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      The Composer Huang Ruo on Illusion and Betrayal in ‘M. Butterfly’

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      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

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      in Movies

      ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Costume Designer Shirley Kurata Becomes the Story

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      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

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      in Movies

      James Wong Howe: A Gutsy Cinematographer Finally Gets His Due

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      A retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image looks at a career filled with sublime images made at a time of strong anti-Asian sentiment in Hollywood.The Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe was an industrious, peripatetic youngster. In modern parlance, he was a hustler, but so was everyone in the early, exploratory years of cinema, when the fledgling film industry churned out dozens of titles every week. During the 1910s, the silent film directors who won acclaim — like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille — seemed to rise through shrewd business acumen, false confidence and good luck.Wong Howe had all of those things, but he was gutsier — he had to be. It was clear in the boundless, reckless innovation of his work; his reputation as a supreme perfectionist; and his success and respected status in an industry that saw virtually no place for artists of Asian descent. James Wong Howe was defiance personified.His decades-long career, which spanned the silent era, Hollywood’s golden age and the New Hollywood renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s, was emblematic of a creative spirit that persisted despite changing fashions, industry upheavals and discriminatory practices. He revolutionized the way films communicated visually, developing new techniques that could convey feelings without the need for words or even performers — like the expressionistic use of wide-angle and fish-eye lenses in John Frankenheimer’s body-swapping science-fiction drama, “Seconds” (1966); or one of the earliest aerial shots in the final moments of Joshua Logan’s Technicolor romantic comedy “Picnic” (1955).Rock Hudson in “Seconds,” which Wong Howe shot in part using wide-angle and fish-eye lenses.Paramount Pictures/Photofest via MoMIThese and other examples of Wong Howe’s photographic prowess can be seen in a continuing series dedicated to his work that runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.James Wong Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in Kwantung, China, in 1899. In the early 1900s, he was whisked away to Pasco, Wash., by his entrepreneurial father. There, he experienced racism, learned to box and began tinkering with cameras before his father’s death, in 1914, set off a period of drifting. Not unlike Charlie Chaplin’s classic character the Tramp, Wong Howe was a game outsider stumbling from misadventure to misadventure. He went to Oregon, San Francisco, and then Los Angeles, where the 18-year-old Jimmie Howe eventually finagled a job on the janitorial staff of Lasky Studios.DeMille took a liking to Jimmie; he was amused by the young man’s floral shirts, the contrast between his small stature and the outsize cigars he smoked on set. Wong Howe was not passive; he seemed to take the matter of his skin color as a challenge. In his free time, he began familiarizing himself with the studio’s equipment and practiced taking pictures with a still camera. Soon, he was promoted to assistant cameraman.No one at the time was what we might today consider a bona fide camera expert. People learned on the job, improvised and experimented with the new technologies, so the crew members who distinguished themselves were the ones who found creative solutions to the problems that arose on set. This was Wong Howe’s forte and the source of his first big break. The actress Mary Miles Minter, impressed by Wong Howe’s still portraits of her, insisted he shoot her next film. He had devised a solution that could keep her blue eyes from turning white on camera, a problem caused by the blue-sensitive orthochromatic film used at the time. From then on, his reputation as a formidable cameraman was assured.Wong Howe, left, on the set of “The Glory Guys” (1965). His career ran from silents to the New Hollywood renaissance.United Artists/Photofest, via MoMIWong Howe wasn’t the only Asian artist hanging out on the studio back lots. There was the Japanese-born actor Sessue Hayakawa. Hollywood’s onscreen enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws restricted him to playing forbidden-lover roles or sadistic Svengali types, but his popularity among white women viewers made him a bankable presence. Then there was