Surviving in Minnesota

Editorial

Coming to Minneapolis in the early 1990s, I felt like a “Survivor” contestant, stranded on a lonely ice floe. I knew of one or two Asian-American actors locally (and there were the beginnings of an artistic community with the founding of Asian American Renaissance), but I wondered how I would ever survive. In an infamous incident back in the 1980s, my good friend Philip Gotanda actually returned a grant to work here on one of his plays because there were no Asian-American actors to work with. Indeed, at a reading of my play Uncle Tadao soon after I arrived, I had to use a nearly all-white cast. Along the way, there had been a couple of outstanding Asian-American actors in the community, like Randall Duk Kim who played Hamlet at the Guthrie in the ’70s and Jackie Kim who played a number of leads in Guthrie productions in the ’90s, but one or two talented actors intermittently appearing on a major stage does not a community make.

In California and New York City, on the other hand, I was a freelance playwright who had the luxury of working with full-fledged Asian-American theater companies. I was immersed in Asian-American artistic communities where playwrights were creating a new canon for Asian-American playwriting; where a whole new wave of actors, directors and designers were emerging; and where communities were craving to see their own histories and personal stories on the stage. I had the opportunity to work with not only Philip Gotanda but also David Hwang, Amy Hill, Dennis Dun, Lane Nishikawa and Raul Aranas. David, of course, is the Tony Award-winning playwright of M. Butterfly. Amy has been on network television, and Dennis acted in many movies including The Last Emperor and Big Trouble in Little China. Lane has toured his one-person shows across the country, and Raul has acted on Broadway and in London’s West End. I was fortunate indeed to meet and work with these artists early in their careers and I gathered from them my own sense of artistic standards.

Then, while I was visiting here, a Korean-American University of Minnesota graduate student, Dong-il Lee, asked me to help found a Minnesota Asian-American theater company. With Martha Johnson of Augsburg College, Diane Espaldon, and Donna Gustafson (our first board chair), we founded Theater Mu. We gathered some Asian-American students from the U and other colleges and started workshops in acting and playwriting. It was grassroots work of the very deepest kind, yet even then I could recognize that this could become a successful project. One of the earliest actors to work with us, Paul Juhn, had never acted, but he soon went off to get his MFA at University of California, San Diego, has acted Off-Broadway, and is now considered one of the top Asian-American actors in the New York theater world. Another actor from the early days, Sun Mee Chomet, will play the lead in the upcoming Guthrie production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In 2006, she performed her solo piece Sun Mee You All American Girl at the first National Asian American Theater Conference in Los Angeles and drew rave responses from the Asian-American theater community. And Jennifer Weir has become a talented emerging director and one of the senior taiko artists with our company. As odd as it might seem, I felt then that we had the makings of something special—though I thought it would only take three or four years!

And the list of local talented theater artists working with Mu just continues to grow, from Randy Reyes, Kurt Kwan, and Jeany Park (who recently moved to Oregon to work at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland) to Marcus Quiniones, Sara Ochs, Sherwin Resurreccion, Laurine Price, Momoko Tanno, Rose Le Tran, Allen Malicsi, Katie Bradley, Eric Sumangil, and Eric Sharp. Any of these could successfully work nationally and there are more coming up. Certainly, these artists were not exclusively developed at Mu, but I like to think that Mu had a significant influence in their development, if only to give them the opportunity to display their talent. So in terms of acting talent, I would say that in the under-40 age range, Minnesota is now unusually rich.

In playwriting and directing, the process of development has been slower. Still, we have seen both Jennifer Weir and Randy Reyes emerge as talented young directors with Mu and beyond, and others like Brian Balcom and Eric Sharp have come into the spotlight with other companies. Playwrights such as Katie Leo, Jeany Park, Ed Bok Lee, Sun Mee Chomet, Juliana Pegues. and May Lee have all worked with Mu, and we have contributed to the development of national playwrights such as Julia Cho, Aurorae Khoo, Clarence Coo, Michael Golamco, and Lauren Yee. Choreographer Sandy Agustin has done a considerable body of work with Mu, and we have given opportunities to designers such as Joanne Jongsma, Annie Katsura Rollins, and Wu Chen Khoo. Again, I believe any of these artists has the talent to work nationally, and that quality has allowed Mu to elevate our own standard of work.

So there is no question that the situation for Asian American artists in Minnesota has improved dramatically over the past decade. Now, in addition to Mu, other theaters produce plays by Asian Americans. Last season, for example, Walking Shadow produced 36 Views by Naomi Iizuka and Guthrie produced her After One Hundred Years. In the past decade, Children’s Theatre Company produced Dragon Wings by Laurence Yep; Illusion, Undesirable Elements by Ping Chong; Mixed Blood, Messy Utopia by a number of Asian-American playwrights including local writer and actor Aditi Kapil. Stages Theatre produced A Single Shard by Katie Leo, and The History Theatre, 100 Men’s Wife by Jeany Park.

I am proud that Mu has played a key role in that change, but I would be remiss not to mention the vision and support for our company and cause from the funding community. Early on, the McKnight Foundation recognized the importance of diversifying the cultural landscape of the Twin Cities. And others, such as the Jerome and Travelers Foundations and government sources like the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and the State Arts Board, became key supporters as the issue of diversity grew in importance.

Of course, this is not to say the situation is now completely fine. There is still the feeling that Asian-American actors are not seriously considered for mainstream roles in the American classics of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and even more recent major playwrights like Mamet and Sam Shepherd—yet even that could be changing. In the recent Twin Cities Chekov Festival, Mu brought together a large and all-Asian American cast for a reading of Three Sisters, and we’re considering a main-stage production of that play soon. A couple of years ago, we produced a successful version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Southern, and both Randy Reyes and Sherwin Resurreccion were cast in the recent Guthrie production of that play.

Life is much better for Asian-American theater artists in general than it was when I arrived in the early ’90s. At the same time, these Asian-American actors, along with the growing presence of African-American theater artists, give the local theater scene a sense of diversity and dynamism that has not been associated with Minnesota in the past. In fact, locally and nationally, our theater community is gaining a profile that puts us at the center of a new, more diverse American theater reality.

Headshot of Rick Shiomi
Rick Shiomi
Rick Shiomi is a founder of Mu Performing Arts and has been the artistic director since 1993. As a playwright, his plays include the award-winning Off-Broadway play Yellow Fever as well as Play Ball, Rosie’s Cafe, Mask Dance, and Journey of the Drum. As a director he has worked extensively with Mu and overseen the development of many new plays. He is the 2012 recipient of the Ivey Award for Lifetime Achievement.