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      Charles Melton, ‘May December’ Breakout Star, Is Transformed

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      I’ll admit it took me a while to notice the blood, which was wet and daubed onto his right cheekbone like a birthmark. In my defense, Charles Melton hadn’t noticed it either, even though the blood happened to be his.It was an unseasonably rainy November day in Los Angeles — a place where any evidence of the seasons is considered unseasonable — and I had gone to Melton’s house with a dual mission. The first was to discuss the new drama “May December,” in which the 32-year-old actor does more than just hold his own opposite Oscar-winning co-stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore: He gives the movie its bruised, beating heart.And the second mission? Well, that was to make some truly excellent kimchi.“These, you have to cut really thin,” Melton said, handing me a bulbous radish. We were in the kitchen of his cozy home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, preparing to slice and flavor vegetables under the watchful eye of his mother, Sukyong, who was visiting from Kansas. The 32-year-old Melton keeps his fridge so well-stocked with kimchi that he often sends friends home with extra jars of it. “Just remember, kimchi is a probiotic,” he said, feeding me a piece of seasoned cabbage.Six-foot-one, shaggy-haired and easygoing, Melton has the warm glow of a Himalayan salt lamp. (He also has a Himalayan salt lamp.) Though he spent six years playing a conceited jock on the CW teen soap “Riverdale,” Melton wears his beauty and brawn as lightly as a nice jacket, and while we cut vegetables and discussed “May December,” he tried to encourage me by pointing out his own errors.With Julianne Moore in “May December.” Melton played the part as if “you were watching somebody learning how to see and how to speak and how to walk,” the director Todd Haynes said.Netflix“I’ve already messed up,” he said after one particularly inelegant radish slice. Across the kitchen, his mother turned to us, somehow able to sense the misaligned cut. “If you hear my mom saying things in Korean,” he told me, “just assume that it’s all good things.”In “May December,” Melton plays Joe, a diffident 36-year-old father married to the much older Gracie (Moore). The two have seemingly managed to fashion a picture-perfect life — three children, two dogs and a beautiful home by the water — though the original sin of their union provides an awfully shaky foundation: They met when Gracie was a married housewife and Joe was just a seventh grader. Tabloid infamy followed as Gracie was convicted of raping Joe, bore his baby in prison and, after serving a yearslong sentence, married him and had two more children.Enter Elizabeth (Portman), an ambitious actress poised to play Gracie in a movie that will exhume the scandal this couple has worked so hard to move past. In a bid to have the story told their way, Gracie and Joe agree to let Elizabeth shadow them, but as the actress peppers the couple with invasive questions, poor Joe is finally forced to confront the enormity of what he’s locked away for so long. Robbed of a normal childhood by Gracie, Joe can’t quite articulate his feelings — sentences often get lodged in his throat — but in Melton’s hands, Joe’s wounded attempt to make sense of his situation is shattering.In May, after the film premiered to raves at the Cannes Film Festival, Haynes told me that Melton was its linchpin. “It’s a consummate performance by somebody who doesn’t even realize how thorough an actor he is yet,” Haynes said. And as with “Elvis” star Austin Butler, another hunk from the CW turned serious thespian, Melton’s breakthrough role has been drawing plenty of Oscar chatter: He recently earned a nomination for outstanding supporting performance from the Gothams, heady stuff for a man whose most significant laurel until now was a nomination for best kiss at the MTV Movie & TV Awards.As we spoke, Melton met every question with enthusiastic openness; aside from the way he covers his mouth when he giggles, he’s appealingly unguarded for an actor. At 32, he’s been pondering big questions about self and purpose, and our conversation offered such a welcome opportunity to go deep that he often dropped into dreamy reveries.“I can talk to you for hours,” he said as we took a break from grating radishes to nibble on apple slices and Korean pears in his living room. “I’m looking into your eyes and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’”As he met my gaze, I looked at his cheek and noticed the blood. When did that get there? It wasn’t until he absently brushed his hand against his face that I put two and two together and looked down.“I think you might have cut yourself,” I told him.“Maybe,” he said, grinning. Then he glanced at his right hand, where a cut halfway up his middle finger had been gushing for who knows how long.“Oh my gosh,” he said, surprised. “There’s blood everywhere.”From the kitchen, his mother whipped her head around. “Blood?” she said. “I’m coming!”When he landed the role, “I definitely felt a pressure within myself: ‘Can I go there? Can I do this?’” Melton recalled. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSURE, SOME INTERVIEWS benefit from a little spilled blood, but that’s usually meant in the metaphoric sense; Melton was already so willing to be vulnerable that he hardly needed a grating accident to hasten things. He told me that last summer, when he received the audition pages for “May December,” he was similarly ready to go deep.It was not long after Melton had wrapped the sixth season of “Riverdale,” which found his mind-controlled character stabbing comic-book hero Archie Andrews with one of the ancient Daggers of Megiddo. (This is just what happens on “Riverdale.”)As he read the lines and character description for Joe, “There was this sense of repression and loneliness that I related to,” he said. Those wouldn’t necessarily be the first two qualities you’d associate with Melton, an outgoing athlete who loves to hold a game night, but Joe’s predicament reminded him of a pep talk he’d gotten when he was 11: His father, on the verge of a yearlong deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan, pressed Melton to step up and take care of his mother and younger sisters in the interim, effectively becoming the man of the house.