-terms. That was the why. The how and what of it all was left up to me.  So I started thinking.  Sure, the song could sing about victory, or sing about justice or sing about patriotism, duty, service.  All galvanizing ideas. I went with guilt.  Oh yes, guilt.  That beautiful, complex, oft-ugly sentiment that any child of an Asian immigrant knew intimately.  Guilt.  The great thing about guilt was that it transcended.  You didn’t even have to have an Asian parent to know guilt.  Are you Jewish?  You probably know about guilt.  Are you Catholic?  You probably know about guilt.  Are you gay, Black, trans, or have an MFA in musical theater writing from the Tisch School of the Arts?  You probably know about guilt.  Are you Patrick Bateman?  Okay if you’re Patrick Bateman you probably don’t know about guilt, (ironic, since you’re guilty) but you definitely still like a bop of a tune, so I crossed my fingers and set to work.

For a song about guilt, the result was super boppy: 

Keeper of Legacy, Featuring Joan Almedilla, Christine Toy Johnson, Raymond J. Lee, Josh Dela Cruz, Jose Llana and Jaygee Macapugay. Arranged by Isaac Harlan.

You might notice from the video, the remote nature of how everything was shot.  And it is to the credit of Joan Almedilla, Christine Toy Johnson, Raymond J. Lee, Josh Dela Cruz, Jose Llana and Jaygee Macapugay that it happened at all. Because imagine having the following conversation umpteen times, over the course of seven days:

ME: Hey my beautiful Asian-American friend who is super talented and super busy and way too good for this, how are you?  I got asked to write this song for the DNC’s virtual Heritage Month celebration and just found out I was supposed to cast and edit it too!  Wanna learn some music and put yourself on camera?  It doesn’t pay anything but on the other hand it’ll do nothing for your career.

YOU: Well, I’m super busy?  I’m actually in previews or rehearsal or on-the-road or shooting my immensely popular TV show for which I am number one on the call sheet, and I haven’t slept in like, six days.

ME: All fair.  And I totally understand.  But I would owe you big time.  Also, it’s not so much for me as for um… well All Asian Americans Everywhere Including Your Family and Friends Even If They Didn’t Vote Democrat.  No pressure.

YOU: …I mean…

ME: It’s for David Henry Hwang. 

YOU: Oh! When do you need it by?

ME: Three days.  Thank you so much I will owe you so big!

YOU: Yeah, just send me the track.  And thanks for including me, it’s really nice to be included.

End scene. 

Not long after the song debuted, I got a text from Bel Leong-Hong, the chair of the AAPI caucus.  We’d spoken before, emailed, and I’d seen her on video, but we’d never met in person. 

“Keep an eye out for an email from the White House.”  It read. 

“…wait, what?”

“I wanted to show you my appreciation for all your work, so I put you on a guest list for a bill-signing.  It’s regarding Congresswoman Grace Meng’s legislation towards a National Asian American and NHPI museum.”

“…wait, what??”

“Yeah just… you know, check your spam filter.  And let me know if you don’t hear from them.  It’ll come today or tomorrow.  Smiley face emoji.”

“Wait.  …what?  How did you…? What?”

“Don’t worry about it.  I took care of it.  Sunglasses emoji.  Oh also, David can’t make it, but you’ll get to meet Parag too!  Looking forward to meeting in person!”

“…who even are you?”

“I’m just an old Chinese lady. Winky face emoji.  See you Monday.”

The invite came on a Saturday, and by Monday I was on an Amtrak to Washington DC, bagels, butterflies and all.  Turned out, a bill signing was a lot like an industry reading on steroids. There was live music, beautiful monologues, the remembrance of things that came before, and enthusiastic applause and appreciation.   In lieu of music stands, there was a platform, a podium, a desk for the actual signing, four rows of chairs for the audience and behind them, a small army of press. Cameras rolling.  On its own terms it was a really special day!  I met some fantastic public servants, said my thank-yous and got a really great story out of it.

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And then I got the tug on my sleeve.  It was Bel.

“You have to come with me right away.”

“Sure.  What’s going on?”

“The President wants to meet you.”

“…of what?”

“President Biden.  Wants to meet you.”  She said again.  “Just give this man your name and do whatever he says.  Hurry though, there’s not much time.”

We were ushered out a side door of the East Room and into… some other room.  Which was blue.  It was a blue room.  It was the Blue Room.  Inside of which were more photographers, videographers, Secret Service, White House Staff… and Vice President Harris and President Biden.  What were they doing there?  Well to be honest it looked like they were just shooting the shit, waiting around for some rando songwriter.  But the truth is, they were waiting for Bel. And when they saw her, their faces lit up. Who was this badass?  This badass was grabbing my sleeve and pushing me towards the man in blue. 

“Mister President, this was the man who wrote the song about all of your accomplishments.” She said.

What was happening?  No, seriously, what was happening?  This folksy guy with white hair and the blue suit that I’d seen on TV was shaking my hand, smiling at me saying… something.  What was he saying?  Get out of your head Tim, pay attention! You’ll wanna write about this later.

“Joe Biden.  Pleasure to meet you.”

“Tim Huang.  It’s such a pleasure.  I’m a big fan of your administration.”

“Hey, thanks so much! I hear you wrote a song about me.”

“I did! I’m pretty sure you’ll get to hear it.  It’s a good song. Also, go Delaware!”

“Is that what it’s called?”  asked Vice President Harris.

“No, I’m actually from there.  I was just saying ‘go Delaware’ like… go Delaware.”

For a second time, the President’s face lit up.  “You’re from Delaware?”

“I am! I was educated at the Tatnall School.”

“No kidding.  I have a grandkid there right now.  We have a home not far from there.”

“Yeah, I know! We talk about it all the time!”

“You do?”

“We do! It’s like, part of our collective identity.  We’ve been talking about it since I lived there!”

“Wow, that’s really nice.”

“And- this might be apocryphal sir, but my father the neurosurgeon claims to have consulted on your case when you had your aneurysm in the 80s.  I’m not sure how real that is, dads like to impress their sons.”

“Oh no, it wasn’t the 80s, it was the 90s and I know exactly who that guy is.”

“You do?”

“Oh yeah.  Here’s the story.  See, I had been having these headaches? And went to get checked out and was misdiagnosed.  I won’t tell you by who.  But I was misdiagnosed. Anyway this guy said it was because I’d been exercising incorrectly” he mimed a chin-up.  “So it was business as usual and before I knew it I was in the hospital.  So then, my people, they said to me ‘well there’s two guys you could get right now.  There’s this local guy, or the guy from Delaware.’  And I was like ‘let’s get the guy from Delaware.’  And we brought him in.”

“No way.”

“It’s true.  He probably saved my life.”

“Wow! I’ll be sure to bring it up next time we talk.”

A look of pure joy came across the President’s face. “You mean… he’s… he’s still around?”

“Sure is!”

“Let’s call him!”

“…right… right now?”

I peeked out of the corner of my eye.  An aide was looking at her watch.  We were burning minutes. 

“Maybe we can all get into place for the photos while you call your dad.”  She said, ushering me into camera-ready position.

I pulled out my phone.  Dialed my parent’s landline, quickly hung up.  Someone needed me to smile and I can’t do two things at once.  Where did my phone go?  Camera shutters clicked.  Someone called out orders.  I repositioned.  We took more photos.  Someone handed me back my phone, ringing.  These guys were not fucking around.  I put the phone on speaker, and as it rang, the President grabbed it out of my hand.  The answering machine picked up.

“Let me try dad’s cell.  They don’t always answer the landline.”  I said.  “We’ll just try this once and if it doesn’t work, we can chalk it up.” I dialed, put it back on speaker.  Again, the President took it out of my hands.  The phone rang.

“Hello?”  Came the voice from the other line.  My dad!

“Hi dad?”  Said Joe Biden.

“Son?”

I steadied the President’s hand as I talked to my dad.

“Hey dad, it’s me.  Um… there’s someone here who wants to say hello to you.”

“Hey dad, it’s Joe Biden.  I just wanted to say thank you for saving my life.”

For the next four hours the President of the United States talked to my dad.  Later that day I would look back at the call log to discover that it lasted three and a half minutes, but trust me.  It was hours.  Hours of the President telling my dad how I’d made good, and my dad volleying back saying he thought Biden was doing a great job, especially when it came to foreign policy.  Like ya do. Hours of me being visibly shaken, asking myself what is happening right now, mouthing to Vice President Harris “what is happening right now?” and seeing her roll her eyes as if to say “just go with it- this is what he does.”  And then watching both of them do a very similar dance with Parag, who is incredibly under-represented in this story, but trust me, was a total rock-star that whole day and now one of my ride-or-dies.

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On our way out of the White House, the Secret Service said “Have a good day, and tell all your friends you shut down the White House for fifteen minutes, this was an unscheduled visit!”  We walked to the street. “Farther, please.”  They waved us.  “We can’t resume operation until you’re clear.”  We walked to the end of the block.  “Still farther please.” they called after us.  We turned the corner, and it was done.

Days later my dad would Zoom me to say “I had no idea you were so famous!” 

“Neither did I!!” I’d respond. And we would have a good laugh.  Like nearly everyone else who found out, my dad was saying in his disarming and edifying way “why you?”  And as you saw, I had no real answer.  But it’s half a year later, after the official White House images were sent to me, after President Biden heard the song and wrote me a nice letter quoting it back to me (framed, up on my wall) after the midterms, that I’ve come to know that the truth is a little more nuanced and a lot more satisfying than “I wrote a song for the DNC and they went apeshit over it.” 

After our meeting with the President, Bel, Parag and I went to lunch.  We sat outdoors, had some appetizers and drinks and recapped the events that had just transpired over and over, each time adding more layers- peppering in parts of our inner monologues, cross referencing each one’s experience with our own. If you’re Chinese or have read up on your Maxine Hong Kingston, we were basically Talking Story.  I for one, was relieved to discover that I had not ousted Tony-winner, living legend and godfather of all Asian American theater arts David Henry Hwang from the experience, who was opening a show out of town.   (Which, I know that sounds really conceited.  Like, who would ever let that happen?  But still.)  And I was thrilled to break bread with members of the Creative Committee of the AAPI caucus.  But the whole time I kept staring at Bel.

“Who are you?” We had collectively witnessed the biggest flex I’d ever seen anyone make, and none of us were talking about it.

“I’m just an old Chinese lady.”  She kept saying.

My old Chinese was a little rusty, but I think I got what she meant:  In the same way my first instinct when talking to the President was to honor my father, in the same way that my singers honored David, and David honored Bel, all of us were just walking through a door that someone before us had been holding open.  And in turn, making sure the people following behind would get to walk through it too.  It makes a little more sense to carry someone if you yourself have been carried.  So why me?  Because Joan Almedilla. Because Christine Toy Johnson. Because Raymond J. Lee and Josh Dela Cruz. Because Jose Llana and Jaygee Macapugay. Because David Henry Hwang, Bel Leong-Hong and Parag Parikh. Because my dad. Because all of us. 

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Star Wars is For Everybody, or How I Found My [Shang] Chi

Star Wars is for everybody.  Okay who are we kidding, lately it feels like Star Wars isn’t for anybody.  But not too long ago, (and also a long time ago) Star Wars was for everybody.  …wasn’t it?

You’re five years old.  Star Wars comes out in theaters and your immigrant parents who can’t afford childcare take you to see it, probably to the chagrin of whomever it is you’re sitting next to.  But boy are you glad they did.  It busts your mind wide open.  You can’t wait to tell everyone at school.  Before long, everyone is talking about it and playing it at recess. You and Katie Mitchell, and Marc and Chucky gather on the playground with visions of laser swords and blasters and droids in your collective imaginations.  The adventures you’ll have.

“I’ll play Princess Leia.” Says Katie.

“Great, I’ll play Han.”  You say. 

“You can’t play Han.”  Says Marc.  “Han has brown hair.  Like me.  I’ll play Han.” 

…Okay.  “I’ll play Luke then.” You say.

“You can’t play Luke.”  Says Chucky.  “Luke has blonde hair.  Like me.” 

…Hm.  Okay.  “Then who should I play?” 

“You can play Chewie.”  They say. 

Chewie.  Who has brown hair.

You don’t know it yet, but years down the way you’ll have a word for this: microaggression. Till then you’ll simply recognize it as an exclusion of convenience.  You’ll recognize it later in life too when out of the blue your shoulders tense up or your breathing gets labored, or your heart rate increases when someone tells you somebody else should do something you’re qualified to do too. Meanwhile everyone else goes on with their day. This will be a theme. Eventually you’ll also come to recognize that no one is born thinking something isn’t for them. They are told that repeatedly until they decide it is easiest not to disagree. You wonder how if something is for you, it is any less for you when it is also for someone else.