the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, a go-to supporting performer as the film industry began to mount bigger, more spectacular productions in “exotic” settings. Wong Howe, in fact, would shoot her in one of her first major roles, as the Indigenous princess Tiger Lily in Herbert Brenon’s “Peter Pan.”But renewed anti-Asian sentiment and the Production Code of the 1930s, which put a chokehold on the depiction of interracial relationships, further diminished the industry’s willingness to work with performers of Asian descent. Wong Howe initially floundered during this period, but his work — particularly his penchant for dramatic, high-contrast lighting, which earned him the nickname “Low-key Howe” — spoke for itself. His split-screen shot allows Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelgänger in John Cromwell’s “The Prisoner of Zenda,” (1937), and the fight scenes he filmed in Busby Berkeley’s “They Made Me a Criminal” (1939) are so visceral you can almost feel the boxing gloves jabbing.Though he was adored by the press — what a novelty that an Asian man could be so talented and so full of personality — and respected by his collaborators, Wong Howe was often scorned by the white crew members under his command. He dealt with laws and prejudices that relegated him to second-class citizenship all of his life. During World War II, he wore a button that read “I am Chinese” to ward off harassment should anyone think he was Japanese. Though he had been living in the United States for nearly four decades, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited him from gaining citizenship; without it, he was forced to turn down exciting creative opportunities, like joining John Ford’s wartime documentary crew.Wong Howe’s split-screen shot allowed Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelganger in “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1937).Warner Bros.Most devastating perhaps was his marriage to the novelist Sanora Babb; the couple tied the knot in Paris in 1937, but California’s anti-miscegenation laws and the studios’ morality clause prevented them from going public until decades later. For his suspected association with Hollywood Communists, he was put on the “graylist” by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee; Wong Howe kept out of politics for the most part, but it didn’t help that China had become a Communist state.Still, he carried on during the precarious ’40s, working with Fritz Lang on the provocative war thriller “Hangmen Also Die!,” and capturing Ida Lupino in all her shades of ambition and vulnerability in Vincent Sherman’s pitch-black melodrama “The Hard Way.”Wong Howe’s images are sublime, his expressive interplay of light and shadow summoning moral conflicts out of thin air. He re-envisioned New York with a bleak, otherworldly flair with “Sweet Smell of Success,” Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 drama about a vicious newspaperman, a work that many consider to be Wong Howe’s chef d’oeuvre. He coated interior-set walls in oil to give them a surreal shimmer, and used long-focus lenses to make buildings look clustered together, emphasizing a sense of claustrophobic delirium.Walter Brennan in “Hangmen Also Die!” (1943), which Wong Howe shot for the director Fritz Lang.Cohen Media GroupThere are few individuals whose work so comparably ushered in cinema’s transition from mere dime-ticket spectacle to art form. Still, Wong Howe was hungry. Since the 1920s, he had wanted to direct, and though he was given the opportunity in the form of commissioned documentaries and “B” movies, his real ambitions were too often denied. There was a project about rickshaw pullers in China, as well as a script he wrote with Babb about San Francisco’s Chinatown, but both ideas were ultimately dropped for lack of financing. If you can catch only one screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, make it Wong Howe’s sole directorial feature, “Go, Man, Go!” (1954), which stars a fresh-faced Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in a drama about the Harlem Globetrotters. It is a bare-bones production, but the grit and spirit of something even greater was just beneath the surface, like Wong Howe himself.Wong Howe didn’t deny his Chinese roots. For a time, he ran a popular Chinese eatery that was frequented by Marlene Dietrich, Mickey Rooney and Tyrone Power. And in his final years, he took to wearing traditional Chinese clothes. In Todd Rainsberger’s 1981 study of the cinematographer, it becomes clear that Wong Howe, who died in 1976, longed to create a more expansive portrait of Americanness, one that felt true to him, if not his employers. He was one of the great American cinematographers and a two-time Oscar winner, but he wanted more because he knew he deserved it. Such was his defiance.“How It’s Done: The Cinema of James Wong Howe” runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. For more information, go to movingimage.us. More