“As an 11-year-old kid, you’re like, ‘I’ll do it!’” Melton recalled. “I would never change anything I experienced — no one did anything wrong — but in looking at that part of my own experience and then looking at Joe, it’s that similarity of the feeling of stepping into something whether you’re ready for it or not.”He kept rerecording his “May December” self-tape for six hours until he was satisfied, then sent it over. Though Haynes was unfamiliar with Melton’s work and nearly discounted him because of his model-handsome headshot — “I just didn’t see how he would fit into this world,” the filmmaker told me — once he pressed play, Haynes was intrigued by Melton’s unique take on the character.“Charles just brought this sense of somebody who was almost preverbal, who was almost prenatal, like you were watching somebody learning how to see and how to speak and how to walk,” Haynes said. “He was extremely restrained and subtle in what he did.”After another taped audition, Melton was asked to fly to New York for a chemistry read with Moore, with whom he found an unexpected connection: They were both Army brats who had spent formative chunks of their childhood living on a military base in Juneau, Alaska, a link that lent them an easy rapport and helped him secure the role.“I definitely felt a pressure within myself: ‘Can I go there? Can I do this?’” Melton recalled. “‘I believe I can, but I don’t know what it looks like, so let me do everything underneath the sun to try to figure out what that is.’”To prepare, Melton threw himself into the role in any way he could think of. He spent hours every day consulting with his acting coach and therapist, trying to figure out Joe’s tricky, tangled internal wiring. He rewatched “Brokeback Mountain,” studying the ways Heath Ledger expressed repression in his physical bearing, and “In the Mood for Love,” observing how Tony Leung conveyed so much inner turmoil without saying a thing. And after conferring with Haynes, Melton decided to gain 40 pounds for the role, smoothing out his sharp jawline and adding a suburban-dad paunch.“The reward was me discovering my process,” he said. At his dining-room table, Melton demonstrated by conjuring up Joe for me: He curled his lips inward, setting them in a tense horizontal line, then slumped forward, defeated and deflated. “His reality is so distorted by the projections of society, the last thing he wants to do is to show himself,” Melton said, letting the bright light behind his eyes go dim. “He protects himself, even in his body.”Melton in “Riverdale.” Haynes wasn’t familiar with his work when he auditioned for “May December.”CWThe only thing that threatened to undo him was a determination not to disappoint. It all came to a head in one of the film’s most affecting scenes, where Joe and his teenage son, Charlie, share a joint on their roof. Charlie and his twin sister are about to graduate from high school and after their parents become empty-nesters, Joe will have to confront the ugly reality of his marriage to Gracie in a way he has assiduously avoided. Alarmed, Charlie tells him not to worry. “That’s all I do,” Joe replies, teary and close to retching.After a few takes, Haynes felt they had what they needed, but Melton was unsure: Shouldn’t he take this moment to go bigger, to give more, to prove himself somehow? He kept asking for additional takes, but each iteration felt strained, bringing him further and further from Joe and closer to the pernicious fear that he was a terrible actor. Eventually, he came down from the roof to confer with Haynes and burst into tears.“I think those came from selfish ideas of wanting to be at a certain place, where I forgot at the moment, ‘Hey, your job is to tell the character’s story, not yours,’” he said. What had gotten in the way of that connection? “Maybe wanting to be seen,” he said, trying to parse what exactly he meant by that. “I want to be seen, but I don’t want to be seen, right? But being seen for what you do is still a part of you being seen.”Melton paused. “I don’t even know what I’m saying right now,” he admitted, laughing. “I’m just making kimchi.”LATER, WITH THE task at hand finished and his mother retired to the couch to watch Korean dramas on her phone, Melton gave me a tour of his house. Downstairs, in a low-lit room he nicknamed the “Pavilion of Dreams,” Melton put Radiohead’s “Kid A” on the record player, slid open the glass door to his rain-lashed backyard deck, and lit a cigarette. He wanted to talk more about the idea that had tripped him up earlier, the tension between wanting to be seen and, at other times, striving to disappear.“Sometimes I feel this push and pull of, am I white enough, am I American enough, am I Asian enough?” Melton said. Growing up in military bases all over the world with a white father and Korean mother, he felt a constant need to assimilate that often left him feeling unmoored: “I remember having a dream around that time, like if you cut two cars in half and put the front ends together and one is Korean and the other one is American. Which driver’s seat do you want to sit in?”After five years stationed in Korea when he was a young boy, Melton’s family moved to Texas, where his dyed-blond K-pop bangs and affinity for taekwondo went over less well. He soon adopted the uniform there — Vans, cargo shorts and oversized Hawaiian shirts — and even when his family packed up again and moved to a military base in Ansbach, Germany, Melton couldn’t quite let go of the American boy he’d worked so hard to become, continuing to wear a puka-shell necklace and Hollister shirts shipped overseas.“I want to be seen, but I don’t want to be seen, right?,” Melton said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesFor his last three years of high school, Melton’s family moved to Manhattan, Kan. “Being an Asian American kid and that not being a commonality, especially in Kansas, what was my bridge to assimilate?” he said. He found it in football: Though he began disastrously, finishing dead-last in every practice sprint and vomiting in front of teammates, he applied himself and worked his way up, eventually becoming an all-star and earning a slot as a defensive back at Kansas State University, where he was nicknamed “Kamikaze” for hitting harder than anyone else on the team.