But that’s not true, they’ll tell you in high school when you study Joseph Campbell.  It is the classic hero’s journey.  Universal in its theme and immediately recognizable to all. Also, it’s science fiction.  It’s absolutely for you.  (They won’t know that it’s really a Western- neither will you till much later.) Years after they insist Star Wars is for you, you’ll be given a word for why they see something one way and you see it another.  (Unconscious bias) Or more to the point, why they have no context to see what you’re seeing.  And you’ll lose nights of sleep wondering how to get them to open their eyes.  Because fucking Chewbacca had brown hair too.

Before any of that though, you’ll discover comic books and video games.  You’ll see all of your friends go gaga over the same transforming robots your grandparents and cousins used to show you whenever you visited them overseas.  And you’ll think maybe it’s okay to like this?  Spider-Man wore a mask.  It could have been anyone under there.  Maybe it’s okay to like that? But then in Secret Wars 8, when Reed Richards repairs Iron Man’s armor, they have a three bubble conversation about Rhodey’s black skin, and if it was surprising to see a Black man under the armor.  Reed Richards, one of the smartest men in the Marvel Universe will of course not see color.  It’ll make you feel a little better, but yellow skin isn’t even part of the conversation so just to be safe you’ll decide to stick to Spider-Man. 

You finally get to high school and they’ll call you oversensitive and laugh you off.  They’ll also call you Chink when you inadvertently over-step into their realm of privilege.  And sometimes, they’ll be afraid of you.  But that won’t be satisfying either, because they won’t be afraid of you for your very real, very palpable rage.  They’ll be afraid of you because they think you know karate.  Which itself is rage inducing because a) you don’t, b) you aren’t Japanese, and c) they could give a fuck either way.  So your quiet rage gets quietly amplified.  Lost in the cacophony of Short Rounds, Long Duck Dongs, Mr. Miyagis…Not all of them will be that insensitive though.  Your quadruple-bypass, so-old-he-has-Jesus’-beeper-number, Social Studies teacher who looks like Santa Claus and is actually named Mr. White will see your tennis racket and say “Are you gonna be as good as Michael Chang one day?”  He’ll mean it as an encouragement, but all you’ll notice is he didn’t think you’d ever want to be as good as Agassi or Sampras.  You will have no idea how to unpack that for a long, long time.  Fucking Chewbacca. 

In college you’ll have finally learned to downplay questions like “where are you really from” only to realize that when people in New York City ask you that, it’s because they’re actually curious about your second culture.  They want to celebrate how you are not the same as them, and want you to celebrate how they are not the same as you. To you it’s the silent, biological death-sentence you spent the last eighteen years trying to distance yourself from.  To them it will be something great. You’ll start to wonder if maybe it is. You’ll go to a screening of Jackie Chan’s First Strike.  Dubbed in English, with Jackie doing his own lines.  Your overseas family will have been talking about him for a decade by then, but you won’t have given a shit about it until his breakthrough here in the states after Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop become cult favorites.  In one scene of the film that does not involve martial arts stunts of any kind, just a beautiful woman talking to a handsome man, you’ll start to cry uncontrollably.  In the theater. Because you’ll realize this is the first time you’ve ever seen people who looked like you on a big screen talk about anything in English that wasn’t martial arts or being from somewhere else.  You’ll deeply love it for what it is but feel an ache about it too.  Because you’ll understand on some level that this wasn’t made for you either.  It was made for the people who laugh at you when they hear your busted Mandarin. 

By now you’ll have starred in your first independent feature- the first of two that will go nowhere and do nothing for your fledgling acting career.  (Though many of your costars from both and even one First AD will go on to be in big, badass things- I’m looking at you Nelson Lee.) And you'll start to piece together something that, years down the line people will call Institutional Racism.  And even though it troubles you that your enemy doesn’t have a face, or even yet a name, you’ll kind of gloss over it.  Because by then you’ll have found your tribe and Star Wars will be cool again.  At least to everyone you play with. Anyway, fuck Chewbacca.

You’ll decide that even if nothing is really ever for you, and the reasons behind why are myriad and Machiavellian, there’s something you actually can do: make things that are.  One of your directors will say “Ask yourself what you want to see that no one else is making.  Make that.” You’ll let that be your compass for the next twenty years.  You’ll write for people who look like you before it was cool.  You’ll insist on working with female directors before it was cool.  In that twenty years a lot of things change.  Politics change, demographics change, your own worldview changes.  You’ll recognize how much of a racist you yourself have always been.  You’ll see that you got it from your parents, your family, your church and literally every white student you went to school with.  You’ll wonder how anyone ever decolonizes their thinking at all when there’s literally no one around to reflect truth to them.  Then you’ll realize you yourself did it and you’ll wonder how anyone couldn’t.  You’ll see colleagues workshopping their shows at universities.  You’ll be sad you’ll never get to do that because what conservatory has six to ten Asian performers who would be featured in anything you wrote?  (Though eventually you too will get to do that!).  Somewhere in there Fox will launch the X-Men film franchise and you’ll be reunited with old friends.  Only instead of communing with them in a dark basement, you’ll commune with them in a dark theater with Dolby surround sound.  Hugh Jackman will say “bub” and everyone will talk about it like they know.  You won’t call anyone out on their fair-weather fandom because in one sense you yourself were a fair weather fan. 

Eventually they’ll make movies for Transformers, and GI Joe and even though they won’t be good, they’ll be cool because they exist.  You feel comfortable claiming them because no one else wants to. (They’ll make new Star Wars films too, but maybe the less said about those the better.)  Before you know it the Marvel Cinematic Universe spends ten years redefining popular culture and you (and your wife and daughter) are there for it.  You buy a ticket opening weekend of Shang-Chi knowing full well that with an unvaccinated child at home you won’t be seeing the film.  You just want your dollar to be counted.  You’ll give away your ticket on the Buy-Nothing Facebook community.  You’ll have no regrets.  Your wife, god love her, will insist that you be a part of this conversation though.  And lets you go see it at 9:30pm on a Wednesday.  There are six people in the theater.  It doesn’t get much safer.

You immediately post: “I thought about writing an essay on the significance of Shang Chi. And I may still. But at the end of the day all that really matters is literally every frame of this film was made for me and that's never happened before in my life and fuck anyone who says representation doesn't matter.” 

It gets around two hundred likes when you decide “Maybe I should write that essay after all.” 

You can’t stop thinking about this film.  Is it Winter-Soldier-levels of perfect?  Nah.  Is it Black-Panther-levels of world-changing?  Nope.  But it’s yours.  It’s all yours.  It’s yours because your mother has gifted you jade and you held on to it in its tiny cotton pouch for as long as you remember.  It’s yours because when she passes down jewelry she also passes down ghost stories. Family members who are visited upon by dragons and spirits. Your legacy to claim. It’s yours because you too have gone years without speaking to your sibling and if you found yourself in an actual cage match with him as you often wished in your youth, you’d probably do something unnecessarily dramatic.  (We’re cool now, chill.)  It’s yours because only a few people know your Chinese name and recognize how deeply fitting it is for you. They’ll know it as your secret identity.  They’ll know there’s no telling if the name conjured you or if you conjured the name. It’s yours because when you told dad you won the Richard Rodgers that one year his response was “…neat.” And that was progress.  And when you told mom you were invited to speak at your high school graduation in 2019 her response was “Your father did that too.”  It’s yours because the rest of that night was spent talking about their past instead of your future. Because to them there’s no difference. It’s yours because you were never Long Duck Dong, you were never Short Round, you were never Mr. Miyagi even when people said you were.  It’s yours because you were never fucking Chewbacca, even when people said you were.  You were Indiana Jones.  You were Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.  You were Peter Parker. You were Daniel-san. You were Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. And yes, you were Michael Chang too when you wanted to be. And now nobody’s saying nothing.

Thoughtless Tweets, the Last Dragon and You [read: mostly me]

About a week ago a prominent Broadway composer tweeted out a rather innocuous, cheeky text to their followers, of which I had been one, which read simply: As we start to reopen houses of worship (I mean, theaters…) can I put a word in for the seriously silly, the delightfully fun, the chaotically odd, the outrageously funny, the light as a feather?  Not EVERY show has to change the world.  A couple hours of laughs goes a long way.

Yes I liked my own tweet. What? I like it!

At the time I noticed it, it had been liked 2,392 times, quoted 60 times and retweeted 206 times.  So, on the grand scheme of that platform, not a huge dent, but not a drop in the well either.  That was also several hours into its lifespan.  It’s probably higher now.  

I have to confess, I’ve been mulling this tweet over in my head over the last few days and I really can’t let it go.  So I did what I always do.  I wrote.  Rather, I’m writing.  I’m intentionally leaving this composer’s name off this essay even though it would be very easy to find them, and frankly, they put their name on the tweet so it wouldn’t be inappropriate to name check them here- but I’m leaving it off because this isn’t a takedown, and it isn’t punching up.  It’s just… me expressing a deep concern. 

My response to this person at the time was “why is [sic] the delightfully fun, the seriously silly or the chaotically odd at cross purposes with changing the world?” For in my experience they are not.  Surely, Sponge Bob, The Cher Show, Avenue Q, and Head Over Heels all self-identify as chaotically odd, delightfully fun or seriously silly but all had very big world-changing ideas, and integrated them superbly.  But the more I think about it, the more the last part of this tweet troubles me:  Not every show has to change the world.   First of all I strongly disagree.  Because if you’re not trying to change the world with your art, you’re doing art wrong.  And if you’re only in it for the commerce, how dare you invoke the theater as a religious experience?  But third of all how wonderfully privileged it must be to have had so many opportunities in one’s career that not every show needs to change the world.  Or, as seems applicable in this context, how wonderfully privileged is it to not have to carry an entire people, culture, gender, race along with you in your work at all times.  Because for many of my Asian and Asian American colleagues, this is a way of life.  A burden we didn’t necessarily sign on for when we chose this path, but proudly carry despite having no say in the matter.  Certainly the same can be said for my Trans writer and actor colleagues, my women writer and actor colleagues, my Black writer and actor colleagues, my Latinx writer and actor colleagues, my gay writer and actor colleagues, my non-binary writer and actor colleagues… and most certainly for anyone who falls in the intersection of any of those things, this is true. 

If the current conversation surrounding Raya and the Last Dragon shows us anything, it’s that there are still people in America that are grossly under-represented in American media.  And moreover, there’s a public demand to rectify this. (And if you’re having trouble wrapping your head around the dangers of under-representation you needn’t look any further than our current Senate for a parallel.) 

The conversation surrounding the casting of Raya is a worthy one. Why shouldn’t that film have an all-Southeast Asian cast?  And more pointedly, why is the response to that question the exact same as it was twenty three years ago when Pat Morita, George Takei, and Gedde Watanabe (three deservedly celebrated Japanese performers) were voicing Chinese characters in the animated Mulan? (Eddie Murphy, and Harvey Fierstein, I’m giving you a pass on this conversation today, but we’ll circle back so have your answers ready, please.)

I had to wait twenty years to see a second Chinese American sitcom on my TV.  I had to wait twenty three years to see another badass Disney heroine with eyes that kiss in the corners (who didn’t even get to sing!)  And if you look like me, so did you.  How is it then, that someone can say with full commitment and zero irony that not every show has to change the world?  Who is the person who can afford to say that?   I know you know where I’m going with this, so I’m going to answer this question a bit differently this time.  This person serves tirelessly for their guild, they advocate for writers, and education, and they strive to be a thought- and conversation-leader.  That’s not hyperbole, I’ve literally sat in meetings with this person where they’ve said “our goal and our responsibility is to lead the conversation on x, y and z.”  They head a foundation which daily, provides economic relief for distressed writers, and in 2021, that’s like all the writers.  So… not so simple.  Yet, in its complexity one thought materializes in stark relief: before we can change anything, we have to decolonize our own minds.

Yes, this is actually me. Shut up.

How do we do this?  Easier said than done sure. For me it’s one part imagination and one part “medical diagnosis.”  Let’s look at the latter first.  Medical diagnosis. I use this phrase as a catch-all for “let’s be analytical” forgive me, I’m not a real doctor, I only played one on TV.  Here goes.

1. Medical Diagnosis: If pan-Asian substitutional casting is a symptom, what’s the disease? 

a.       The misconception that Asians are a monolith. [read: we are all the same]

b.      The false notion that one story is enough to satisfy twenty plus years of collective curiosity about any given culture or people

i.      Maybe this stems from another false notion: that there is only one story for any “other” culture- in which case I refer you to point A.

c.       The myth that there aren’t enough performers of Southeast Asian descent that can handle a multi-million dollar project/franchise/fill in the blank here.