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      in Television

      Daniel Isaac, 'Billions' Actor, Cedes the Spotlight While Quietly Commanding It

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      Daniel K. Isaac, a theater actor with a steady gig on the series “Billions,” is appearing at the Public in Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady.”“I’m the type of actor who won’t take up the most space in the room,” Daniel K. Isaac said.This was on a weekday morning, at the Public Theater, an hour or so before Isaac would begin rehearsal for “The Chinese Lady,” a play by Lloyd Suh that runs through March 27. Isaac perched at the edge of his chair — arms crossed, legs crossed, chest concave, occupying the bare minimum of leather upholstery.“It’s a big chair,” he said.Isaac, 33, a theater actor and an ensemble player on the Showtime drama “Billions,” combines that reticence with intelligence and warmth, qualities that enlarge every character he plays. (On this day, he was dressed as a New Yorker, all in navy and black, but his socks were printed with black-and-white happy faces.) With his sad eyes and resonant voice, he is an actor you remember, no matter how much or little screen time or stage time he receives.Isaac, left, and Shannon Tyo in Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Chinese Lady” is inspired by the life of Afong Moy, a Chinese woman who came to America as a teenager in 1834 and was exhibited as a curiosity before disappearing from the popular imagination. Isaac plays Atung, her translator, who made even less of a dent in the historical record. “He exists as a side note,” Isaac said.Isaac created the role, in 2018, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. Even in a two-hander, he rarely takes center stage, ceding that space to Shannon Tyo’s Afong Moy.“I am irrelevant,” Atung says in the play’s opening scene.Isaac relates. In the first decade of his career, he felt ancillary, in part because of the roles available to Asian American men. He still feels that way. But now, in his 30s — and with his debut as a playwright coming later this year — he is trying to be the main character in his own life.“I don’t think I’ve ever had the big break or the large, hugely visible or recognizable thing,” he said. “My life has been a slow burn, a marathon rather than immediate sprint.” Isaac ought to know: He recently trained for his first marathon, and then posted cheerful selfies — of him in his NipGuards — to Twitter.Isaac with Tyo. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIsaac was born in 1988, in Southern California, the only child of a single mother who had immigrated from South Korea. At her megachurch, his mother heard a story of a pastor who suffered from stage fright. And because she imagined that Isaac might one day become a preacher — or a lawyer, or a doctor, who might have the occasional lecture — she signed him up for the church’s drama troupe.In high school, he participated for the first time in secular theater, playing a gambler in “Guys and Dolls.” He loved it. “There’s nothing like the community of theater, or what I still call the church of theater,” he said. This was also a time when he was struggling with his attraction to men and voluntarily undergoing conversion therapy. Theater, by contrast, allowed him to experiment with his identity, to try on different ways of being.“It became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more,” he said.He finished high school at 16 and went on to study theater at the University of California, San Diego, where he accepted his sexuality, which led to an estrangement from his mother. (They’re still working on it.) After graduation he moved to New York City and found restaurant work. He had set his sights on classical theater because peers had told him that, as an actor of color, he might find more parts there.“I was trying to imagine, could I be the token Asian in a project?” he said. “And would that be enough?”Seven years, some Off Broadway plays and a few episodes of television later, he landed a small part in the “Billions” pilot. He didn’t think much of it. He knew that plenty of pilots didn’t take. And he’d been killed or written off in ones that did. But “Billions” took, and his character, Ben Kim, an analyst who became a portfolio manager, remains alive. Isaac has appeared in every episode. (Still he didn’t quit his restaurant job until midway through Season 2. And technically, the restaurant told him to go.)Dhruv Maheshwari, left, and Isaac in “Billions.”Christopher Saunders/ShowtimeThe showrunners of “Billions,” Brian Koppelman and David Levien, hadn’t had huge plans for the Ben character. Once they understood Isaac’s intelligence and versatility, they expanded the role. “Daniel is a fearless actor, and that gives us huge freedom,” they wrote in a joint email.There’s a sweetness to his “Billions” character, which contrasts with the macho posturing of his colleagues at an asset management company. And that sweetness, as his co-star Kelly AuCoin said during a recent phone conversation, is all Isaac. “He could not be a more lovely or positive person,” he said. “He emanates love.” AuCoin broke off, worrying that his praise sounded fake. Which it wasn’t, he assured me. Then he broke off again. Isaac had just texted to wish him a happy birthday.For Isaac, who tries to do theater in between “Billions” shoots, taking on the role of Atung felt personal. And it felt important, not only as a way to explore who these characters were, but also as a means to reclaim their history.“Daniel understands the sacrifices made to get him where he is, and it imbues his work with a sense of purpose,” Ralph B. Peña, the play’s director, wrote in an email.Isaac says that theater “became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn 2018, playing Atung, and reckoning with the weight of what men like him had suffered, felt painful. “I think I took it a lot more personally,” Isaac said. In the intervening years, anti-Asian prejudice, fueled by misinformation around Covid-19, seemed only to increase, which has made the work feel even more necessary.“If art has any capacity to make space for understanding, or empathy, or can be more than just entertainment, which I hope and live by, then I want to share that,” he said.Isaac has a way, in conversation and seemingly in his life, of taking the emphasis off himself and putting it onto the work, his colleagues, the world. That’s why he started writing plays.“Because then I could literally give the spotlight to others,” he said. “And sit in the shadows and still experience something and the joy of creation.” Ma-Yi will produce his first play in the fall, “Once Upon a (Korean) Time,” which explores the Korean War through the medium of Korean fairy tales.Tyo, his “The Chinese Lady” co-star, would like to see him find his light. They often help each other film auditions, so she has seen the range of what he can do. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “He’s very good at it. He’s very good at surfer bro. There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”He is trying, he said. And at the risk of sounding what he called “extra woo-woo,” he thanks theater for helping him to try. “I credit the theater community because that’s where I felt safest and saw people being fearlessly themselves,” he said. “That gave me permission to try to step toward that in my own journey. And I’m still doing that.” More

