Subterms
Almost everyone who reads “American Born Chinese,” Gene Luen Yang’s groundbreaking graphic novel, is a little afraid of Chin-Kee.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More
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
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
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
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
Huang, who wrote the music for the operatic adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s play, says its exploration of race, gender and power still resonates today.The question from the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo came out of the blue: Would David Henry Hwang, the American playwright, consider adapting his Broadway hit “M. Butterfly” for the opera stage?It was 2013, and Huang, who had worked with Hwang on an Off Broadway revival of “The Dance and the Railroad,” was eager to collaborate again. The playwright agreed, and in late July, almost a decade after their first conversation, “M. Butterfly” had its premiere at Santa Fe Opera.Like the play, the opera tells the story of René Gallimard, a civil servant at the French embassy in Beijing, who falls in love with Song Liling, a Chinese opera singer who seems to be the ideal woman. Gallimard eventually discovers that Song has been a man — and a spy — all along.“M. Butterfly” upends Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” which tells the story of Cio-Cio-San, a betrayed young geisha, waiting in vain for the return of Pinkerton, her American husband. It gives power to Asian characters instead of Westerners, and the fluidity in gender roles counters sexist tropes in Puccini’s opera.Kangmin Justin Kim as Song Liling in the Santa Fe Opera production of “M. Butterfly.”Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe OperaIn an interview from Santa Fe, Huang said the discussions of race, gender and power in “M. Butterfly,” which runs through Aug. 24, spoke to the present moment, more than three decades after the play’s premiere. He also talked about his early immersion in Chinese opera, the impact of the pandemic on the production and Asian representation in the arts. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me about your first encounter with the play “M. Butterfly.”When I was at Oberlin, in my college days, the first play that I saw in America was “M. Butterfly.” It left a very deep impact. I knew Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” the opera, but I did not know “M. Butterfly.” I thought it was a misspelling. I went in expecting to see “Madama Butterfly” but walked out with a totally opposite and different story.Why turn the play, which was successful on Broadway and inspired a 1993 movie, into an opera?I saw several versions of the play, and I often felt it needed to be told in musical form because it was so related to Puccini and to the reversal of “Madama Butterfly.” I felt in opera I could freely integrate — to twist and to turn, to create all the drama with the music. Some plays should never be touched or turned into opera, but I felt this was one of the rare cases where it could work.You grew up on Hainan island, the southernmost edge of China, immersed in traditional Chinese opera and other music. What was that like?In every village in Hainan, there is a communal open-air space, like a square. People would bring their clothes during the day to dry under the burning sun or put the rice out to dry. At night, people would sit there, the guys would take their shirts off, to get cool and to fall asleep.Occasionally there were Hainanese opera troupes that came to the village to perform. And at that moment, the open square became an improvised theater. Every family would bring their own food and chairs. And my grandmother would take me to sit there, to see opera.How did those early experiences inform your artistic philosophy?My grandmother was never sent to school because her family was poor and she was a woman. But she got her education through watching opera. Opera was for everybody: men and women, the elderly and the young. She learned all these stories and moral lessons, and she taught me those as well.Kim, left, and Mark Stone as René Gallimard in “M. Butterfly.”Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe OperaHow did the story of “Madama Butterfly” influence your approach?Puccini’s opera shows a submissive, young Asian woman who will do everything — even change her faith — to be put in a cage, to serve as someone’s wife and even bear a child. And it shows her foolishly wanting him to come back, only to be abandoned and to have her only child, her only hope, brutally taken away. Pinkerton was portrayed by Puccini as this white man who doesn’t know or respect Eastern traditions or culture, and just abuses Cio-Cio-San, and takes advantage of her, both physically and psychologically.The big picture is this kind of imbalance between East and West, and the smaller picture is the interplay of male and female, and Asians being treated as subhuman. That is entirely reversed in “M. Butterfly.”Can you give an example of how Puccini’s music influenced the score of “M. Butterfly”?The overture of “Madama Butterfly” is very fast and energetic, in a minor key, that sounds very Western. I turned the overture upside down. I used the Puccini motif, and I reversed it. I made it quasi-pentatonic, to make it more Eastern. And then I have an opera gong, crash cymbal and all these instruments go along with it. So it’s quite unrecognizable if you don’t know the Puccini well, but I felt that in that way it’s related to the Puccini, and it also became new, just like “M. Butterfly” itself.The premiere of “M. Butterfly” was delayed for two years because of the pandemic. How does it feel to open in this moment?It’s even more timely now, because of the pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian hate. Asian Americans are again being treated with subhuman stereotypes and racial hate. They’re being treated as others, not as equals. With “M. Butterfly,” we are showing people this is the history of humanity — that this is not just an exotic story happening in the past.What has it been like witnessing the spike in hate directed toward Asians in the United States, particularly in New York City, your longtime home?You just don’t know when and where you might get attacked. For example, I took my kids out biking after the severe attack on a Filipino woman in Times Square last year. I basically disguised them, and disguised myself, so we all had masks, and they had helmets on, and I had a hat, so we all looked less Asian. That was the first time I felt I had to disguise myself in America.Normally Asians and Asian Americans want to be seen and heard. We have been complaining for a long time that we are invisible. But that was the moment that I wanted to be invisible. I did not want to be seen or identified. Is that normal? Is that real? I don’t think that’s normal, but that felt so real at that moment.What do you want audiences to take away from “M. Butterfly”?I want people to understand the story, but also to ask questions. That, to me, is the best opera can do: Not to provide answers, but to provoke questions. And to leave the audience asking questions about their own background, their own journey. More
With the success of the film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the work of Shirley Kurata is in demand, but her personal style has always had its own fans.Shirley Kurata wore a pink long-sleeve T-shirt designed by her husband, Charlie Staunton; a vintage pink floral Comme des Garçons skirt; and yellow and purple Melissa x Opening Ceremony sneaker jellies, one of at least two pairs she owns. The large round L.A. Eyeworks glasses are exclusive to her, in a marbled pattern and tobacco color called “bronzino.”Ms. Kurata, who gives her age only as “Gen X’er,” has a signature style, mixing vintage with high-end designers, and is drawn to an intense color wheel — an exuberant look she has cultivated since her brother’s girlfriend gave her hand-me-down Barbies from the 1960s. (“I thought, ‘Wow, these clothes are so much cuter’” than Barbies from the ’80s, she recalled.)She has brought her aesthetic to the Linda Lindas’ new music video “Growing Up,” Rodarte’s recently released look book for its fall 2022 collection, the MiuMiu short film “House Comes With a Bird” and Vans’s capsule collection with the rapper Tierra Whack. But perhaps most notably, this sought-after costume designer’s original eye was showcased in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” this spring’s sleeper hit feature film.“She’s able to take the dumbest-looking things and turn them into high fashion,” said Daniel Kwan, who, along with Daniel Scheinert, directed “Everything,” which is now streaming. “In a lot of ways, she’s a kindred spirit to our process and very much focused on the same endeavor, putting highest and lowest on the same level and showing people maybe they’re two sides of the same coin.”“A lot of the movie is regular people wearing kind of frumpy things that are very specific to an I.R.S. office or a laundromat, and it was exciting that Shirley was just as passionate about that as the far-fetched, wild aspects of it,” Mr. Scheinert said. “Shirley was a slam-dunk for this movie.”For the film, Ms. Kurata spearheaded the costumes for the actors Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis as they traveled between multiple universes — including nearly a dozen wild looks for Ms. Hsu, who played Joy Wang, the daughter of a Chinese American couple running a suburban laundromat, as well as the villain Jobu Tupaki.Ms. Kurata spearheaded the costumes for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” in which characters (above, Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre Beaubeirdre) travel between multiple universes.A24“She’s able to take the dumbest-looking things and turn them into high fashion,” said Daniel Kwan, who, along with Daniel Scheinert, directed the film. Above, Stephanie Hsu as Jobu Tupaki.Allyson Riggs“The interesting parallel is my parents owned a laundromat, too,” said Ms. Kurata, who grew up in the Los Angeles suburb Monterey Park and attended an all-girls Catholic high school in La Cañada Flintridge. “I really related to Joy’s character.”Based in Los Angeles, Ms. Kurata describes herself as a “creative collaborator.” She has dressed Billie Eilish (including for her current world tour), Ms. Whack, Lena Dunham, Jenny Lewis and Pharrell Williams. Among her fans are the directors Autumn de Wilde, Cat Solen and Janicza Bravo. And Ms. Kurata herself emits an aura of celebrity — as a fashion icon, a model, a muse and a co-owner, along with her husband, of the lifestyle store Virgil Normal — even if fame is not how she measures her success.The youngest of four children in a Japanese American family, she said she didn’t fit in at her “predominantly white and preppy” school. At a freshman ice cream social, she recounted, “One of the seniors asked me earnestly, ‘Do you speak English?’”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.The Villain: The actress Stephanie Hsu, who plays an all-powerful evil being, talks about how clothes convey the full range of her character.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blanding action and drama.A Healing Experience: For some viewers, the movie was a way to reflect on how the effects of trauma can be passed down between generations.“You’re just as American as these other white students,” she said. “But in terms of the mainstream, there wasn’t much that reflected who you were. It was always a challenge or dilemma to assert your Americanness.”She expressed herself through fashion.“I was really into Japanese magazines,” Ms. Kurata said, adding that she loved the fashion and styling and would try to do her own version on “free-dress days,” when school uniforms weren’t required. “I had a friend that lived in Orange County, and she introduced me to the whole world of thrift shopping.” While studying art at Cal State University Long Beach, she decided to move to Paris to study fashion design.It was during this formative three-year period attending Studio Berçot, known for its avant-garde curriculum, that Ms. Kurata’s interest in film burgeoned. “There was such a big appreciation for filmmakers and there would always be film festivals — Godard, Jacques Tati,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Who is this Cassavetes?’ I had a thirst for seeing cult and indie films and the fashion in them.”“I really consider Shirley to be one of the top five stylists in the world,” said Peter Jensen, chair of fashion at the Savannah College of Art & Design. Mr. Jensen founded (and has since sold) a namesake label that once featured a collection inspired by Ms. Kurata — with color-blocked ’60s silhouettes and models all sporting her glasses and hairstyle. “She comes from a fashion design background. She knows the language. She understands the nuance and small elements and how to put all of it together to become a full story.”“I was really into Japanese magazines,” she said. “I loved the fashion and styling and would try to do my own version.”Jimmy Marble for The New York TimesMuch of her inspiration comes from the world she has built around her, including Virgil Normal, the East Hollywood store she opened with Mr. Staunton in 2015 in a former motorcycle-repair shop that was also the hangout for their moped gang Latebirds. The shop’s patio hosts events such as a pop-up for hand-lettered signs by She Chimp, fund-raisers and gatherings to rally support around local causes.“Having the shop has been really fulfilling and it was kind of a surprise to me because it’s beyond just having a store, it’s having a community,” she said. “Having events here, being part of this neighborhood, we’ve met so many people, artists, designers.”Her home in Los Feliz (by the midcentury architect Stephen Alan Siskind) is an extension of her style, filled with art, vintage furniture, records, magazines, books, CDs and DVDs. Among her enthusiasms are ’80s music (tickets to a freestyle show with the headliners Stevie B and Rob Base are affixed to her refrigerator), shopping in Japan, analog entertainment devices (especially “anything that’s round”) and photography books.“Shirley has knowledge of all different mediums of art that makes her references and eye unique,” the actress Kirsten Dunst, whom Ms. Kurata has worked with on Rodarte collaborations, wrote in an email while shooting Alex Garland’s “Civil War.” Besides being a great dancer and karaoke partner, she continued, “Shirley has an innovative imagination and knows how to make that a reality.”Standing at her Eero Saarinen tulip dining table on a recent Saturday morning (in a bright red turtleneck worn underneath a knit tank dress with vertical black and white stripes), Ms. Kurata brought out a book called “Fruits,” while the soundtrack for the 1971 movie “Melody” played.