Deductive reasoning and a very small amount of Googling can debunk all of the above.  I mean you could probably type in my name or Christine Toy Johnson’s name, or Pun Bandhu’s name or Diep Tran’s name or Courtney Ariel’s name (Easter egg!), or David Henry Hwang’s name or Baayork Lee’s name or Peilin Chou’s name or “AAPAC” or “Asian American Arts Alliance” [and like a thousand other organizations I don’t have space to name-drop here] followed by the word “discussion”, “casting” or “inherent bias” or “de-centering whiteness” to find all the statistics and facts you need. (I’ll not spare you that satisfaction.  Go to.)

2. Imagination:  What if the story YOU have to tell has an audience?  What if you are an original?  What if your contribution is just as valuable as the aforementioned Tony-nominated composer? 

a.       What show/story do you want to see that no one is writing/telling?  Write it.  Tell it.  What the actual F is keeping you?

b.      Who were the people that told you this was a bad/inaccessible/half-baked/un-sellable idea? 

i.      WHY ARE YOU LISTENING TO THEM?

ii.      WHY AREN’T YOU LISTENING TO ME?  You mad bro?

Seriously though. I’ve not seen the Ratatouille TikTok musical- I am familiar that it exists, and I know a few of the contributing writers- they are brilliant. From what I have read, it seems like not only was it light hearted fun, but also served as a very positive outlet in very dark times. And I’d wager, was for many in our industry a therapeutic experience. Let’s make no mistake. There’s a PLACE for that. A very necessary place for it. I don’t begrudge anything that’s “a couple hours of laughs.” What I’m suggesting is that it shouldn’t come at the cost of your story being told. And further, that looking at it in that way is not only unnecessarily binary, but also potentially damaging. So maybe let’s not be that way?

I’d take a moment now to write some pithy wrap up, to encourage you but literally this is all I have to say and I don’t want to keep you from changing the world.  As clearly, others would have you not. Also I have a one year old who wants to put a bow in my hair.  And THAT is the most important part of my day.  So stop reading and go counter-program well-intentioned if irresponsibly worded tweets.  Know that I love you. 

Tank-aret – Developing Under-represented Artistic Voices at the Tank

How do you solve a bias with ideas?  How do you catch and burn the system down?  How do you plug conceptual diarrheas?  You curate the coolest cabaret in town. 

I’m sitting at the Citizen M hotel lobby- I sit here a lot.  And I write about sitting here a lot.  It’s a cool place where cool people have cool ideas.  Take Ellarose Chary.  My good friend, colleague and co-contributing editor to Musical Theater Today.  Flip around, you’ll find her work.  I’ll wait.  What you won’t find in this tome is an article she wrote for the Lillys in 2016 called Is the Pipeline a Pipe Dream for Emerging Women Musical Theater Writers? Which takes a stark look at gender inequality in awards-winning.  The article itself exploded my social media feed four years ago when it went live and is one of many reasons she’s a rock star.  But more on that later.  Right now, I have many questions about Tank-aret, the monthly showcase series she and collaborator Brandon James Gwinn co-curate for The Tank.

TH       Tell me about Tank-aret.

EC       So that started because I was/am good friends with Rosalind Grush who was at the time the co-artistic director at the Tank.  I’ve known Rosalind for a long time.  She has since gone on to other new adventures, having shepherded the Tank from their big move from the small space on 46th St. to the bigger space on 36th where they are now, and they had two theaters and more equipment to do music and cabaret.  And Rosalind went to a cabaret event that someone invited her to downtown and she said to me casually off-hand, “I was at this cabaret event on Monday night and I thought ‘who goes to things on a Monday night? Oh Cabaret!”  And so she asked me if I knew anyone who would want to do cabaret at the Tank.  I said “Rosalind, I know one or two hundred people who want to do cabaret at the Tank.  But you can’t just do that, there needs to be a way

TH       Like an angle?

EC       You need way to weed out- like they have curators.  They have a dance curator.  I thought they needed a cabaret curator.  Because you can’t just do it.

TH       Well, you could…

EC       You could.  But I wouldn’t recommend it.  And then I was mentioning to Brandon and said “who should we give her to help with that?  Because someone should help with that.”  And Brandon was the one who said “ we should put our money where our mouth is and we should do it.”  And I thought we didn’t have time for that.  And they can’t pay us…. And we were trying to do the right thing, and he said “All we ever do is bitch about all the people we know who don’t get the opportunities that we want, and all these other cabaret series that are boring New Yorker, cis white…

TH       I love New York, it’s such a great town, and it’s dirty but I have my dreams and you love me…

EC       And that is not a dig at the many cabaret series around town that I love.  Because I love those.

TH       Do you?  I don’t.

EC       I have a great deal of affection for New York Theater Barn. 

TH       Ooooooh… I wouldn’t consider that cabaret. 

EC       Oh, interesting.  Okay.  Well that’s what I think of it.

TH       Okay. Great.  Now we’re triangulated.

EC       Yeah, so it’s not a dig at their new works, which I’ve done many of, and which your wife [former NYTB Associate Artistic Director Laura Brandel] had a hand in.  We just felt like it’s really hard to get a chance to do them.  We had been thinking about doing Joe’s Pub, and Brandon does the Duplex all the time and we’re looking at these and see that it’s really expensive when you’re coming up-but it’s the first opportunity that I had when I moved to New York, it was the first opportunity that both of us had.  It gets you video.  It’s this thing to do. 

TH       I literally fell in love with someone there.

EC       So we started to think about the Tank, and what that is, as a venue people already recognize, and so we thought “maybe it should just not be cis white men.”  And we should just get people to do this, and it wasn’t really going to be for us.  It wasn’t meant to be an opportunity for us- we were just going to go find people that we know.  And the first year was very much me being “who are people that I know?”  Like Dyan Flores.  I said “I know you have a project. I know you haven’t finished it.  I really want it to exist and be on stage” so I went up to her and said “I’m giving you a spot.  You have to finish your Rahm Emanuel musical so that I can watch it.”  So there was that.  And then there was Brandon making lists of artists that he knew because he knows of the musical theater people.  And so he’d say “it’d be really interesting to have that person do a solo show. Or be given more space than they’re usually given.” 

TH       I love that.

EC       The Tank’s thing is to give us safe space to bite off more than we can chew.  The thing for underrepresented artists is always that we don’t get second chances right?  You don’t get to develop anything.  We have to be good the first time.  [Playwright] Marcus Scott said this.  He had a 54 Below show not long after his Tank-aret so he got to go very confidently into 54 Below.  And that’s what we want.  We want people who are not felt empowered to put something together, so we could say “here’s a thing, go do it.”  Or we want someone who needs an opportunity.  It doesn’t have to be a halfway point, it can be the thing.   So we took it to Megan Finn and Rosalind and said “this is what we’d like it to be and what we want to do” and they said “You guys want to do that?  Obviously we would like you to do that, we never dreamed that you would be willing to!” And we knew it was crazy but we also knew it should be a thing.  So we figured out with them how to do it such that it wouldn’t be too much of a burden on us, and defined what would be expected of the artists.  The first year we were more hands on because we really wanted it to fly, but going into our third year now, we have enough artists where we are looking into producing a showcase night where artists who don’t have a full night of material can do ten minutes.  So for those, we take on the producorial responsibilities.

TH       It seems to me though that if everyone else is benefitting from this platform you’ve created, maybe there’s no harm in you benefiting from it too.  Have you and Brandon done one?

EC       That first year we did do one for ourselves.  We needed content for the series, and had just been given a grant to do a concert of TL;DR [Thelma and Louise: Dyke Rock] so we did do it and counted it as a Tank-aret, but then afterward we decided “this is not for us.  We both have opportunities.  We don’t need to take up one of these slots.” Though I did do one this year with two fledgling writers which was more on-mission and really needed to be a date on a calendar.  So there isn’t a purity there where we can’t program ourselves.  We definitely will if we need to, but we’ve discussed this before- one of the things that is both wonderful and maddening to me is how easy it is for me to program this.  It’s wonderful because I can, in minutes and without any research, come up with a list of twenty five people that I want to ask, for twelve slots.  And it’s maddening to me because I put in no effort and program nine or ten people for a twelve slot season.  Why is no one else programming them?  This idea that artists who aren’t cis white men are not out here making art, and that’s the reason why we’re under-represented is ridiculous.  There’s such a wealth of artists if you put even a little effort in.  Maybe others have to put a little bit more effort in, but they’re out there. 

TH       A commercial producing entity might respond with: we know that those people exist but they’re not ready for prime time yet.  Let us know when they’re ready for prime time.

EC       I think it’s a mix.  I don’t think my entire season is people at the halfway point.  I think we have many artists who are ready for prime time.  But my real answer to that question is “you are pouring resources into plenty of cis white men who are at that same point.  So… it’s not like you’re reserving your resources for artists who are “ready” whatever the hell that even means, but look at who you are putting those resources in to?  What’s that demographic look like?   Don’t get me wrong- I like a lot of those more privileged artists’ work.  It’s not even about that.  I just have seen in the last few years on Broadway a lot of stories by those lucky few white men where the women and people of color are poorly drawn.  And it feels like anyone else might be told they needed to hone their craft a little bit more before they’re given such a big platform. 

TH       I’ve seen a few of those myself.  I won’t give specifics, but we were having a discussion at the BMI workshop this past week about a show from a recent season centered around a female character and the general response in the room was “it would have been nice if they had a single woman on that creative team.” 

EC       Right! And I’m just like why?  It just seems like with Broadway being as financially risky as it is already, to bring in someone on your creative team who has no firsthand experience writing those characters is to absorb even more risk.  Thing is, we simply don’t have trouble finding artists for Tank-aret.  And I’m not like “in it” as I used to be either.  I used to be really able to know everybody that’s doing everything and now I’m old and no longer in that “unpaid-labor/literary job” tier, going to readings all the time or feel it’s my responsibility to know everything.  But we had one person for our 2020 season that I emailed about it and even then I didn’t have to ask them.  I didn’t even get to the stage where I had to actively look before I had nine slots filled.  I think we have one or two in the fall that we’re waiting on.  But we’re programmed February, March, April, May, June, July.  I’m glad it wasn’t a ton of work but it’s almost embarrassing how little work it was.  To have that amazing group of artists at various levels of success who have been recognized for it.

TH       So what do you think is the difference between you, who can’t toss a feather without it hitting someone she can program and someone else who complains about not being able to find anyone?

EC       I think for any number of reasons, people feel icky about saying “we’re not going to give this opportunity to cis white men.”  So there’s a thing where people don’t create a box that necessitates them finding this person.  They give themselves permission to look and not find them and take the easier way out.  And again, that’s not the mission of everything.  I’m a white person.  And I don’t want everything to be unavailable to white people because I also like to write things?  So I understand that different platforms have different missions.  But I also think you have to be honest with yourself a little bit because if you know that that’s what you’re looking for, then you’re going to see it a little bit more.  Also I do think there’s a little bit of infrastructure that I’ve built over the course of my career because I care about that. So I offer that it’s not like it’s immediately possible.  You do have to put in some work to build your infrastructure.  But I also think building the infrastructure is easier than some people think it is.  It’s a three step process.  First you accept the premise that these artists exist.  Then you accept the premise that they’re talented.  If you accept those two things, then you must accept that they’re making work and that they must be making it somewhere.  Once you’re there you just have to say to yourself “if it’s not being made in the places that I’m going, then I’m going to the wrong places.”

TH       If it’s a given that there is inherent bias.  That the whole of Timothy Huang’s pedigree hinges on an aesthetic predetermined by Euro centrism and the patriarchy- I’m not necessarily going to have the facility to even see that you, Ellarose, a female artist creating work are talented.  I’m going to see something very, very different.  How do I unsee that?  How do you open my eyes?

EC       I think that’s tricky because we have this entire process that is completely subjective that we’ve convinced ourselves is objective.  So the first thing is that you burn it all down.  Honestly.  The first response is burn it all down and say “those people should not be in power.” They aren’t qualified because their viewpoint is compromised.  Instead of saying “They are the authority, and they are right and we have to figure out how to work within that” we say “those people are under-qualified to be in power because they are too limited in their scope and the industry is bigger than them and they are too- it isn’t even necessarily because of their age, but-

TH       It might be because they never had to learn how to pass the torch to the generation after them because most of that generation were wiped out in the AIDS epidemic.  Nobody ever taught them how to mentor.