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      5 Monologues, Each a Showcase for Asian American Actors Over 60

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      “Out of Time” at the Public Theater is intended to showcase the talents of older actors. “People want to dismiss your stories,” the show’s director says. Not here.They might be asked to play a person lying in bed, dying of a stroke, or someone’s horrible mother, or a beloved grandparent struggling with dementia.“Commercially speaking, ‘old Asian lady’ is a huge amount of my opportunity,” the actor Natsuko Ohama said recently. “I like being ‘old Asian lady.’ But it has its limitations.”The director Les Waters became even more acutely interested in those kinds of limitations as he was watching a dance performance choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at the Skirball Center in 2020. The dancers in it, he recalled, were “older than usual.” He was struck by what he saw.Waters, who most recently directed Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.” on Broadway, and Mia Katigbak, the co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, had met a few years back at a festival and had agreed to work together at some point. Three years later, they were together at dinner, and Waters could not help but share what he called “an insane directorial megalomaniac’s vision.”What if there was a show that started at night, ran until the morning, and featured a succession of talented older actors telling stories — demonstrating just how much they were capable of?“Out of Time,” which began performances Feb. 15 at the Public Theater, is not quite as ambitious as that original vision. But it is intended to showcase the talents of older actors all the same. It will feature five performers delivering five new monologues — centered on themes like memory, parenthood, and identity — in a show that will run roughly 150 minutes. All the playwrights and all the actors are Asian American. And all the performers are over 60.Ohama is performing a 40-minute monologue by the playwright Sam Chanse.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesKubota will perform Naomi Iizuka’s monologue, about a man much like the playwright’s father.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt is a first, officials at the Public maintain, even if the first is a tad specific: The first production in New York theater to be written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over the age of 60.“This is to say: ‘Older people in the theater exist,’” Waters, 69, said of the production’s purpose. “We’re here, we’re underused and we have experience.”“As an old person myself, I find people want to dismiss your stories — I did it to my parents all the time,” he added.“Hyper-consciousness” in casting these days means you’ll often see one old person featured in an ensemble, making for “its own kind of tokenism,” said Katigbak, who is 67.“This project addresses that,” she added, “because it centers the old character, the old actor.”The message will be purposefully reinforced by the fact that the actors will be giving long, demanding monologues, some of which run more than 40 minutes and approach 5,000 words.In her monologue, Anna Ouyang Moench, who wrote the 2019 Off Broadway play, “Mothers,” captures a grieving documentary filmmaker dealing with both personal loss and professional rejection.Naomi Iizuka’s piece features an elderly Japanese man who loves Scotch and hates jazz, while Sam Chanse introduces audiences to a novelist who is giving a speech at her alma mater despite (or in spite of) having apparently been canceled by the students she is addressing.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Leong said.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe playwrights also include Jaclyn Backhaus, whose breakout work “Men on Boats” was a 2015 Off Broadway hit; and Mia Chung, whose “Catch as Catch Can” will return next season, after a 2018 New York premiere.Waters and Katigbak said the playwrights were not given specific prompts, except that their monologues should be “of the moment.” Given that they were created during the pandemic, isolation — and an examination of how loneliness metastasizes and manifests when family and friends all but abandon you — pervades almost all of the works.In a round-table discussion earlier this month, the actors said that living through the last few years has made them intimately familiar with the feeling.