“I’ll show you my bible,” she said, with the book, a 2001 collection of Tokyo street-style looks photographed by Shoichi Aoki, in hand. “I refer to this all the time because the way they mix, you know? It never looks out of date to me.” Mr. Aoki also published the magazine Street, chronicling fashion in cities such as London and Paris — including, in one issue, a photo of Ms. Kurata while she was studying at Studio Berçot.“Shirley is always hip to new things, so whenever I present an idea to her, she’s able to think quickly and find a resolution,” Ms. Whack wrote in an email. “There are so many looks that Shirley and I pulled off. Recently for my show in New Orleans I sent Shirley a photo of this outfit Michael Jackson wore when he was a kid and, boom, she got it made.”“You know how when you’re dreaming and then a sound from the real world appears right before you wake up?” said Ms. Solen, who directed Ms. Whack’s fantastical videos for “Link” and “Body of Water,” working alongside Ms. Kurata. “It’s almost like you’re seeing into the future for a second. That’s what working with her is like. She understands what you want immediately, and it’s also something that only could have come to you in a dream — slightly newer, different, more surprising. She’s a visual artist and she could do anything, and she wants to do costumes. She blows my mind the way that she costumes Tierra, which is out there, but then she also works with Rodarte.”Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters who founded and are the designers of Rodarte, have worked with Ms. Kurata, along with the stylist Ashley Furnival, since their first New York show, in 2006. Its fall 2022 collection — presented in a look book instead of a runway show — featured a cast of actors, musicians and directors such as Kathleen Hanna, Rachel Brosnahan, Lexi Underwood and the Linda Lindas. Laura Mulleavy talks to Ms. Kurata almost every day on the phone.“Shirley is very much connected to a visual narrative,” Ms. Mulleavy said. “Creating character, an intention to come across in the clothing, extreme or subdued, she understands the theatricality. She understands the history of fashion in a very interesting way.”“The first time we met her it was over Zoom and she had her cat on her lap,” said the drummer for the Linda Lindas, 11-year-old Mila de la Garza. (Ms. Kurata has two black-and-white tuxedo cats, Fanny and Moondog.) “She was already there petting her cat. And she has her glasses. And we were like, ‘Wow, this girl is cool.’”“In film right now, it’s still very much a boys’ club, so throw in being a person of color, that’s another challenge,” Ms. Kurata said. “I’ve definitely felt that. I think it’s still a battle.”Jimmy Marble for The New York Times“For us, it’s important that you’re comfortable and you can move in your clothes and you’re confident in what you’re wearing,” Lucia de la Garza, 15, a guitarist for the group, said over Zoom as her bandmates nodded in agreement.That’s what punk is, according to Bela Salazar, 17, another guitarist: “a way of doing things and thinking, so it translates into fashion.” “It’s a way of expressing yourself,” she added. “And we trusted Shirley.”Ms. Kurata said she wished a band like the Linda Lindas had existed when she was growing up.“We need more voices and new stories,” she said. “Things are changing; it’s long overdue.”Ms. Kurata has taken a momentary pause to field scripts before signing on to her next major project since the surprising box-office success of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”“I don’t want to be working on things for superficial reasons, because I need money or to build my book or whatever — I did that when I was younger,” she said. “I’m seeing how much the movie has affected people. Being part of something like that means a lot to me, where you see Asian representation not in a clichéd or stereotypical way.”Ms. Kurata is also involved in workers’ rights in her own field, as a board member on pay equity for the Costume Designers Guild. “In film right now, it’s still very much a boys’ club, so throw in being a person of color, that’s another challenge. I’ve definitely felt that. I think it’s still a battle.”Though she’s reached a certain level of success, Ms. Kurata says she’s far from done.“For me, it was a long path,” she said. “It wasn’t like I was discovered, I didn’t have the contacts. I worked on the crappiest low-budget movies for years. It was very slow and it took a lot of hard work to get to where I am now. I’m still not even where I could be, but getting there.” More