EC       That’s a really big part of it.  And because they live in a society where they are fish that can’t feel water.  But truly I feel the people you’re describing are unqualified for their positions and so we have to recognize that and burn it all down.  But in the interim, I think we pose the question differently.  Marsha Norman and I had this conversation when I did my fellowship at the Guild and commented that the Ebb Award [which pays out $60K to the winning writer or writing team] only goes to white men.  She said “should I give them a call and ask if they want to be introduced to any women songwriters?”  Which, I don’t know that she did that but it did lead to that blog I wrote for The Lillys about the pipeline.   We need to say to people: Look around.  Look at the landscape.  Separate the question of quality of work and ask yourself “do you think that women are incapable of writing good musicals?  Do you think that people of color or incapable of writing good musicals?”  If you believe that, I don’t think that I can change your mind.  Which is why I’m like “burn it all down.” I honestly think most people don’t believe that if you put it to them that way.  The people that I’ve talked to about it truly just don’t know where to find us.  I’ve gotten a lot of “I want to do this. Where do I find people.”  And that’s a little frustrating because I’m an artist and I’m standing right here.  And you haven’t programmed me, but you’re asking me to tell you how to do it and but also for free.  But also… Google?  Google especially now that trans lab is a thing and Musical Theater Factory lab is a thing but nowadays when I get that question I can just say “come to Tank-aret!”

TH       I’d to take a minute and footnote that at the time of your conversation with Marsha, the Ebb award itself was eleven years old and three of its sixteen winners were women.  In the four years that followed your article, the number rose to five out of twenty three.  Put a different way, before your blog, women were winning once every five years.  After your blog, they were winning as often as men were.

EC       Isn’t that interesting.

TH       To go back to your statement before though, I think the trouble is people rarely say yes or no if asked that way.  It’s “I can’t list five women /POCs who write musicals.” 

EC       Great.  So the problem then is that you don’t believe they exist, it’s that we’re having trouble programming them in your sphere.  And maybe it’s that you need to bring on somebody else.  If you have that bias, and you’re unable to do the work or willing to do the work or able to understand that you are the thing in your own way.  Maybe the thing to do is hire someone within your organization who can. 

TH       Which is thankfully a more and more common practice.

EC       I think that the whole underpinning of this conversation and everything we’ve been talking about since the beginning is that as long as we allow America and as an extension of that the arts, to be run by corporate capitalism we have far fewer solutions.  It incentivizes certain things because of their monetary value, which are not inherently artistic.  The conditions of America create a situation in which we can’t be individuals who can make art because we do not have a guarantee of food or shelter or healthcare.  If there was universal healthcare and universal housing and access to food was secured then we could truly have a capitalism that people pretend to want, which is a merit based “best work rises to the top” system.  But circumstances being what they are, that’s just impossible.  I don’t think there should be an equality of merit in terms of what’s good and what isn’t but it’s so skewed by capitalism and white supremacy and the patriarchy that we can’t even have that conversation. 

TH       I mean, there’s so many conversations we can’t have until we…

EC       Until we topple all white supremacy, topple all hetero-patriarchy, topple all class warfare and predatory capitalism and the denial of basic civil rights.  And we haven’t even talked about ethno-centrism, jingoism and xenophobia and the idea of the American musical and what it means to have the American musical. 

TH       Exactly.  So… maybe let’s topple all that stuff before deadline so we can actually have those meaningful conversations!

EC       Ha!

TH       Anything else you want to close out on?

EC       I’m not one of those people who think all work is good.  There is work that is bad. And there is work that doesn’t deserve to be funded, or produced.  But I don’t think that means those artists shouldn’t be allowed to make art.   There should be venues and opportunities for people that are not necessarily steering the culture.  There should be more community theater in New York.  There’s all these reasons why it should exist at all levels.  Everyone who wants to create, write, make something should be allowed to do that. 

PC: M aria Belford

ELLAROSE CHARY (she/hers) is an award-winning writer and advocate for inclusion in musical theater. She is a Richard Rodgers Award winner, Dramatists Guild Fellow, NYFA Fellowship Playwriting/Screenwriting Finalist, Kleban Prize Finalist, Kernodle New Play Award Finalist, and winner of a BOH Cameronian Arts Award and the Weston Award for Musical Theater.

Her musical TL;DR: THELMA LOUISE; DYKE REMIX is a winner of the 2021 Richard Rodgers Award and has been developed at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center (NMTC Incubator Residency, NMTC Finalist), Rhinebeck Writers Retreat (Triple R Residency), and the UArts Polyphone Festival. Her play THE WRONG QUESTION was selected for the 2021 Jewish Playwriting Contest. She is the bookwriter for the award-winning THE DOLL MAKER’S GIFT, which opened at The Rose Theater in 2019 (“Families should flock to this one.” – Omaha World-Herald) and her play THE SÉANCE MACHINE premiered off-off Broadway at Obie Award Winning The Tank in 2019. Her other projects include: COTTON CANDY AND COCAINE, HOW TO SURVIVE THE END OF THE WORLD (featured on Broadway.com, BroadwayWorld, Hollywood Soapbox, and 89.5 FM Star), THE LAKE AND THE MILL, QUEER. PEOPLE. TIME., PATRIETTES (The #FWord Finalist) and the Malaysian musical MARRYING ME.

She has been in residence at Ars Nova (Uncharted), Harvard ArtLab, Catwalk Institute, and has received an Anna Sosenko Grant and a NAMT grant. Her work has been produced, developed and commissioned by the Great Plains Theater Conference, the Drama League, The Civilians and City Center (Encores! Off-Center), Theater C, AFO Solo Shorts, Prospect Theater, Joe’s Pub, and 54 Below. She was a guest lecturer and production studio lead artist at Harvard University in the Theater, Dance and Media department in Fall 2020.

She is an activist and advocate for inclusion in media both on and off stage. She has written for The Lilly Awards Blog, HowlRound, and Musical Theater Today (where she is a contributing editor). She has appeared on panels at NYMF and with Honest Accomplice Theater and co-curates Tankaret, a cabaret series for underrepresented voices. She believes the future of the American theater is universal healthcare. MFA: NYU, BA: Brown University.

Gifts of Heaven, or My Lynn Cohen story.

In May of 2002 I had just finished my MFA and honestly didn't know where I was. I didn't want to be an actor anymore, I didn't know how to be a writer yet, a girl I had been waiting seven years to call my partner suddenly ghosted on me. I had wandered clear off the map and didn't know it. (Some of you might recognize this as chapter one of my "Deborah Craig Saved My Life" story.)

Out of the clear blue I got a call from a theater company I had worked with before (2G) to do a reading of a then-new play.  Lloyd Suh's The Children of Vonderly. The reading was at The Public, and I had never worked there before so I said "sure I can do that." I had literally nothing else to do and was very grateful for the invitation.

It was a very different play from what it would eventually become, and it was a very different time from a casting perspective. I was asked to play an adoptee who used a wheelchair: two things I had zero real-world experience with. I'd like to think that these days that offer would not even have come my way. But that's what it was. Most of the cast played adoptees to the titular [deceased] Vonderly in that piece, and Lynn played our matriarch. I think I may have been the oldest sibling (surprise surprise). I might be remembering this wrong, forgive me Lloyd, it was eighteen years ago. There was a passage in it where I had to describe heaven. I had to tell her what I thought her husband was doing in heaven, why we shouldn’t mourn him. When I initially read the passage I knew exactly what it was. Lloyd's prose is as purposeful as it is rich. It wasn’t the emotional apex of the story, and it certainly wasn’t intended to be a meal. But it had weight to it. Which was disconcerting only because I had been two years out of practice and a little unsure of myself.

But in rehearsal Lynn was sitting there next to me listening and at one point she put her hand on mine, never breaking eye contact. She didn’t say anything. She just held my hand and listened. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. But in that brief exchange her energy occupied my person like a warm hug and I had permission to feel again. Suddenly, I couldn’t make it through that passage. I literally could not read the page through my tears. I knew even then that on this third day of our 29 hour reading I wasn’t mourning my adoptive father, or the children and wife he left behind. I was mourning the end of my life as an actor, the end of the future I thought I wanted with ghost girl, the end of my twenties, the end of a New York City I had come of age in. (This was less than nine months after 9/11.) And because Lynn held my hand, it was all okay. It was all a gift from heaven.

I would meet her again four more times in my life and four more times she would have no recollection of who I was. I would never remind her, as I was a completely different person in 2002 and it seemed fitting that during a time in which I had so little lasting memory, the week that I spent with her might only be conjecture. Might only be something that existed because it couldn’t be disproven.

See, I may not be able to prove that I did a reading at the Public, or that I once worked with the world famous Lynn Cohen on a Lloyd Suh play. But I can prove that I knew her because she gave me permission to breathe again. Thank you, Lynn for giving us all permission to breathe again.

Good. Fast. Cheap. Any two, but never all three.

There’s a triangle wedged in the heart of art as commerce. You’ve heard this before. Good, fast, cheap. Any two, but never all three. If you want something good and fast, it won’t be cheap. If you want something good and cheap, it won’t be fast. If you want something fast and cheap, it won’t be good.

For the most part, this has proven pretty honest in my experience. But it also takes the nuance out of a lot of it. There are a few exceptions. And most of those exceptions are determined by a different triangle: profile, passion, price. On the other side of you making something, is another artist who you’ve invited to make something. My wife, a freelance director, will take any job so long as it fulfills one of three things: does it elevate her profile? Then it can be work for cheap. If not that, is it something she is passionate about? Great. If it is neither of these two things, then the price has to be right.

As a writer, it’s often my pleasure to invite someone who is SO good, and for lack of a better phrase, “Accustomed to a certain lifestyle because of it” who will, nonetheless come and record a song for me because it fills their passion. Or is part of a bigger machine that will elevate their profile. It’s rarely a thing they do because I pay handsomely. Wish it wasn’t so, but I work a full time job out of the arts because… institutional biases and an over dependence on consumer culture. That’s a conversation for a different time. Today I want to talk about something completely different, and in order for me to do that with credibility, I nee to first acknowledge the above. That there are two concentric (concentric?) triangles at play in everything.

About a week ago I reached out to a friend. Actually they’re a new friend. I know them through their paramor, who is an old friend. They don’t really know my work, though they do know one of my shows, and maybe their paramor has given them insight into what I’m about. Unclear. But I invited them, via messenger [read: all in text, archiveable and presently available to read from their phone] to come in and record some spoken-word dialogue for a piece I’m recording. We set a date, after which I said “I’m only available after 5, I have to be at my job until then.” They said great. I put it in my calendar.

Here’s what happens next:

I put their name into my calendar. Which means that time, while still mine, has now been promised to them. I would never do it if they hadn’t agreed to it. But since they had, I dedicated that time to them. What I did not do, was find another person to see if they were willing to do the exact same work. Because that seems super douchey. If you’re going to ask someone else, then start there. That’s called respect and integrity. So the day of, I text them again to confirm. They say “what time” and as is very much always the case with me, I said then what I said before: I’m free after 5. [simply scroll up, if there’s confusion about that.] To which they said they could not do it after five because they had to meet their paramor’s family in Great Neck.

What did not happen between then and now? I did not get a call or a text or an email from them saying they had double booked. I heard it on the day of, as I was confirming them. Which meant what for me? It mean that anything I had planned on getting done that morning had to go out the window in favor of finding someone else to come in last minute and do this for me. Which, thankfully, I did.

They apologized (?) and said to send them the music so they could learn it for next time. (WHAT MUSIC???) I ignored. Because there’s nothing they do now, when the stakes are as low as this, that they won’t do when the stakes are super high. When they get their broadway show? When they get their pilot? When, if they are ever so fortunate, they reach the kind of level that will allow them to be accustomed to a certain lifestyle, they will find a reason to devalue who they work with or under schedule or over schedule, or blame their paramor, or any number of things. And now they will most certainly not be invited to come work with me on anything either.

Violin Diary - 2 months in.

Not sure what this will add up to- but I have been teaching myself violin for about two months and have not really been keeping any records, which is probably not healthy since it makes it harder to track my progress. And I suspect that in February, when my daughter is born, my time will be limited and I’ll need to look back on something to motivate myself to find/make the time.

Thus far it’s been pretty fantastic. I bought this violin a few years ago, and began taking bi monthly lessons in the summer. Turns out it was a busy summer of traveling to weddings, retreats and a residency overseas so that never amounted to much. And then my instrument languished.

The phone-call closet at my office has blue sound-proof padding. Makes for a cool photo. Yes I’m practicing at my office now.

This past summer a new protege of mine offered to give me lessons, which seemed like a great and inexpensive remedy until I realized timing was never going to work out due to her other commitments. So I took it upon myself to learn. I bought a few beginner books at her recommendation, some fingering tape and a beginning violin package on the website Udemy, which was probably the best thing, because when I got impatient I could just fast forward. I didn’t need the lessons on music, theory, note reading etc.

I started practicing properly August 1st. Not a lot, just regularly. About a half hour a day. The references my mentee gave me were actually far more useful than the video lessons, though I did take comfort knowing that the video lessons were there, since that was my only real authority figure. I’d learn from the books, and sometimes watch a video to see how the methodology differed. A few things I noticed:

1. The video instructor referred to “high 2s” and “low 3s” which basically referred to fingering that deviated from what is essentially a diatonic scale. I don’t want to say accidentals, but that’s sort of what it felt like initially. Apparently “high 2” and “low 3” are not universal terms? No one else I’ve spoken to has used that phrasing.