“My mother, who turned 97 in August, sits at home and watches TV all day because all her friends are gone,” said Glenn Kubota, who will appear in Iizuka’s monologue. “To see what she has to do on a daily basis just to amuse herself is really eye opening. I’m getting a glimpse of what maybe I will be facing 10, 20, years from now.”Many of the works are also at least somewhat autobiographical. And a few of the playwrights, who are all younger than 60, have created characters that resemble one of their parents. In some cases, in the process of acting, editing and rehearsing, the characters have evolved as their creators have reflected more deeply on themselves and those close to them.The monologue by Iizuka, whose well-regarded “36 Views” opened at the Public almost two decades ago, features a Japanese man who, in peeling back the layers of his life, recounts the time a bomb fell on his house leading him to wander around Tokyo and end up inside a candy shop.Iizuka said the character is strongly influenced by her father, who died in December 2020. “It’s about trying to find joy and pleasure, but also running up against your own mortality,” she said.She shared photos of him with the show’s creative team, who in turn provided them to Kubota. Iizuka said the actor has an “uncanny ability” to capture her father’s “feisty, tart-tongued humor.”“I’ve found this process incredibly nourishing,” she said.Kubota noted that the script had changed considerably — from a first draft he felt was filled with anger to the one he is now performing that mostly expresses love.“Hopefully I can do her work justice,” Kubota said, “because I’m going to be talking about her father in front of all of these people.”As co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, Katigbak helped get the project off the ground.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Every time I work on something new,” said Wolf, “I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesSince the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic roughly two years ago, the number of documented episodes of race-based hate toward people of Asian descent have soared, leaving Asian Americans in New York and beyond to endure what has at times been daily dread about their own safety and also the well-being of their older parents.The monologues mostly avoid racial animus and lean toward more universal themes. Even still, Katigbak emphasized that in “Out of Time,” audiences will hear the universal stories through Asian American voices — a rarity in the theater, even in 2022.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Page Leong, who last performed at the Public in “Too Noble Brothers” in 1997, said of the roles that come to members of her community. “It’s also connected to being relegated to being the surgeon or the lawyer.”Rita Wolf, who has had roles in Richard Nelson’s recent plays, including “The Michaels,” said, “So much of it is about opportunity.” She added: “Every time I work on something new, I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized. And I think about how they did not have opportunities to do something like this.”Ohama is performing Chanse’s work, “Disturbance Specialist,” which recently clocked in at 40 minutes and 21 seconds and 4,998 words. She joked about doing such a piece at her “advanced age,” since it takes hours and hours of memorization.“When you are our ages, life is there inside of you, so we don’t have to worry about the acting so much,” Ohama said. “But what is concerning to the older actor generally is: Do I know my lines?”“We have dedicated ourselves to this art form,” she added, “and the thing about us older people is we don’t get a chance to show that very often.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Try Harder!’ Review: California Overachievement Test