“I’m checking all the boxes, right? ‘American,’” he said. “But a big thing to process for me was, what is my identity outside of this?”Around that time, on the way to football practice, he heard a radio advertisement for a talent showcase that asked, “Do you want to be a star?” Melton had always dreamed of becoming an actor, but when he was a child, his father warned him that the only Asians who succeeded in Hollywood were martial artists like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Still, he drove 45 minutes to the open call in Salina, Kan., where he was asked to read ad copy for Twizzlers, model for talent scouts and perform Ben Stiller’s airplane freakout scene from “Meet the Parents” onstage.He came out of the showcase with 20 callbacks and a brand-new lease on life. “It was so exhilarating to be seen in a way that wasn’t me being seen, but what I was choosing to do,” he said. “It seemed like there were no boundaries.” Though he was used to toggling between different identities, acting offered something way beyond assimilation — it felt, if anything, more like expansion.The entirety of what he wanted out of life shifted very suddenly, and Melton dropped out of college, moved to Los Angeles, and spent the next few years modeling, walking dogs, delivering Chinese takeout and auditioning for anything he could. Eventually, he secured “Riverdale,” which led to roles in films like “The Sun Is Also a Star” and “Bad Boys for Life,” as well as a featured spot in Ariana Grande’s presciently titled music video, “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored.”But after leveling up as an actor with “May December,” Melton could be at a career crossroads: Will Marvel come calling, ready to poach a hot new name with superhero looks, or will Melton throw in with the likes of Butler and Jacob Elordi, who are using their heat to help finance auteur-driven projects? “All one hopes for with an actor like Charles is that he gets roles offered to him and projects coming to him that excite and continue to stretch him,” Haynes said.The monthslong awards gantlet will surely raise his profile even more, and Melton is excited to embark on all it has to offer, though he’s lately tried to ground himself in simpler pleasures, like family visits, camping trips and accepting licks to the face from his Siberian husky, Neya. “I have good people in my life, Kyle, really good people who know me and love me,” he said. “I don’t need any more love, but if I get it, it’s awesome.”At the very least, Melton is about be seen in a whole new way, and he’ll have to wrestle with all that entails. But as we parted ways — me, with several jars of take-home kimchi and him, with a bandaged middle finger — he promised that no matter what happens over the next few months, he’ll be ready for it.“I’ll still be me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just have nicer shoes.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘The Light in the Piazza’ Through an Asian American Lens at Encores!

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      A new Encores! staging of the 2005 musical, starring Ruthie Ann Miles, considers what it is like to feel like an outsider, at home and abroad.Inside a New York City Center studio, at a rehearsal for the Encores! revival of “The Light in the Piazza,” two young lovers in 1950s Italy were meeting for the first time.“This is my mother, Margaret Johnson,” Clara, a suddenly smitten American tourist, said to Fabrizio, a local Italian.“Johnson,” Fabrizio repeated, connecting the name to a then-popular Hollywood star. “Van Johnson?!”“Yes!” Clara enthused.“You are — relative?” Fabrizio asked.“No, no,” the mother, Margaret, cut in.And then, so too, did the director, Chay Yew. He turned to Ruthie Ann Miles, the Tony-winning actress playing Margaret, with a note.“Van Johnson is white,” Yew said, gesturing at his own Asian face.The group nodded. They started the scene again, and when Miles got to her line, she drew out the “noooo” while encircling her own Asian face with her finger to make the contrast exceedingly clear to the lovestruck Fabrizio.The move sent onlookers into a fit of laughter.“In the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes,” said Chay Yew, who is directing the Encores! production.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNothing in the book, music or lyrics of this Tony Award-winning 2005 Broadway musical has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday for a short run. But the casting of Asian American actresses in two of the main roles has reframed the musical to emphasize its exploration of the otherness — an otherness that some Asian Americans often feel in the United States and elsewhere. Without revisions, that point of view will have to come through in Yew’s direction and the actors’ interpretations.When Miles (“The King and I”) agreed to play Margaret, Yew began thinking about homing in on her background as a Korean American to further explore the experience of feeling like an outsider. The spike in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, Yew said, was still very much front of mind.“No matter how Asian American you are, you’re always going to be the perpetual foreigner. The face that we wear,” Yew said, “always makes you feel that you do not belong in this country.“So I was interested in, well, what does it really mean to explore the outsider status in this particular musical?” Yew, a playwright and director of shows like “Cambodian Rock Band,” added. “It actually helps open up the music a little bit more. I think in the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes.”“The Light in the Piazza,” which originally starred Victoria Clark as Margaret and Kelli O’Hara as Clara, tracks a woman and her daughter on vacation in Italy. Love is at its heart: Clara (Anna Zavelson) falls for Fabrizio (James D. Gish); Margaret wants to disrupt the romance to protect her daughter, who suffered a brain injury as a child that renders her childlike even as an adult; and Margaret herself is stuck in a seemingly loveless marriage to a husband who stayed at home in North Carolina.It is the Johnsons’ status as tourists — outsiders in a foreign land — that allows preoccupations with Clara’s disability to fade, her love to blossom and Margaret’s perspective to shift such that she can begin to let her daughter go. In leaving home, both women, in a sense, find themselves.Nothing in the book, music or lyrics of “The Light in the Piazza” has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday at City Center.