2. I learned how to hold the instrument incorrectly from the songbooks, but found the video teacher to be a lot more helpful.

3. I still don’t hold the bow correctly, though my new friend B might help me with that. More on B later.

4. There’s no formal introduction to the use of the fourth finger in the video (which is defined as beginner) yet by page 15 of my beginner book, it is all about that fourth finger.

This last point is where things started to get interesting. As soon as I noticed this discrepancy I texted a friend of mine, asking about the importance of the fourth finger. She makes her living on-stage not in a pit, but is often cast as a singer-musician. I didn’t want to hear from a professional pit musician, since that was not my ambition. To be good enough to play on stage though, that’s something I can wrap my head around even if I don’t actually want that. In brief, she said to try working it in as soon as I can, because it is the finger that is used least, but is no less crucial than the others.

I saw the merit in this. When I played piano- like a million years ago- there were many things I ignored that would come back to bite me on the ass. Not learning how to sight-read for one. Never running a lick in every key for another. (Why Tim? Why would you do that to yourself? Were you THAT lazy? Of course you were.)

So now, naturally, I only sometimes invoke the fourth finger but definitely not as much as I know I should.

A few weeks into the second month, I met B. B is a musician who loves theater and is new(ish) to town, and wanted to meet as many theater people as she could. A mutual friend introduced us and we went on a friend-date during which I discovered she was also a violinist. Since we both had the afternoon free, and our friend-date was not too far from my house, we walked to my house so I could show her how I was teaching myself.

By this time, I’d completely abandoned the video lessons in favor of youtube holes. My favorite channels belong to Nicola Benedetti, a woman named Julia, and The Tune Project.

What was interesting when B and I chatted was her facial expressions when I told her what my warm up was. By this time I’d realized that I didn’t want to follow someone else’s “Adult Beginner” curriculum because they rarely tailored them to “adult beginners who have known theory since grade school” or “who didn’t spend 40% of their week in front of Finale.” So, knowing that I seemed to progress well enough at a half hour a day, I opted for Julia’s warm up, from youtube. B would nod her head in approval, having a vastly deeper experience than mine. It was like getting to look into the future. “If I do this, I’m going to be able to accomplish whatever it is she’s thinking right now.” Or, in the case of watching my bow holding, would make a face like she was in pain just imagining the kind of wrist cramps I would be imposing upon myself. Then when I mentioned that I will sometimes practice my vibrato after the warm up eventhough I don’t expect to be able to apply it for a long time, she smiled. I took that as a good sign. (BTW, I can subdivide into eighths, but I totally get chomped up when I start subdividing into triplets. Something to work towards, I guess.)

She gave me a quick tutorial on how to hold a bow, and showed me a few motions that I’ve already forgotten, but remember understanding why they existed, and that they felt right. I look forward to rediscovering them on my own, now that I have my bow holding technique notes. She also said “it’s totally okay to pizz instead of bow if you’re still struggling with fingering.” Which is something only a teacher can tell you. I could never have given myself permission to do that. So, that was time well spent. She also told me “Don’t bend for the violin. Bring the violin to you.” Which I thought was some kind of metaphor, but apparently I slouch a lot. Got it.

The next day I realized that all good warm-ups need practical application. We didn’t spend forty minutes of our ninety minute ballet class warming up just so we could do exercises in front of a mirror. So I downloaded Julia’s free songbooks. (Thanks Julia!) This is what I learned:

1. I have a strong distaste for Lightly Row. I think it triggers me from when we played recorders in 2nd grade.

2. I have no investment in any of these songs, no offense. It’s a shame there isn’t like, a songbook that has all the songs I liked as a kid, but in a friendly key to someone at my skill level.

3. Oh wait, I’m a Finale Power User, so I can actually just make this myself.

4. Realizing this, I notated the following songs, modelling the notation after both my beginner songbook, the video teacher’s dry erase board, and Julia’s free download:

   • The Luckiest, Ben Folds (mine and my wife’s wedding song)

   • Verdi Cries (an old favorite by 10,000 Maniacs)

   • Hallelujah (because Hallelujah)

   • You’re Aging Well (by Dar Williams)

   • Chandelier (by Sia)

The only hard thing was notating fingering above each note. Getting the text tool to self-align in Finale is still a pain in the ass if you want to anchor them to each measure, which… if you don’t, you’re totally doing it wrong.

Eventually I abandoned trying to keep them level. And also, I don’t think I proofed them well. But by the end of five songs, I learned quickly how to read a stave from a violinists perspective. I will probably lose this if I don’t keep making sheets for myself because I’ve already started to rely too heavily on fingering numbers to read music.

Things I learned once I started playing these songs:

1. It’s a lot easier to hear pitchiness when playing a familiar song. This over say, a song I don’t know or care about or even a basic scale. And it’s (thankfully) far less taxing on the ears than recording my own lessons and playing them back ad nauseum. (Emphasis on nauseum.)

2. Forming callouses is not the same thing as muscle memory.

   • I’m getting great sound out of the strings now, and that’s encouraging. But it’s only because after two months of regular playing, my callouses have formed. I can’t yet rely on muscle memory to land finger placement.

3. High 3s and Low 2s are diatonic. I need to pay more attention to actual key signatures. This is good to know. I never had to as a singer, and I never have to as a composer. As a player, this is… this is kiiiiiinda important.

4. I hadn’t planned it this way, but there’s a slow progression of skill in these five songs. This will be good for me, in terms of setting goals. I am notorious for learning something and then sitting happy. Need to keep pushing forward.

5. I made Chandelier SO accessible in my mind’s eye/ear. I am still so far from playing it well. I think I’ll put it aside for now and work towards it.

6. My new goal in life is to be a still-living version of the dead father from Abominable, who played violin for his daughter which inspired her to go on all sorts of adventures with a Yeti.

And that brings us to today. Final thoughts for now: I’m starting to think more about playing violin than writing musicals. This is probably a good thing. Also, my brain is starting to offset this music-logic with lyrical ideas for actual song songs, which is very exciting to me.

That’s all for now.

T

7 reasons the Casting for Abominable Rocks My World

This fall, American audiences will get to see something they’ve never seen before.  Which, in a world of reboots and franchise sequels, is truly a gift.  The September 27th premiere of Abominable, the animated, feature-length co-production between Dreamworks and Pearl Studio, heralds an unprecedented achievement in American moviegoing:  every Asian character in the film was voice-cast with an Asian actor.  Even background characters.  Which may be even more exciting than the fact that Tenzing Norgay Trainor (who plays Jin) is the actual grandson of the first human to reach the summit of Mount Everest. (#mindblown)

Here are seven spoiler-free reasons why the casting of this film blows my mind. (Full disclosure, I’ve written some songs for an un-related project at Pearl Studio, and they were kind enough to allow me into an advance screening of Abominable for this post.)  

1.     Because feeling like you’re a part of something is crucial for all humans, and representation is crucial to feeling like you’re a part of something.

It’s hard to convey the significance of what it feels like to be seen if for most of your life the TV is saying “Hey there! I see you!” For those of us who had to wait literal decades between seeing an Asian American face in mainstream media, being seen is a feeling that is rarer still than the yeti.  Which, by the way, totally exist and will adopt me someday.

 2.     Because language matters.

There’s literally five words of Chinese in this film, but boy, are they glorious. When was the last time you heard Mandarin spoken in a wide-release American movie by an actual Chinese or Chinese-American?  Don’t get me wrong, I see you Mira Sorvino and John Cena.  But when it’s featured at all, Chinese language is usually showcased to American audiences by stars who have not studied it.  If we’re lucky, they’ve hired a coach and worked on it a few months.  But learning a foreign language isn’t like learning how to tune a violin.  There isn’t a youtube video for fluency.  In the wrong hands, even a Shostokovitch concerto can be poorly represented. 

 3.     Because Albert Tsai should just be in everything.

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.

4.     Because sometimes you need to be told something is for you.

Remember when you were a kid and your folks took you to like, every kids’ film because it was for families and that’s what you were, a family?  What was that like?   Because in my family going to see a kids film was like campaigning for a Christmas present.  You needed to drop hints, time your asks, defend how it wasn’t a waste of money, and if it came down to it, you had to offer to do housework.  You also had to get used to disappointment because it rarely worked.  Movies I had to rent on VHS after I was old enough to drive and get my own money: Labyrinth, The Secret of NIMH, All Dogs Go to Heaven.  (I’ve still never seen Pinocchio or An American Tail.)

5.     Because Ben Kingsley played Gandhi, Mickey Rooney played Mr. Yunioshi, Linda Hunt played Billy Kwan and David Carradine played Kwai Chang Caine and they were all celebrated for it. 

Sure, Emma Stone got her share of internet backlash for playing Alison Ng in 2015, but keep in mind: Emma Stone was cast as Alison Ng in 2015. Someone said okay to that.   In 2015. There is a rich and storied history of Caucasian performers playing Asian characters and well-documented reasons why it isn’t cool today, even though a) it still happens and b) it was never, ever, ever, cool.  Appropriate casting shouldn’t be a unicorn but until such time as it’s as common as saying “bless you” after a sneeze, we should celebrate it when it happens.

 6.     Because you still know Asian-Americans who were asked “so do you know karate” as kids.

Hi.  Have we met?  I’m Tim.  I used to get this ALL the time.  Let’s put a pin in the whole “Karate is Japanese and not Chinese” thing for a moment.  (BTW karate is Japanese and not a Chinese martial art, though Hollywood might have you convinced otherwise.)  The only reason I got asked this at all as a kid is because it was one of two things that American movies told people about Asians.  (And the less said about that second thing, the better.)  Don’t get me wrong- it’s a cool thing.  No one was like “You know karate? I’m gonna kick your ass!!”  But it gets old.  And over time, lends itself to the idea that you are defined by one thing, and not many.  Which is not great, because you are defined by many, many, things. Who do you know is just one thing?  Scallion pancakes.  Scallion pancakes are one thing. No wait. Even scallion pancakes are two things. People are many things.  People are into basketball, posting pics of their shoes, walking dogs.

7.     Because they were the right actors for the job.

I’ve already linked you to IMDB. You can check out the pedigree of this cast for yourself.  I’m not talking about talent right now.  What I’m saying is their being cast at all is evidence of progress.  And that’s worth celebrating.  Imagine being a great actor.  You’ve gone to conservatory, you got your degree, you are gorgeous.  You have everything except an agent to get you seen for the top tier projects.  So some agent decides to take a meeting with you.  You’re stoked. Now imagine the agent doesn’t sign you- not because you aren’t talented, but because he knows he can’t make any money off you.  Because there’s no demand for your look.  Because people who look like you don’t get asked to sell shampoo.  Because people who don’t look like you aren’t used to seeing a face like yours in shampoo commercials.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  What we’re witnessing is the end of a generations-long cycle of institutional bias in the entertainment industry, and as far as I’m concerned that’s huge.  

My Remarks to the 2019 Graduating Class of the Tatnall School

Over the weekend I was invited to deliver remarks at the school I attended for fourteen years before college. It was super surreal, and quite humbling and a very big deal for me. One doesn’t spend fourteen years at a school without aquiring a few battle scars. And certainly if you’re me, you don’t expect that anything you’ve ever done in your life would warrant an invitation to return. when you look at the distinguished alumni who have come out of this place. Athletes, artists, politicians… anyway, it went over pretty well, and a few people were asking about a transcript, so here it is below. Unfortunately [or fortunately?] I didn’t script the big group selfie moment at the top but maybe that’s for the best.

Dr Burns, Mr. Shluter, Mr. Marvin, faculty, distinguished alumni, thank you so much for having me…

Graduating class of 2019… Woohooo!  You guys!  You did it.  Congratulations!  You’re like, SO done.  Not just like, “done,” but actually, effectively, you are “SOOOOO done.”  And I get the magnitude of that.  I started here in Pre Kindergarten.  Fourteen years from there to there, all told.  Even if you weren’t like me, and did not start here in Pre-K, like that last year?  NOT EASY.  I stand up for you.  I’m saying this because I want you to understand that I know somewhat of what you’ve been through, and that I see you.  I don’t want you to lose heart.  Because I’m about to get real:  You are not done.  Not nearly done.  Not remotely done.  You are, in fact, only getting started.