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      This documentary from Debbie Lum goes inside a top-performing San Francisco public high school to see how students are preparing for the future.The coming-of-age documentary “Try Harder!” from the director Debbie Lum (“Seeking Asian Female”) immerses us in the world of elite college admissions at one of San Francisco’s top-performing public high schools: Lowell High. Equal parts vérité character study and probing meditation on the virtues of success, the film follows a group of five delightfully earnest overachievers who have internalized, to a stunning degree, the necessity of getting into Stanford and Harvard and other top-tier colleges. Watching these bright, motivated young people apply for and be admitted to (and rejected from) the Ivy League has all the energy of a high-stakes poker game and a reality competition show combined.The film mostly takes place inside the school, yet its inventive and unexpected visuals manage to avoid classroom banality. When the camera zooms in on the science posters on the walls around the student (and aspiring brain surgeon) Alvan Cai, as he gushes about Lowell’s beloved physics teacher Mr. Shapiro, the close-up transforms these dog-eared microscopic images of biology into sharp abstract paintings. Lum and the cinematographers Lou Nakasako and Kathy Huang skillfully harness the depth of field of their images to routinely point us toward a wider view that the Lowell students often lack.As Lowell has a majority Asian American student population, the film briefly takes up the complex well of anti-affirmative action sentiment among some Asian Americans, but its attempts to use Lowell teachers as talking heads on this topic feel stunted and confusing. (Here Peter Nick’s film “Homeroom” pairs nicely as another Bay Area-set doc that examines youth politics to greater satisfaction.)However, Lum smartly interrogates the “tiger mom” archetype by presenting more than one kind of Asian mother, and focuses on the experience of a biracial student (Rachael Schmidt) to debunk the myth that Black students only get into Ivies to meet quotas. Quiet yet assertive, “Try Harder!” itself succeeds at not trying too hard.Try Harder!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      First Asian American Muppet Arrives on ‘Sesame Street’

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      Ji-Young, a guitar-playing Korean American character, will bring rock music and conversations about racism to the long-running children’s show starting on Thanksgiving Day.“Sesame Street” is welcoming its first Asian American muppet to the neighborhood. Ji-Young, a Korean American 7-year-old who loves playing her electric guitar and skateboarding, will make her debut next week.Ji-Young won’t just be sharing her love for rock music and tteokbokki, or Korean rice cakes, on the show. She will also play a role in countering anti-Asian bias and harassment at a time of heightened awareness around the issue.Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces “Sesame Street,” said it created Ji-Young to support families of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage as part of its racial justice initiative, Coming Together. Sesame Workshop introduced the initiative in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and as racism and violence targeting Asians and Asian Americans surged during the pandemic.“Sesame Street” has been on air for more than 50 years, but Ji-Young is its first Asian American muppet.The show has had human characters and guests of Asian descent, including Alan Muraoka, who is Japanese American and owns the fictional Hooper’s Store. In June, “Sesame Street” released a video called “Proud of Your Eyes,” in which Mr. Muraoka helped Analyn, a Filipino American girl, after she was teased about the shape of her eyes. Muraoka and Wes, a muppet, told Analyn that her eyes were beautiful and part of what made her who she was.Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociology professor at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., and an expert on race and racism in Hollywood, said that when she first immigrated to the United States from Taiwan at age 5, she learned more English from “Sesame Street” than from the E.S.L. classes at her school.The show was more diverse than most children’s programming of the time, but Ms. Yuen said it was missing characters who looked like her when she was growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s.“I think having this muppet who is more culturally specific and is able to speak another language, especially in the current time of rising anti-Asian hate, is so essential to representation,” she said.Kathleen Kim, Ji-Young’s puppeteer, with the finished muppet.Zach Hyman/Sesame WorkshopJi-Young made her television debut on the “Today” show on NBC on Monday. “You know what’s really cool about ‘Sesame Street’ is that no matter what you look like, or how you play or where you come from, you belong, and that’s really cool,” Ji-Young said.She will be introduced on “Sesame Street” during a special episode on Thanksgiving Day on HBO Max and on local PBS stations. The show, “See Us Coming Together: A Sesame Street Special,” will also feature Simu Liu and Naomi Osaka.Mr. Liu, who plays the title character in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings,” welcomed Ji-Young to “Sesame Street” on Twitter on Monday, after The Associated Press reported on the new muppet’s debut.“I’ve had the privilege of experiencing so many incredible things over the past couple of years, but this definitely sticks out,” Mr. Liu said. “Welcome to Sesame Street, Ji-Young! I’m so glad I got to hang out with you.”In the special episode, the residents of Sesame Street celebrate Neighbor Day, a community event with food, music and games. Someone offscreen tells Ji-Young to “go back home,” and then the other residents, guest stars and friends, like Elmo, offer her support.Ji-Young’s puppeteer is Kathleen Kim, who is Korean American. “My one hope, obviously, is to actually help teach what racism is, help teach kids to be able to recognize it and then speak out against it,” Ms. Kim, 41, told The A.P. “But then my other hope for Ji-Young is that she just normalizes seeing different kinds of looking kids on TV.” More