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFor Asian Americans, determining exactly what and where feels like home can be tricky. Clint Ramos, who designed the set with Miguel Urbino and is part of the Encores! leadership team, recalled having seen the show 10 times during its original run. He had moved to New York from the Philippines, and the idea of becoming totally immersed in a new place — and loving it — resonated. “Every time was ugly crying,” he said of seeing the musical.Miles was at the top of the Encores! list for the role of Margaret. (In his 2005 review of the show, Ben Brantley wrote that the character “qualifies as a blessing for those in search of signs of intelligent life in the American musical.”) They felt Miles “was virtuosic enough to actually handle the score, but also such an excellent actor,” Ramos said.With the role cast, Yew and Miles studied the history of Korean immigration and determined, for subtext, that Miles’s Margaret could have come to the United States in the early 1900s to study art and learn English, then met her white husband, settled in the South and eventually had a child.Miles, who has been juggling this show with her Tony-nominated role as the beggar woman in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” was born in the United States, then spent a few years as a young child in South Korea before returning to the U.S. with her mother. She recalled learning English while growing up in Hawaii as her Korean language skills diminished and becoming frustrated with her mother’s stubborn accent and lack of concern, unlike her friends’ parents, about things like having nice clothes. Over time, she said she even developed a sort of bitterness toward her mother.“And so I carry all of these stories and these ideas with me when we’re building Margaret,” she said.Zavelson, who graduated from high school last year and is making her professional New York debut in the musical, has always wanted to sing the score, but said she had never seen someone who looked like her play the role of Clara. Zavelson said she is Japanese American and Jewish.Anna Zavelson, as Clara, above with Gish, who plays Fabrizio, said she never “pictured myself being able to sing that role” because it’s usually filled by a white actress. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“I don’t think that I had pictured myself being able to sing that role,” Zavelson said, because Clara has usually been played by a white actress. “Growing up, I think every kid is like, ‘Wouldn’t that be fun if I did this?’ But once you get to middle school, high school, and start to realize that you’re perceived differently by certain people, I think a lot of me was kind of like, ‘Oh, well, I’ll let that role die.’”“But seeing that Ruthie was attached to it just kind of lit something inside of me,” she continued. “I’m from Texas and Margaret and Clara are from North Carolina. So it’s not the same geographically, but having a Southern Asian American with a last name like Johnson isn’t actually that far from me.”And despite the effects of Clara’s injury, she is a generally upbeat, optimistic young woman who is warmly embraced by Fabrizio’s family, Zavelson said.So although the actors were still exploring their characters during rehearsals last week, Zavelson said she suspected many of the race-conscious nuances layered into the performance would manifest through Margaret, and the mother-daughter interactions between Clara and Margaret. To what extent does Margaret have an internalized fear of racism that makes her more hesitant to embrace Fabrizio and his family? How have her experiences as an immigrant toughened her? And how does that toughness play out in Margaret’s interactions with Clara?Exactly how to integrate the feeling of racial otherness into the show was also an ongoing challenge for the cast.“Maybe it’s slight racism from other people in Italy, whether it’s a gesture or a look,” Miles said.Miles also saw “The Light in the Piazza” on Broadway, and said she immediately noticed the “sweeping orchestration and beautiful vocals and this really human story of love and grief and regret.”But as she has played back the music in the years since, it speaks to her differently.It is no secret, she said, that she and her husband, Jonathan Blumenstein, have endured tragedy. In 2018, their daughter, Abigail, 5, was killed, and Miles herself critically injured when they were struck by a car while walking in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Miles was pregnant at the time, and two months later, near her due date, lost the baby.“I really feel the ways that Margaret tries to be strong and wants to let everybody know that she is in control and everything is OK,” Miles said. “But then what happens when the doors are closed?”When Margaret finally allows herself to be vulnerable for the audience, she continued, it could become a way for her personally “to finally take a breath and show perhaps a little bit more of the true me.”“Hopefully it’s not until the end of the show,” she added. “Because I won’t recover.” More

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      For a Pioneering Artist, the Joy of Having Done the Work His Way

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      If you keep a musician friend for over 50 years, as the experimental director Ping Chong has done with Meredith Monk, just maybe at your retirement celebration, that friend will sing you a song. And so on Wednesday night at the performance space Chelsea Factory, a luminous Monk sat down at a keyboard, reminisced about Chong when she first knew him — as a pony-tailed student in her dance class, wearing bell-bottom jeans — and played “Gotham Lullaby.”At the front of the crowd, Chong stood listening, transported to his earliest days in theater, when he was a member of Monk’s company. At 76, he has long since become a force in his own right in downtown theater. As a documentary film crew glided through the room, emissaries from La MaMa and the Wooster Group were among the more than 250 guests toasting his nearly half century with Ping Chong and Company.Meredith Monk and Chong have been friends and collaborators for over 50 years. She sang “Gotham Lullaby” at his farewell celebration.