Now, I’ve been thinking a lot about why someone like me, a guy you barely know, (who prior to meeting him, you had literally never heard of before,) would be invited to come speak at your graduation.  And the only reason I could fashion aside from the alumni connection, was that at forty four years old, I’m finally starting to live my best life and I suspect as a parting gift for you, Tatnall would wish that you started living yours way earlier.  That you do is so important.  It’s bigger-than-the-individual important.  I’ll tell you why I say that in just a minute, but right now…

Right now I want to tell you, whether you like it or not, your generation has already been and will continue to be defined by Unprecedented Wackadoo Circumstances: I’ll give you some examples.  The company that created Mickey Mouse now controls what comes out of the mouths of Homer Simpson, Darth Vader and Deadpool.  Someone with no experience or formal education used Instagram to defraud the public to the tune of $100 million by hosting a fake music festival on an island with zero infrastructure.  Also, our government is like, going through some stuff right now.  Point being:  Unprecedented.  Wackadoo.  Circumstances.  Unfortunately, most of that’s completely out of your hands.  In the age of the twenty hour news cycle, hashtag activism and callout culture you take fire on all sides every hour of every day in mostly metaphorical but often very literal ways.  I have no idea what that feels like, and I imagine it sucks.  But I can’t be too disappointed by it because as a result, you all are super woke, you are driven to speak your truths loudly and are prepared to know and defend your convictions from the word “go.”  And that’s beyond impressive, that’s admirable.  It’s as unprecedented as the times in which you live.  But conviction is only half the distance.

Maybe not soon, (but also maybe not soon enough) yours will be the generation that puts into the White House the first woman or LGBTQ President! (or both!).  I’m using this as a literary example, not a political one, but history suggests this is  inevitable.  And with that unprecedented circumstance, and the myriad others like it to come, you’ll find yourselves frequently at odds with rule makers and each other as to the value of that and what the next steps should be.  And what you’ll need to have when you are in those conversations more than conviction, are curiosity and kindness.  Because no satisfying co-operation ever came by being unkind, and no long-term solution to any new-world problem ever came by being un-curious.

And that’s what’s at stake here.  Long-term solutions to new-world problems.  Problems that my generation either failed to predict or succeeded to perpetuate.  (Really sorry about that, by the way.)  You and I might not have anything of substance in common, but graduates, your generation and mine are more the same than not: From the moment we were born, we were Othered.  We grew up in a world that was obsessed with the generation before us.  They were the ones who were marketed to, they were the ones whose opinions were solicited.   In subtext and in plain text we were told we were an afterthought.  A generational post-script.  And like my generation, yours will have no choice but to adapt to a landscape that shifts in twelve months the amount it used to shift in twelve years.  The difference is you won’t gaze at your navel as you rage against the machine.  You have the wherewithal to do it elegantly and fearlessly and with tremendous kindness and curiosity.  I can’t even tell you how proud of you I am for that.

I mentioned earlier that I’m finally living my best life at forty four.  If you’ll allow, I’d like to tell you a little about why and what that is.  Let’s start here: I acted professionally for a few years after college, and did a couple of films and TV shows but mostly nowadays people know me because I write theater that is thought provoking and well-considered.  Usually that involves writing for characters that look like me, and share my experiences as a second generation immigrant American.  A bi-product of that is on social media, I look kind of amazing.  It would appear from my profiles that I spend a lot of time on red carpets taking selfies with Pulitzer, and EGOT winners.  Wanna see a picture of me holding the Best Song Oscar from Frozen or the Grammy Award for From A Distance? Or sitting at the right hand of Steven Sondheim? Maybe you’re more curious about that footage of me on The Sopranos or why Lin-Manuel Miranda drew the Terminator robot on a legal pad and slid it over to me during a meeting despite not even knowing my name.

If I’m being honest, my hope is that you don’t care about any of these things.  But let’s allow that you do.  All of these things are sort of real?  But also completely artificial.  The realest thing about them is that they are evidence that people far more influential than me are attracted to where my curiosity and kindness has led me.  And they want to go there too.  I spent most of my 20s trying to fit into a system that was not designed for a person who looked like me, and certainly not prepared to adapt for one by any measure.  No one was ever saying to me in college  “do you know what a great role for you would be?” Because there were none.  For me.  Then I spent my 30s punching back because there should have been.  That was my conviction.  That there should have been.  Theater self-identifies as the place for misfits.  As the place where there’s something for everyone.  So when there wasn’t, I punched back.  I wasn’t even trying to be antagonistic. I was just trying to carve out a space for myself in a community that evidently didn’t think I had anything to offer it.  In any event, something really curious happened.  I tried so hard to convince “The Establishment” that I was actually a human person with a heart and a brain and courage, that I forgot that I was talking to human people with hearts and brains and courage. 

So in my forties, something even more curious started to happen.  I stopped seeing The Establishment as a wall and started seeing them as people.  The world I was and am so deeply entrenched in wasn’t intentionally trying to keep me from the things I wanted to achieve, it just didn’t have the language or context to understand why what I wanted to achieve was so important.

I’ll give you one quick example.  In 2008 I was working on a theater piece called Death and Lucky about a Chinese mother and her American-born daughter who were forced to move back in with each other after the father dies.  It was inspired by a nonsense rhyme my mom used to sing to me in Mandarin about two racing tigers.  “One has no eyes, one has no ears, isn’t that strange?” 

They both have to take care of the adult brother, LUCKY, who is non-verbal and communicates only through the piano, but they both have very different ideas of what care-giving is.  The mom character in particular showed little compassion and cared more about how her kids made her look than how her kids felt.  She was, in fact, a classic Tiger Mom.  Unfortunately for me the book that coined that phrase “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” didn’t come out until 2011.  So this piece I had been writing for three-plus years that would have cast a bright light on non-verbal Autism went the way of the dodo.  No one knew.  Right?  Back then anyone looking to take a risk on a new musical wasn’t looking at intersectionality, or the importance of representation. 

I’m skipping a couple of beats here, and it hasn’t always been a straight line, obviously, but I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that the reason people are now suddenly interested in this piece I shelved nine years ago is because I found a way to get other people to nerd out over the things that I nerded out over.  And you know how I pulled that off?  Curiosity and kindness.  It wasn’t conviction.  I wish it had been, but it was curiosity and kindness.  Curiosity of their journey of their experience, and kindness when recognizing their fear.  Which is something we all share.  And then suddenly, I was The Establishment.

I’m really reluctant to end this speech here, but I’m going to now share with you the obligatory 10 lessons I wish I knew at your age that I didn’t.  Some of these will probably already sound familiar to you.

1. When at your job or in class, if you take a moment to invest in your supervisor or professor, you’ll pretty much automatically get a passing grade.  Do with that what you will.

2. Reinventing yourself is a myth.  Allow for the possibility that you just didn’t know yourself as well as you thought.  Allow also for the possibility that you have always been enough.

3. Never ask the question you think you know the answer to- you’ll always be disappointed.  Ask the question you don’t know the answer to- it’s just underneath that first one.

4. At least once in your life, make a New Year’s Resolution to sleep better at night.  You’d be amazed at what that allows you to do and shook by what it disallows you from doing.

5. A propos of number four, put your name on everything you say and write publicly. If you can’t, give yourself two days to think about why before you do anything.

6. At some point you’ll say no to school.  That’s okay.  But please always say yes to learning.

7. Keep every single promise you make.  Make none you can’t keep.

8. If you listen as ferociously as you speak, you will find the truth far more quickly than if you do either one without the other.

9. Power multiplies when you are generous with it, not when you are selfish with it.  And finally,

10. Empathy is even more valuable than time.  And time is super valuable.

I have to confess, graduates, I lied earlier.  You were never an afterthought generation.  We don’t have that in common.  You are the architects.  You get to reframe national conversations.  You are not done.  You are not nearly done.  Not remotely done.  You are, in fact, only just getting started. Thank YOU.

5 Reasons You Should Maybe Re-Evaluate Your Position on the Renaming of the Gypsy Robe

Recently an article in Playbill announced that Actors' Equity Association would be renaming the Gypsy Robe ceremony,  "which celebrates ensemble members of Broadway shows, after the current season. The decision—a response to the cultural implications of the term—follows a vote by AEA’s National Council."  Following this, and an e-blast from AEA to its members asking for name suggestions was a hailstorm of snarky comments from friends and enemies alike on my social media feed.  

I've spent the better part of the morning thinking about this.  Asking myself what traditions do I hold that are SO important to me that renaming them would fundamentally change what they were.  I confess, I don't have that many traditions.  Or, at least, my traditions are pretty malleable.  I'm okay with getting a Christmas present on December 26th.  Frankly, I'm happy to have a present at all.  (I'm notoriously hard to shop for.)  But I get off topic.  This thought exercise led me to the below.  I know this will probably irritate some of you.  I really... wish that mattered.  You're on the wrong side of this if you think it shouldn't change.  And people are going to remember it.  So maybe re-evaluate?  Here's why:

1. Nomenclature matters

Anyone who has gotten an email from me in the last two weeks may have noticed I changed my signature from a quote by Maxine Hong Kingston (“Breathe. Pay attention. Tell the truth.”) to something a little bit simpler: he/him/his.  I admit, I should have made this change the moment I made my first trans friend.  The moment that struggle ceased to be an idea and started to be a person.  But I am a stubborn mother-fucker and generally slow on the uptake.  But if the price I pay for learning empathy late is that I actually learn it and hold it, then sign me up.  Nomenclature matters.  It matters not just to the people who are asking for clarity and respect, but to people who do not know that their bias harmfully affects someone else.  Not a single person I know would ever question that my gender identity and gender representation is male.  That’s never been my struggle.  But I include those pronouns now because I allow for the possibility that it is someone else’s.  And personally, I’d prefer my privilege to betray me in the way I complain about Moviepass on Facebook then something that actually matters.  Nomenclature matters.

2. We can actually care about more than one cause at one time.

I am a feminist.  I am a queer ally.  I believe Black Lives Matter.  And I have spent the better part of sixteen years representing Asian men and women on stage by writing almost exclusively for them.  F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in a 1936 issue of Esquire “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not calling myself a first-rate intelligence.  I’m actually calling YOU a first-rate intelligence.  Because you are.  And you can do this.  Just because a little bit of time is being spent considering the consequence of re-appropriating a culture doesn’t mean less time is being spent discussing fair wage on stage.  One might even argue that these conversations are all tributaries to a greater river of equality.  Don’t bite off your nose to spite your face. 

Which brings us to:

3. Just because it doesn’t benefit you doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit you because it actually does.

But Tim, you ask, we don’t even know any Gypsies.  Who even is this affecting?  The answer is, whoever proposed the name be changed to begin with.  The conversations happen when the conversations happen.  When someone is finally ready to be a squeaky wheel about them.  We don't get to decide if they are trivial, for every time someone has, it has only resulted in their downfall.  As recently as fifty years ago our LGBTQ forefathers started a riot because they knew that the systems of power in place at the time would never elect to consider their humanity.  They rioted because literally everyone else on the planet was saying “why do I have to respect someone else’s perversion? Who even is this affecting?”  Without Stonewall, there is no SCOTUS decision.  Who is this affecting?  History would answer “literally everyone.”  

4. Old comics are lazy.  And you are not an old comic.

This has been going around a lot.  Where middle-career comedians are saying they can't go to universities anymore to do their stuff because university students are snowflakes and take everything too seriously.  The students themselves would counter that their awareness is impossibly high, and jokes about rape aren't funny anymore.  I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  (Not that bit about rape jokes, which are not my kind of funny.) You can extrapolate this to, let's say, white male playwrights lamenting that they lose out on opportunities because of the inclusion of women and writers of color.  That's one that's in my orbit right now.  I'm going to stick with comedy though because it's something I like, and something I am wholly outside of. 

What the comics seem to mean when they say this though is when they started out, people were allowed to be misogynistic and racist, and now they aren't, and they don't have the skill set to find humor where none existed before.  They can only re-iterate, not innovate.  For better or worse, this is the path of progress.  It starts with a resentful conversation about something no one has ever considered before, and in the face of that tension and adversity, results in some of us becoming irrelevant before our time and others of us realizing that someone we didn't know was there, has been there all along.  The thing these old comics don't know?  They can choose either.

5. How we choose to respond to discussions like these is the benchmark of our civilization

Dostoevsky says “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”  But prisons are more than just cells and yards.  And he didn’t mean it literally anyway.  We allow ourselves to be trapped within social confines on a daily basis.  And within those confines, we allow ourselves to value people differently.  There are websites alive today that still maintain that the Three Fifths Compromise in the Constitution of 1787 does not inherently devalue a human being.  Many things we think are givens are actually not, and rolling our eyes at something we deem unimportant only demonstrates our own privilege.  What is the actual harm in having the conversation?  What about this name change threatens the actual tradition it represents?  For a community whose benchmark is inclusion, whose union name boasts the word EQUITY itself, being resistant to a discussion about a name change essentially says: This tradition is for us.  Not for you..

Everyday Aggressions or, Why I Won't Be Writing Your Great American Musical

“Pretty much everything you’ve said to me today has been positively aggravating, if I’m being honest.”  I say to him, as I play with my Diet Coke straw.  But this director who I’ve only just met knows I’m not being honest.  He can tell by the way my hand is twitching, trying its best not to reach for the knife at our table.  If I was being honest I’d be holding it, a thread of profanities unspooling from my mouth like so much Christmastime popcorn.

It’s a little after 4:45 pm on a Monday afternoon and the steam coming from Westway Diner is absolutely originating from my ears.  I’ve been seething in this booth for the better part of an hour hoping for someone to start a fire or rob the place Pulp Fiction style, so I can get out of this meeting but no such luck.  The very best I can hope for now is to sink into the floor, through the cushions into the sunken place a la Get Out.  But I’m not holding my breath.  It would appear that having my mind lobotomized and my body re-purposed is more pleasurable to me than enduring this casually racist, dangerously ignorant, hyper privileged, dim-wittery.  But I get ahead of myself.  Let me catch you up.

Couple weeks ago I get an email through my website from someone I’ve neither met nor heard of before.  He says he is a director, looking for a composer-lyricist to collaborate with on an idea for a musical.  This happens fairly often, and I’ve written about it at length, so you can probably guess that he is a white man, and the subject matter of his chosen project involves… Asia.  That’s only half true.  It’s actually about a still-living, female Olympic figure skater who is Asian-American.  Already, this is a good sign.  Not only because as a lyricist I’d have more agency in the storytelling, but  as a composer, I know this show won’t be set in Feudal China and doesn’t “need that special flare that my music would be perfect for.”  (For the uninitiated, this is code for “I want political cover because I’m writing about Asia and no one will let me do that by myself anymore."  But more on this later.)

“Great!” I think to myself.  “I may not be a woman, but I am legitimately Asian American.”  This is something about which I feel confident I can write with some kind of credibility.  Also, I rarely write about Asian Americans, so that’s cool too.  This guy sends me the first act of his script, with his lyrics already set and I pause.  He said he was looking for a composer-lyricist, but sends over a script with lyrics.  Not “here’s what I think the song moment is” poetry, but real lyrics.  They scan.  They have a rhyme scheme.  They have hooks.  So… what is he really looking for and why is it incongruous with what he says he’s looking for?  And why is he positioning himself as a director, when he obviously thinks of himself as a writer?  Red flag number one.

So I read about half the script, and think about it for a day before responding.  I keep coming back to two moments in it that interest me: the first is a comparison of lacing up skates to foot-binding, a practice that was outlawed in China one hundred years ago, and the second involves a scene where the then-fourteen-year-old protagonist is encouraged to costume herself sexually in order to be taken seriously by the judges.  Depending upon where you fall on the Feminism spectrum I’m either a feminist or an ally, (I’m comfortable with either) and this piece seems like something I could really get into.  I agree to a meeting. 

Maybe it shouldn’t be red flag number two, but the fact that he doesn’t know where New Dramatists is also gives me pause.  So we agree to meet at Westway instead.  Here’s where things go decidedly south.  I sit down, we play the name game, we discover we have a few mutual friends.  I ask him one question.  “So what drew you to this person and their story?” 

“After she took silver at the Olympics, someone asked her on TV how it felt losing the gold.  She said ‘I don’t see it as losing the gold, I see it as winning the silver.’ And I thought ‘wow, that answer is totally full of shit.’ So I started thinking about the secret conversations we never got to see on TV or in the media.  What does she say when Connie Chung turns off the cameras?” is his response. 

Red flags everywhere.  For one, that this guy would presume something a real person said about her own outlook as a willful misrepresentation takes the narrative in a direction I’m not sure I want to go in.  Especially when the other direction seems so promising.  For another, where is he getting his research for those off-the-record moments, I wonder?  I ask him.  “Making it up.”  He says.

This isn’t an uncommon practice among writers.  Historical figures are frequently adapted to the stage.  And we’d be lying to ourselves if we thought every word uttered in their names was verified true.  But there is a thing called life rights, and there is also a thing called historical-domain, and since he hasn’t said “I have optioned her life story” and since she is still very much alive, I think it’s fair to say that at best, this work falls into a highly questionable gray area.  But I slow my roll.   Sure, he’s been talking at me for fifteen minutes, recapping the script he emailed me.  Surely at some point he’ll stop and… ask me something.  Anything.  He continues. 

“And then at first when they try to dress her up like a tart, I had her dad refuse to acquiesce because that’s what a Chinese dad would do.”  I feel a trickle of sweat sliding down my right temple.  This is frustrating to me.  Not only because he thinks he’s paying me and my people a compliment with this statement… Not only because he presumes he knows what a “Chinese dad would do”…  Not only because he is suggesting the character would do anything because he’s Chinese…  But also because he could have just asked me. 

“Does this track, Tim?  Does this moment feel disingenuous?”  Why bother inviting an Asian-American on to your creative team when all you want is their validation?  Unless the whole thing is a pretense to begin with.  You see where this is going. We’re at the twenty five minute mark now and he’s still talking at me, my core temperature slowly rising.

“And then I had to have the sister character in there too because it couldn’t all just be about the dad and the coach.”  Now my head is exploding.  Did he just say his show couldn’t just be about the dad and the coach?  Did he actually suggest that the protagonist of this story was not the Olympic figure skater herself?  Maybe he didn’t mean it that way.  But the ill-considered word choice is enough.  Another red flag.  How many is that now?

"Also, I know a lot of young girls would come, and it's really important to me that they see it."  He continues.  See what, I wonder.  Someone representing them on stage being full of shit? 

“Okay hold up.” I say to him.  “Tell me again, who recommended me to you?”

“Well I was having a conversation with [drop-in name of fancy producer here] and he was saying to me ‘I think you might have to write this with an Asian American writer.’  And I was like ‘Yeah.  I kind of have to.  Because the landscape.’  Right?  Like, in this landscape they’d never let me get away with it.  I can’t write Dream Girls in this landscape.  In. This. Landscape.”  He says, while striking his thick finger down on the Formica on every word. 

So... in case you missed it, what this gentleman suggested to me was that a) “this landscape” is the only reason he shouldn’t be writing stories about women of color and b) he’s working on the same level as Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen.  And maybe to a lesser degree c) that someday within his own lifetime the attitudes on this will change back and favor him writing whatever he wants. 

I'm only going to say this ten million more times: Just because something used to be permissible doesn't mean it was ever okay.

“Wait.  Stop.  Just-  ...so [fancy producer name-drop] recommended me to you?”  I ask.  I can’t do this with him for another thirty five minutes. 

“No,” says he, “I got your name from a Facebook group.  The Asian American Composers and Lyricists Project.”  Which in itself is pretty weird because I'm a moderator of that group and no formal inquiries were ever made.

“Then… no one recommended me to you.  Okay.  Have you asked anyone else?”

“No.  I initially reached out to… what’s his name… he’s Asian American… he’s at Primary Stages?  Do you know who I’m talking about?” 

“Not without a name…”  I'm shaking my head.

“Yeah well anyway, I asked that guy.  And then he recommended me to a lyricist at New Dramatists… she’s… what’s her name?  I can’t remember her name either.  She’s an Asian American and she's a woman lyricist at New Dramatists.   Anyway I emailed her, and I never got an answer back.  So, just you.”

Now I’m completely off the reservation.  This lyricist he speaks of, who (I presume is not a composer) and is from the same New Dramatists whose address he didn’t know and couldn’t Google for himself… this person was going to write... music?...  Whatever. 

“Okay. Let me stop you right there.  I… I’m not going to do this with you.”

“Do what?”

“Write your musical.  I’m not going to do that with you.”

“Wait.  Really?  Why?”  This comes as a legitimate surprise to him. 

“Pretty much everything you’ve said to me today has been positively aggravating, if I’m being honest.”  I reach for my Diet Coke straw, wonder why the waitress never came back to take our order and see his open menu on the table.  Thank God for small favors. 

“Did I say something wrong?”  He stutters.  He looks over the table at my face.  I can’t know for sure, but I think I have on that face you get where someone steps on your foot and is more upset at the bottom of their shoe than your toe and you literally don’t know which indignity to address first.   That’s the face he’s looking at right now.  Meanwhile, the face I’m looking at is the one that only comes from a lifetime of ease and privilege and being told that everything you see is defined in relation to you.   Equally aggravating.

“All I know is I’ve been sitting here for forty five minutes, and you have been talking at me but not to me.  You haven’t asked me a single question about myself, my process, or my principles and shouldn't knowing that be critical in a collaboration?  I’ve asked you two questions and instead of answering you’ve just described your show to me in great detail.  You’ve also presumed to know anything about my Chinese father (and by extension, me) and just now you looked me straight in the eyes and said your show was about the dad and the coach.  As if it could ever not be about her.  Finally, you have said exactly nothing about the two things which I found most compelling about your idea.  So, no.  I’m not going to write this show with you.  And I'm certainly not going to write it for you.  But you should do it, man.  Go for it.”

Open mouth, vacant stare into the middle distance… he is still very confused. “What two things?”  He asks, grasping.

“Early on in the script you evoke foot-binding, (something the person who talks about it could never have experienced firsthand) and make a direct comparison between it and lacing on ice-skates.  Later on, you talk about how this young girl becomes overtly sexualized by the two older men charged with her well being.  Yet your show isn’t any kind of commentary on the subjugation of women?”

Again with the open mouth and vacant stare.  “I… hadn’t thought of it that way.”  He says to me.  I’m not making this up.  He says this out loud.  To my face.

If he had asked me even one thing, he'd know that I have no interest in telling stories where women or Asian people are props.   If he'd asked me two things, he'd know that I have no interest in telling stories where anyone outside of my experience is a prop.  And if he'd asked me three things, he'd know that the reason he was encouraged to write this show with an Asian-American was because we can't trust ourselves to be our own council when writing outside of our own experience.  Not yet anyway. 

"Yeah."  I say.  "So, I’m going to think about people who I know who might be interested in this, and if I think of someone I’ll make an introduction.”  (I’m not lying.  If you want to meet him, I will introduce you.)  “Meanwhile, I didn’t bring any cash with me and can’t pay for this Diet Coke.  Would you mind?”

He shakes his head no.  I take it as a kindness.

I grab my bag, head out onto 9th Avenue and immediately Google dry cleaners near me.  I got privilege all over my new sweater and someone’s going to help me get it out. 

How I Remember Jadin Wong

March 30th, 2018 marked the eight year anniversary of the passing of Jadin Wong.  If you don't know who she was, you can read the obituary Playbill wrote about her here.

You know... I didn't really like her.  I didn't like how she mentored her assistants.   I didn't like her cynicism.  And I didn't like that she refused to allow my generation of up-and-comers to consider their artistry even a little when booking professional jobs.  If you had grandparents who grew up in the depression, who did not understand why you would ever willingly wear ripped jeans in public, you might have an idea of what talking to Jadin about art was like.  She came up during a time when you took what was given to you.  Because the very notion of having creative autonomy as a person of color in this country- the idea of it- was not even discussed.  It was an abstraction.  21 year old me did not understand this.  So 21 year old me did not like her.  But I will probably still thank her in my Tony speech someday because truly, when no one was looking at anyone with almond eyes and yellow skin, she was looking at everyone with almond eyes and yellow skin.  

Nowadays there are Facebook groups.  Back then you had Jadin Wong's office.  

She once told me the story of a client who auditioned for her just so she would submit him for a role of "thousand year old man" (he went into the other room to prepare and simply never came out- "thousand year old men move very slowly.")  

She would frequently submit me for voice over stuff where I had to use a fake Asian accent (a time honored tradition of multi-layered humiliation on all sides that I assume still goes on today) and told me "Just go in.  Look at what else they are reading for and ask if you can read for that too."  Which is not only how I eventually avoided having to play a minstrel more than twice but also how I learned to write for a white audience who were in perpetual denial of their own privilege: Be a Trojan horse.  (PS, yes the voice of "pupu platter" in that Chiclet clip was mine, but also the voice of "kumquat.")

As far as I know, she never stopped paying dues to AEA, despite having retired from performance years before I met her.  She also never stopped throwing her ankle above her ear to prove that she could.  Which, in retrospect, was way more impressive than it should have been.  

Whenever I had to trek to her office/apartment on west 57th, I could never be sure if she legitimately knew who I was or if she had any genuine idea what I was capable of.  (Another luxury of client-agent relationships that was never afforded to me.)  But about two months or so before she passed, I had a sudden realization that she would probably pass soon (it wasn't a premonition- she was just very, very old) so I called her up.  I had been out of my MFA for eight years by then, and enjoyed a few moments of recognition for my work.  Whatever it was I'd needed to prove in my twenties as an actor, I no longer needed to prove in my thirties as a writer. I just wanted to say thank you.  In person.  Maybe with a box of egg-custard tarts or something.  Her brother Wally answered the phone. He said she didn't really see anyone, but he would tell her I called.  Probably for the best.  I honestly don't know if she'd have remembered me.  This woman who palled around with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who once had to parachute out of a falling plane for the USO ("That was the day my hair turned white.") was probably not going to remember a 21 year old son of privilege from the late 90s.  It mattered less to me that she would know I'd remember her than simply knowing I would remember her.  