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIt was an evening full of warmth and camaraderie, a world away from the loneliness that Chong says he felt when he was an only: toiling alone as an Asian American theater artist in New York. An Obie Award winner and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts — which he received from President Barack Obama in 2014, the same year as Sally Field, Stephen King and Monk, too — Chong formed his company in 1975 and carved out a niche with shows like “Collidescope” (2014), inspired by the killing of Trayvon Martin; the puppet piece “Kwaidan”(1998); and “Nuit Blanche” (1981), about Chong’s touchstone belief that, he said, “we’re all human beings, and we need to stop thinking that what’s on the superficial surface separates us.”Born in Toronto to parents who immigrated from China, he was four months old when his family relocated to New York City. He grew up in Chinatown, where his parents ran two restaurants and a cafe, and went to the High School of Art and Design in Midtown Manhattan. After two years at Pratt Institute (“The easel next to mine was Robert Mapplethorpe”), he studied film at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 1969.Three years later he made his first independent theater piece, “Lazarus,” which he revisited last fall in a version titled “Lazarus 1972-2022,” his final show as artistic director. His current project is the latest installment in the company’s interview-based, social-justice series Undesirable Elements, about Ukraine, set to have its premiere in May.A Zhongkui puppet by Chinese Theater Works at the Chelsea Factory event.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter that, Chong plans to take some time “to see what it feels like to be a civilian again,” while working on getting the rest of his archive to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts — a task he views, like cooperating with the makers of the documentary about him, as part of the responsibility to history that accompanies being an Asian American pioneer. With his retirement — and that of Bruce Allardice, Ping Chong and Company’s longtime executive director, who was also celebrated on Wednesday night — the company will continue under the artistic leadership of a four-person team.Last week, in a rehearsal studio on Great Jones Street in Greenwich Village, Chong sat down to talk about his career. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What was your first experience of theater?My family’s in the Chinese opera, so it was Chinese opera. I didn’t see Western theater until I was in high school. My mom was a diva. My grandfather was a very famous Chinese opera director-librettist. My father was a director-librettist. My mother was performing in Vietnam in the late ’20s, and my father was directing in Singapore and Malaysia in the ’20s. But I hadn’t planned on being in theater at all. I thought I would be a painter.What drew you to theater making?An accident. I didn’t have that much confidence by the time I graduated from film school. I said, “There aren’t any Asian filmmakers.” I was interested in dance. So this young woman said, “You want to take Meredith Monk’s class?” I took the class, and Meredith invited me to take her personal workshop. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be here now. At the end of it, Meredith said, “I’m doing a show at Connecticut College in the summer. Are you free to be part of it?” And I said, “I don’t know if I can do it because I’m thinking of going to India.” Sixties, right? I never got to India. I did get to Connecticut College. And my mind was blown because I’d never seen theater like that before. It was like a surrealistic dream. It was completely not realism. Chinese opera is not realism. So the connection was not so crazy for me. Then she invited me to be part of the company.Some of the table décor, highlighting Chong’s playful sense of humor.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesHow do you define theater?I almost don’t like the term theater. I prefer the term performance because it includes dance. My own work integrates dance and theater and visual arts and all these other things, you know? So I prefer a more generous definition.Do you have a philosophy of theater making?The stage cannot compete with cinema or television for realism. Why are we bothering? Theater has its own unique properties. So that means you need to go back to the Greeks. You need to go back to people like the Kabuki or these other theaters that recognize theater is not realism. Theater is a much more imaginative space.I don’t know why I’m asking this, except that it’s a part of having a long career. Were you ever tempted to —Chuck it?To chuck it, yes!The first time I wanted to chuck it was in 1991. That was the one time I wanted to chuck it, actually. I remember being in Portugal between jobs, lying on the floor, thinking, what else can I do? Nobody talks about how scary it is to create. Because you’re always afraid of failure. That’s the big fear. You always think it’s not going to work. I love what I do, but it’s stressful.More than 250 guests turned out to toast Chong’s half-century career and leadership with Ping Chong and Company.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhat persuaded you not to quit?I couldn’t figure out what else I would do. After I had that little crisis, then I was fine. Once I decided to go on, that was the major flowering for me. Artistically. But I think the other thing that happened was in the late ’80s I went to Asia. I had gone to Asia when I was 17, to Japan and to Hong Kong and to Singapore. I never went back until ’86, when I went to this festival in Japan. It was kind of a shock to be in a place where I didn’t stand out because I was Asian, and that was a real revelation. Two years later I was in Hong Kong. I’m Cantonese. Hong Kong is Cantonese. And when I went to Hong Kong, I reconnected with my cultural roots. Up to that point, I was looking to Europe artistically. After that, I said, “Being approved by Europe is not important to me anymore. I’m just going to go my own way.”Do you remember when you were 17 having that sensation of “I don’t stand out here?” Because when you were 17 you would have been living in Chinatown, right? But also going to a high school that was looking to Europe for validation.Well, that process of leaving Chinatown and going into the high school — at that point, I was trying to learn how to belong to the new world that I was moving into. The alienation wasn’t happening so much yet because I was discovering a new world. The estrangement didn’t really start for me until college, because that’s when I hit the wall with European art, which I did not connect to. I did connect to surrealism.“The whole ’70s was a time where I was grappling with identity,” Chong said. “At this point I’m comfortable with both things. Getting there was complicated.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOf course you did!Because it’s a much more stylized world, right? But I didn’t understand any of those things because I was young. I didn’t understand that leaving Chinatown meant being estranged from that and not really comfortable in this. So my early work all had to do with this sense of limbo. “Lazarus” is an example of where I was emotionally, and of feeling estranged. And “Lazarus” was ’72. The whole ’70s was a time where I was grappling with identity, like, where do I belong? At this point I’m comfortable with both things. Getting there was complicated, accepting these two aspects of myself. I actually went to China, to my father’s hometown. And when I left I said — I said to myself, because he was dead already — I said, “OK, I know where you’re from, but this is not where I’m from.” Because I’m from here. Like it or not.Theater is ephemeral. After 50 years, all those shows, what do you have?You have the joy of having done them. You have the joy of sharing them with people. It’s all ephemeral anyway. It’s not just theater that’s ephemeral. It’s all ephemeral. More

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      in Theater

      Lloyd Suh’s Plays About the Past Speak Directly to Our Present

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      The 47-year-old playwright Lloyd Suh is having a moment, with a handful of plays that reveal how history can exact an emotional toll across culture and time.His latest, “The Far Country,” opens at Angel Island, the notorious checkpoint off the coast of San Francisco, and explores lives fractured by the Chinese Exclusion Act, a racist policy that severely restricted immigration of Chinese people and limited those in the United States from gaining citizenship.The play, running at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through Jan. 1, has been well received by critics. In her review for The New York Times, Alexis Soloski called it “an act, loving and sorrowful, of reclamation, salvaging the history of early generations of Chinese Americans.”His aim, Suh said during a recent phone call, is to prove “the way in which memory becomes hereditary because of the way it lives in the body, the way it lives in the family. There’s poignancy there, but power too.”This mission also plays out in his acclaimed “The Chinese Lady,” in which audiences learn of Afong Moy, who, as possibly the first Chinese woman in the United States, was exhibited across 1830s America. The story, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote in her review for The Times earlier this year when it played at the Public Theater, traverses “188 years of American ugliness and exoticization.”Then there’s his fanciful “Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery” — a metanarrative of Asian American history, set in Berkeley in 1967, a year before students there coined the term “Asian American” — which finds charm even in grotesque rebuttals of racist caricature. And an early one-act, “Disney & Fujikawa,” that dramatizes a 1942 meeting between Walt Disney and the Japanese American illustrator Gyo Fujikawa, whose family was held at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.Next up is “The Heart Sellers,” which debuts in February in Milwaukee and involves two housewives navigating feelings of isolation in a new country in 1973. The play’s title is a pun on the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which, by ending U.S. quotas on the number of immigrants from outside Western Europe, saw a dramatic rise in global newcomers — especially Asians.Shannon Tyo and Jinn S. Kim in “The Far Country,” at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through Jan. 1.Richard Termine for The New York TimesDaniel K. Isaac and Shannon Tyo in “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater earlier this year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBeyond its storytelling, “The Far Country” has reunited Suh with the actor Shannon Tyo, who originated the role of Moy in 2018 in a Ma-Yi Theater Company production of “The Chinese Lady.” She returned to the part for the show’s run at the Public.Suh and Tyo both said their continued collaboration is a testament to new creative and professional growth for Asian American theater workers made possible by diversity, inclusion and equity strategies as well as the broader racial reckoning in America that dovetailed with the pandemic.Having performed in “The Chinese Lady” both before and during the pandemic, Tyo explained the shift. “Prior to the pandemic, it’s almost like audiences didn’t believe us about our history of violence against our community,” she said. “The violence we’ve seen in our present is unfortunately what it takes to make our violent history come alive. People are more ready to believe us, ready to empathize.”In “The Far Country,” that sense of personal resonance and theater’s ability to refract a scene for different audiences — as was the case with Suh’s children’s play “The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go!” — was amplified by the show’s director, Eric Ting.The script subverts immigration, he said, by focusing on how “the only way the characters can achieve a place in the American project is by severing ties with their ancestors.” He added that Suh “is really focusing on the destructive force of capitalism, how it disrupts and destroys families.”Separate from bureaucracy and labor, one character notes, “there is more strenuous work: the work of being Chinese in America.”For the cast and crew, takeaways varied. Whit K. Lee, who plays both a translator and a detainee, said he wept when he first read the script. His maternal great-grandfather had been a translator for 19th-century Chinese railroad workers in Montana and his paternal grandfather was held at Angel Island when he was just 9 years old (separated from his mother, Lee said, the malnourished child used rice rations to lure, kill and eat a pigeon).“So much is lost because our ancestors didn’t want to pass down these stories,” Lee said. “‘The Far Country’ allows me to help tell the story that I was never taught in school. I’m very proud to be Chinese, Chinese American, American Chinese and American.”But Suh, who last week won a $100,000 prize as a recipient of this year’s Steinberg Playwright Awards, is not alone in his success.With his work, Suh says his aim is to prove “the way in which memory becomes hereditary because of the way it lives in the body, the way it lives in the family.