So, no.  I can not say with integrity or credibility that I liked her.  But I will always owe her a great deal of thanks.  And if you have ever worked with me on one of my projects, you probably do too.  Rest peacefully, Jadin. You won't be forgotten.

An anecdote.

Straight out of college I got cast in an indie film. By today's standards it wouldn't be a script that changed the world, but in the late 90s any film script featuring Asian American leads was precious. It didn't matter that they had no money. It didn't matter that half the day players weren't actors. It didn't matter that the interior scenes were all shot in the film maker's apartment. It didn't matter it was a basement apartment. It wouldn't matter, years later, when some anonymous troll said on the IMDB message board that the lead, played by Timothy Huang, had all the charisma of a schoolyard pedophile. You know what did matter? What did matter was when the lead actress looked our director square in the face and said she had dance training, and the day we shot the scene in the studio I said "why don't we start with something simple: tombe pas de bourree, glissade, jatte" and all she did was spin around in a circle, [without even spotting] and do crazy shit with her arms.

Never lie on your resume kids. Because the schoolyard pedophile might know more about dance than you, and how bad does that look?

It’s Not About a Latte

It’s getting on midnight on a cold November Wednesday and I’m sitting at the Brooklyn Diner in midtown with my good friend Em.  We’ve just come from an original new musical that might not have been for us.  We’re both okay with it, except I am totally not okay with it.  I’m actually kind of infuriated.  She’s confused as to why.  I start in.

“If this playwright wanted me to sympathize or identify with his protagonist, as all playwrights do, I think all he needed to do was acknowledge that his character was inherently privileged.  That the very belief they can leave their latte on a counter and walk away is an act of privilege.  Because where I come from, leaving a latte on a counter isn’t something people take lightly.  And acknowledging that there are places in this world, no- this country where leaving a latte on a counter is unheard of, would have made me feel a little more included.” 

Obviously, I’m not talking about an actual latte.  I am talking about a much larger, much deeper action around which someone could, and effectually has, structured an entire theatrical narrative.  But this is a real show, with a real writer, so for anonymity’s sake let’s just pretend I am talking about a latte.  (It’s still not about the latte.)  Em fires back.

“Okay first of all, this isn’t Broadway.  This is a forty show run and a fifty seat house, and the contracts are different.  Slow your roll.  There are no names above the title here, no swings, no understudies, and I don’t get to ask for my money back if someone calls out.” 

“Just because it’s Off-Broadway doesn’t give it license to be ill-considered.  In fact some might argue it has to be even better considered if it’s going to be Off-Broadway.”  I reply.  She ignores me, continues.

“Second of all, are you saying it’s unrealistic that a college aged character would be insensitive to the magnitude of sacrifice involved in leaving a latte on a counter?  You’re surprised by this?”

“No,” I say, “I’m saying that addressing that privilege, in some way, in ANY way does not compromise the narrative or the character.  Why leave it out?  It only adds to the inclusivity of the piece as a whole.  And conversely, not addressing it at all, suggests that either the writer was blind to it or only wrote for people to whom leaving a latte on a counter is commonplace.”

Em stirs her black and white milkshake with the straw that very well may be her last.  We’ve been friends since college but she’s heard this speech about twenty five times.  In her defense, she doesn’t disagree- she just doesn’t see how my problems are her responsibility.  This would probably be fair, except they aren’t just my problems, and that’s exactly why I think they’re her responsibility: Are you living in America in 2018?  Do you have a social media account?  Know anyone who is gay, Black, Trans, Asian, Latinx or CIS female?  (That last part is particularly apropos.)

“In my world, you simply couldn’t walk away from a latte.  Your parents worked too hard for you to leave that latte for someone else.  And you certainly couldn’t make that sacrifice as if the only thing at stake was your own time, money and future.  For many people, this is a reality.  Our lives are not wholly our own.  And to not have that acknowledged is the same as having invalidated it.”  We’re worlds apart now.  Em knows it too, and I see what’s coming next.

“Yeah,” says she.  “But that was your world.  This writer doesn’t come from your world.  This writer doesn’t even claim to be from your world.  It’s unfair you should expect them to include you.  Isn’t it?  Like, why can’t they write their show, you write your show?”

Em poses an interesting question, and one worth addressing, but first it needs a little unpacking.  For starters, she is conflating inclusion with representation, but more on that in a minute.  I reply in the only way I know how.

“Because when I write my show, people call it ‘an Asian show.’  When they write their show, people just call it ‘a show.’”  What I’m getting at, and she knows this, is that in every case where an under-represented artist seeks to represent a marginalized people or experience, the mainstream marginalizes it further by giving it a qualifying descriptor.  It is defined by its relation to what is assumed is the norm.  Therefore it only ceases to become “other” when someone within the mainstream takes it upon themselves to integrate it into their own work.   

“The question we should be asking,” I continue, “is ‘who within the mainstream will identify it as their problem if every time they stare it dead in the face, they refuse ownership over it?”

“So… what?”  Asks Em.  “Make the character walking away from the Latte an Asian person?  You’d just say that’s unbelievable and a misrepresentation.”  She’s not wrong there…

“Okay.  Let’s go back to definitions.  This conversation isn’t about representation so much as inclusion.  The former is the act of putting someone ‘other’ in a show or film because that other exists in the real world and as such, should be seen.  Should be represented.  This is a personal choice for any writer and one I can do for myself.  The latter is far simpler, less costly, and should be on everyone’s to-do list:  making sure no one in your audience has to work any harder than anyone else to experience your show.  Because right now friend, the contracts are different, and they shouldn’t be.”  I’m on a roll.

“You posit that this writer should be free to write this show and this show should be free to be what it wants without the responsibility of including me, the guy who’s never left a latte on a counter.  Let’s look at that model for a moment. The thing that happens when writers, producers and artistic directors in the main stream take a pass on being responsible for inclusion is a thing that has actually happened.  Slowly and surely no one else gets represented.  Or, as you hypothesize, people like me get represented poorly. You with me so far?”

Em slurps her black and white, the irony lost to her.

“But then when someone like me writes for faces like mine, as I have perpetually and without apology for the past fifteen years, if I’m not writing with an eye towards including you, I’m simply writing an unworthy script that no one ever sees.  That seem right to you?  We finally put a name to this phenomenon.  It’s called institutionalized racism.  Perpetuated by something else we didn’t know had a name until recently: unconscious bias.”

“That is pure conjecture.” Says Em.  “No offense Tim, I think you’re really talented, but what if your earlier work in those days just wasn’t good enough?”

“Em, my work from yesterday wasn’t good enough.  It can always be better.  But the numbers are documented, and historically, the ratio of produced work is hugely disproportional in favor of white men.  Do you really believe that whenever ‘those days’ was, that the work of every single person of color, every single female, every single intersection was simply not good enough? Is it that hard to believe they were systemically overlooked?”

This hits a little close to home.  Of course she knows what it is to be systematically overlooked.  She might not ever wonder why in a five show season at a regional theater company two shows about Chinese people can’t co-exist.  Or two shows about Gay people.  Or two shows about Trans or Gay or Black or Latinx people… but she does know what it feels like to have her own experience invalidated.  And if I were inside her head (which I am) I would tell you what pisses her off more than anything, is the knowing that she has no control over it.  Except she does.  Her half empty milkshake, now a murky gray, is actually half full.

“Yes, the contracts are different.  Some people get to walk in, and take ‘leaving a latte’ on its own terms while others have to adapt.  The great news is you don’t have to put up with it.  You can choose to see exclusivity for what it is, and not endorse it.  You can be openly critical about any show that runs counter to the ideology of a living and inclusive theater!  You can also share that Youtube of Neil Patrick Harris opening the 2013 Tonys where he basically says it in a rap penned by Lin Manuel Miranda, because it really holds up.”

“It was actually James Corden in 2016.”  She fires back.  And just like that, we’re back into it.

“Nuh-uh, sorry, NPH did it first, and did it better.”

“Are you kidding me?”  Says Em, flicking her straw wrapper my way.  “That part when the rainbow kids become that year’s nominees is magic.” 

“Fine, share them both.  They’re both great.”  I say, just as our waitress comes by, checking in.

“Do you want anything else?”  I ask, “It’s on me.”

“No,” says my good friend.  “It’s on me.”

5 Things That Don't Mean What You Think They Mean If You Are a Lame Inconsiderate Unprofessional Musical Theater Writer

1. Rehearsal Starts Monday Morning

What you think it means: My writing deadline is Monday morning.
What it actually means: Rehearsal starts Monday morning.

You'd think this was a no-brainer, but actually it kind of needs to be said.  Your writing deadline does not end the day rehearsals begin.  You have a director.  They need to look at your text so they can have any idea what to do in the room.  Because 29 hours is not a lot of time.  When is this director going to do this?  It really depends on how busy your director is.  Probably the Thursday before.  But if they have other projects, maybe two Mondays before. Your actual deadline is when they need your text.  Always ask.  Same for your Music Director too.

2.  The Director is Your Friend

What you think it means: My director of my reading is literally a friend of mine.  They won't care who I cast.
What it actually means: I should probably check in with my director and music director about who they like.  And I should probably not have cast it before hiring them.

Theater is not made by two people.  Even if your graduate program tells you that musicals are a product of the collaboration between a "words person" and a "music person."  Musical Theater is made by a hundred and fifty people.  Your writers, your directors, your choreographers, your designers, your cast, your crew, your musicians, and yeah, your producers (sometimes that's you.)  You get the idea.  They're all real people with real expertise and real opinions that are worthy of your consideration. 

Look.  You'll probably end up getting your way.  But do you want to have your way at the cost of alienating your team?  Or would you rather have it after you have asked everyone else what they think and either learned something new or gained their respect?  The director is your friend.

3.  Your Cast of Characters are Ethnically Non-specific

What you think it means: My cast can be any color, creed, or orientation.
What it actually means: Your cast will wind up being white because you did not specify.

Okay.  I'm not going to dwell on this.  You've probably read any number of diatribes I have written on this subject.  And if you have not, certainly check out this interview with Bernie Telsey where he says casting directors "don't get credit" for diversity.  THIS type of thinking is your enemy.  And certainly more likely when you're an aged dinosaur who willfully turns a blind eye to sexual harassment and misogyny.  But that is a different article for a different time.  Meanwhile, how do you solve this problematic Maria: make specific choices.  "But wah wah," you cry, "that means I have to potentially be responsible for representing someone other than me or mine!" 

Yes. Now go do it, and do it responsibly.

4.  Your Mentor Got a Prize

What you think it means: I can ask them for a recommendation to the same prize because they are invested in me artistically.
What it actually means: Your mentor got a prize.

Okay, let's start here: if you don't have a mentor, you can ask for one.  Go find someone you like, and say the words out loud: Will you mentor me?  And see what it gets you. 

Moving on, it actually does mean what you think it means.  Too.  (Inconceivable!) But it doesn't always have to.  Your mentor is an artist.  They are trying their best to use their powers for good by making themselves available to you, and opening doors for you that you might not be able to open for yourself via a benefit-of-the-doubt that they have earned for themselves.  But it has to work in both directions.  I'll say it again.  Your mentor is an artist.  They need support just like you need support.  Even if they are opening their fifth Broadway show.  They still need support. 

So maybe before you ask them to vouch for you again, make sure
a) they aren't in the middle of something and could use a cookie and a hug, and
b) your own personal conduct as of late has not been embarrassing

I once got an email on a Saturday from a mentee who was in the middle of writing a new draft for their workshop (that started the next Monday- see 1.) asking about a recommendation for a fellowship I had just completed for myself. 

Being unprofessional not only reflects poorly on you, it reflects poorly on anyone who has ever vouched for you.   Which brings us to:

5. You Know People Who Know People

What you think it means: You know people too.
What it actually means: You know people who know people.

Access is a funny thing.  It isn't like power, which only multiplies when you share it.  It's a delicate balance of favor-asking and privacy-respecting.  If you're in your twenties it's a little less likely that you know influential people than if you're older.  Attrition hasn't happened yet, and your peer group hasn't decided to specialize, but take note.  It will happen.  Especially if you're writing musical theater.  Because let's face it, those actors you're using for your cabarets will get to Broadway before you will.  Those dramaturges and producers and directors you worked with at NYMF or The Fringe?  They are the next literary person at The Public, Development Coordinator at The Lark, Talent representative at Gersh.  What does this mean for you?

Probably nothing if you've done any of the above things I'm trying to save you from.  But even if you haven't, probably nothing.  Remember this, so when that probably nothing manifests as something, you're grateful and not a dick.  Send hand written thank you cards.  Respect their time.  Know in advance what your asks are.