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesIn spring 2020, Asian American theater professionals mourned nine plays that were scrapped or curtailed when live performance spaces closed amid the unfolding pandemic chaos. In the last six months, a number of works by Asian American playwrights have been produced Off Broadway, including Jiehae Park’s “Peerless,” presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters, and Daniel K. Isaac’s “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” a Ma-Yi Theater Company production at La MaMa. Several more are planned for the spring, including “Elyria,” the playwright Deepa Purohit’s Off Broadway debut at Atlantic Theater Company, and Hansol Jung’s “Wolf Play,” which, after an engagement last winter presented by Soho Rep and Ma-Yi Theater Company, will return to the stage in January at MCC Theater.The works are not only the fruit of prepandemic efforts to include more Asian American storytelling in theater, but also a reclamation of agency and identity following anti-Asian bigotry and violence during the pandemic itself.“There’s certainly a range of activity now and a quantity of work and a variety of work that feels pretty fresh,” said David Henry Hwang, who became the first (and remains the only) Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award for best play, for “M. Butterfly” in 1988.“There has been an increasing number of AAPI playwrights challenging what has come before,” Hwang added, referring to Asian American Pacific Islanders. “Asian actors have been largely employed by ‘The King and I’ and ‘Miss Saigon,’ which have Orientalist aspects, white supremacist aspects, and with ‘Miss Saigon’ is actually pretty racist.”By contrast, said Suh, “I want Asian American actors to feel like it’s for them, their ownership. Not just roles in plays.” Asked if he has any interest in revivals of “The King and I,” “Miss Saigon” or “South Pacific,” he offered a deadpan “no” before laughing. “I don’t think those are pieces where it’s possible to have any kind of take that is meaningfully transformative.”More recently, breakthroughs and opportunities have manifested in the revisiting of classic works: An Off Broadway production of Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” this fall had an all-Asian-American cast and a “Little Shop of Horrors” revival in California was set in Chinatown. And newer works have found audiences nationally: Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band” and Kristina Wong’s “Sweatshop Overlord,” which had Off Broadway runs in New York.“It’s exciting to me,” Tyo said, “that we could build our canon ourselves.”Suh added: “This industry can be a marketplace where plays have value as commodities, but with all these shows it’s a reminder that the power of theater is in the conversations it creates, how one play leads to the next. That’s how the conversation sustains.” More

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      New Yorker Festival, which runs Will Host Bono and Rep Jamie Raskin

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      The three day-festival beginning on Oct. 7 will also include conversations with stars like Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey and Sandra Oh.The New Yorker Festival returns for its 23rd edition, featuring conversations with Bono, Quinta Brunson, Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey, United States Representative Jamie Raskin and more, and will run from Oct. 7-9.Bono, the Irish rock star and more recently the motorbike-riding lion in “Sing 2,” will be in conversation with The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, about his new memoir and his decades as an activist and musician. The book, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” will be released in November.“Like so many memoirs that I’ve read, the most intriguing part is how someone becomes himself or herself,” Remnick said in an interview.Quinta Brunson, who plays the chirpy yet clumsy elementary school teacher in “Abbott Elementary,” will speak with the magazine’s television critic, Doreen St. Félix. And Chloe Bailey (of the R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle) will perform live at the festival after a conversation.Remnick said that politically driven conversations can be had by artists, authors and actors, as well as lawmakers. Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 House select committee, along with three of the magazine’s writers, will join a live taping of The New Yorker’s “The Political Scene” podcast.The political conversation will continue with a talk about Asian American culture and representation, with the chef David Chang, the filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, the writer Min Jin Lee and the actor Sandra Oh. And the climate activists Sara Blazevic and Molly Burhans, and the climate expert Leah Stokes, will delve into the future of the environment.“All of these people in cultural life are also in many ways connected to the political,” Remnick said.The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will return to the festival, where Hari Kunzru, Elif Batuman, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will also appear.As for comedy, Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, the actresses and comedians who star in the Showtime series “I Love That for You,” will chat with Susan Morrison, an editor at the magazine. And the comedians Hasan Minhaj, Phoebe Robinson, Billy Eichner and Jerrod Carmichael will also participate in festival conversations, along with the directors Stiller, the duo Daniels, Sharon Horgan and Maggie Gyllenhaal.Remnick said that with the return to theaters and the arrival of vaccine boosters, he feels confident sharing a room with readers, thinkers and performers, and the festival will hold select events virtually.“Part of cultural lifestyle was taken from us, and now it’s bounced back,” he said. More

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      Where Did Those Hot Dog Fingers Come From? Daniels Explain

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      The directors of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” have found the reaction to their film “humbling and inspiring and confusing.”When “Everything Everywhere All at Once” opened in March in a handful of theaters, its creators, the directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, weren’t sure what to expect. The film had stars — “I thought we could bill it as ‘Michelle Yeoh fights Jamie Lee Curtis,’” Scheinert said — but was otherwise tough to pigeonhole. It was a multiverse picture, sure, but instead of superheroes and spaceships, there were fights with fanny packs, cinematic shout-outs to Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kubrick, and a singing raccoon. And then there was the pandemic, and who knew what that might do to box office numbers? “I went in with very low expectations, because there were a lot of unknowns,” Kwan said.Instead, the movie became one of the sleeper hits of the summer, expanding from 10 screens in three American cities to 2,200 theaters worldwide, becoming A24’s highest-grossing release in the process. Strong reviews helped: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film was rated 95 percent fresh, while The Times called it “an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy” and praised its “sincere and generous heart.” The film also benefited from exuberant word of mouth, which included viewers posting photos and videos of themselves on social media having a good cry or three. “It’s been very humbling and inspiring and confusing,” Scheinert said.In the film, Yeoh stars as a laundromat owner who must call upon various alter egos in parallel worlds to battle a mysterious power out to destroy the multiverse. On a recent morning, Kwan and Scheinert, known professionally as Daniels, spoke — via video call from their separate homes in Los Angeles — about the film’s slow-burn, still-burning success; how Yeoh and Curtis ended up with wieners for fingers; and why, with a movie about infinite possibilities, they wouldn’t change a thing.The film had a pretty small first weekend release. What was it like watching audiences discover the film?DANIEL SCHEINERT I’m grateful that it’s been slow, because I think it allowed us to process how people were reacting. At those early screenings, people would stay after to talk with us, and a good number of them would cry while talking about it.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.The Costume Designer: Shirley Kurata, whose work defined the look of the movie, has a signature style that mixes vintage, high-end designers and an intense color wheel.DANIEL KWAN That first month was very emotional. It became this version of group therapy for certain people, especially at college campuses. For a lot of younger Asian American kids, especially children of immigrants, they’d come up to me, and they wouldn’t even be asking about the movie past a certain point. They’d be asking about their own life, like, so what do I do? How do I talk to my parents? And like, I’m not a therapist. My relationship with my parents is good, but it’s good for an Asian American immigrant relationship.Michelle Yeoh in a scene from the film, which Daniel Kwan described as “it’s like if my mom was in ‘The Matrix.’”A24“Everything” is hard to describe. How would you describe it?SCHEINERT Michelle Yeoh stars in an action-adventure movie, but it’s in the multiverse. So we get to interrupt that movie with a family drama and then interrupt that with a romance and then interrupt that with an absurdist comedy. And all of that is a fun way to play with how overwhelming life is these days. But at the end of the day, it’s a story about a family.KWAN And then the really dumb pitch is: It’s like if my mom was in “The Matrix.”In one universe, Michelle Yeoh (as Evelyn Wang, an embattled Chinese American laundromat owner) and Jamie Lee Curtis (as Deirdre Beaubeirdra, her I.R.S. auditor and nemesis) have hot dogs for fingers. How did that come about?SCHEINERT We were just high and hungry. No, that’s not true. When we were writing this, we were engineering that particular universe to be the one that pushes Michelle the furthest out of her comfort zone. It was like, how do we make Evelyn hate the multiverse? And so it was like, oh, well, you’re in love with your auditor, and you have floppy useless hot dogs for fingers.KWAN They’re just dumb ideas. The hot dog fingers idea is something a 5 year old would come up with. The only difference between us and a 5 year old is that we are adults with budgets to actually execute the ideas. A lot of these ideas are really dumb. They’re the kind of thing that anyone could come up with.You have an extended and weird shout-out to “Ratatouille,” which is already a really weird movie. Instead of a rat under a chef’s toque, controlling his every move, you have a singing raccoon riding atop Harry Shum Jr.KWAN There’s a phrase that we picked up from working with comedians. When a joke stacks on a joke and stacks on a joke, it’s called a hat on a hat. It’s a problem. It’s like, don’t put a hat on a hat. You’re messing up the purity of the joke and it’s not funny anymore. But we do the opposite. We love to put a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat.SCHEINERT The hope is that the tiny hat on top of the other hats is the one that makes you cry. It’s not good comedy writing, but it’s fun to play with.KWAN I think you saying that “Ratatouille” is already a really weird movie is probably why we love that movie, because it is weird. A rat controlling a man by his hair is hilarious and strange. And so that already feels like a hat on a hat. Or maybe a rat on a hat.SCHEINERT A rat under a hat.The famous hot dog fingers, which Daniel Scheinert said were devised in response to the question, “How do we make Evelyn hate the universe?”A24“Everything” deals with alternate realities and what one might do differently if you had a second shot at life. Is there anything you might do differently if you had a second shot at this film?SCHEINERT Not really. I think our takeaway from the whole exercise of making a movie about alternate lives is that it made me reflect on all the little forks in my life that got me here. How precarious and miraculous the good stuff in my life is. I feel like just one really charming [expletive] friend in high school and my life would just be garbage right now. Just one persuasive butthead who convinces me to join a cult or be a misogynist, and I wouldn’t be here.KWAN It was the same thing with this film. There were so many moments where we thought the movie was going to fall apart, and those moments ended up making the film better. So it’s like, I don’t want to touch it. It’s not a perfect movie. It’s very strange and messy. But I have no regrets.What’s coming up for you?KWAN We might try to make something really small. Just the opposite of this movie, you know, to disappoint all of our new fans. [Laughs] We think a lot about the way the Coen brothers work. Right after they did “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Oscar and is probably one of the best films of the past 50 years, they followed up with “Burn After Reading.” I love “Burn After Reading,” but it’s like a farcical, nihilistic, stupid joke about bureaucracy. I think they’ve been able to build a long career because they’re constantly playing with expectations, and just kind of doing whatever they want to do. I wish, I hope, that we can have that kind of bravery. More