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      in Theater

      Kristina Wong’s Pandemic Story: Sewing With Her Aunties

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      The performance artist ran a mask-making operation during the pandemic. That inspired her new comedy at New York Theater Workshop.Kristina Wong is an in-your-face performer who, until this month, hadn’t performed for an in-person audience since March 2020. The thought of looking into dozens of eyes, not just the little green light on her laptop, made her feel, well, weird.So her stage manager, Katie Ailinger, came up with a plan to ease her back into the rhythms of live performance: She taped stock photos of people’s faces around the rehearsal room at New York Theater Workshop, where in September Wong began to prepare “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord,” a one-woman show about running a sewing group during the pandemic.“Just turning my head and having a range of motion is a whole thing — and having eye contact again is huge!” Wong, 43, a comedian, performance artist and community activist, said recently during a phone interview from her dressing room. She was about to run through an afternoon technical rehearsal of the 90-minute production, a hybrid of stand-up, lecture and performance art that is scheduled to open Nov. 4.“I feel like I got more done for the world by running a mutual aid group than as an elected official,” Wong said, who is also a member of the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesWhile Wong was stuck at home in Los Angeles, she stayed busy leading the Auntie Sewing Squad, a volunteer group of mostly Asian American women she founded in March 2020 to make face masks for health care workers, farm workers, incarcerated people and others. She recruited 6-year-old children, her 73-year-old mother and others for the operation, which ballooned to more than 800 “Aunties,” a cross-cultural term of respect and affection for women, as well as “Uncles” and nonbinary volunteers in 33 states. Together, they distributed more than 350,000 masks.“I feel like I got more done for the world by running a mutual aid group than as an elected official,” said Wong, a third-generation Chinese American from San Francisco. (She’s served as an unpaid elected representative of the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles since 2019, an unusual electoral journey that is the subject of her one-woman show “Kristina Wong for Public Office,” whose national tour was interrupted by the pandemic.)After disbanding the sewing squad (she hosted a retirement party for the Aunties in Los Angeles in September), Wong shifted her focus to bringing the tale of her 504 days leading the group to the stage in a production directed by Chay Yew. And a streaming version of the show ran at New York Theater Workshop in May.In a conversation a few days before previews began, Wong discussed her journey from an out-of-work artist to the leader of hundreds of volunteers, her mother’s changed opinion of her performing arts career and how she hoped the show would reshape people’s perceptions of Asian Americans. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In March 2020 your tour for “Kristina Wong for Public Office” was postponed. What made you want to start a mask-making group?I was home without income feeling sorry for myself, and I stumbled across some articles that said there was a need for homemade masks. It started with me taking my Hello Kitty sewing machine and fabric and making a naïve offer to the internet: “If you need masks and don’t have access to them, I will help you!” But my ego wrote a check my body couldn’t cash, and within four days I was inundated with requests, so I started a Facebook group of people whom I knew could sew. We had Aunties cutting the elastic off their fitted sheets, the straps off their bras. It was a Robinson Crusoe situation.Why did you call yourself a “sweatshop overlord”?My first volunteers were all Asian women, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is the sickest moment, we are a modern-day sweatshop.” Our mothers and grandmothers did garment work — my grandmother and grandfather did laundry work as part of their rite of passage to America — and now we find ourselves doing this work again, for free, because the government hasn’t prepared us for this moment. So it was this gallows humor joke that I was the sweatshop overlord — also humor about child labor because I was ordering children around.At what point did you realize this was a show?Within the first 40 days, one of the Aunties — my first mentor, Leilani Chan of TeAda Productions [a Los Angeles-based theater company] — was like, “We’re going to try to figure out how to make work online.” So I’d get a booking from a college or a theater and then would just create new sections up to that point in the pandemic.The shows, which were all [streamed] live, became an event for the Aunties. I would post in our Facebook group “I’m doing a performance about us now,” and they would all change their name to “Auntie So and So” in Zoom. They’d openly chat with audience members during the performance and be there for the Q. and A. afterward, usually at their sewing machines. So it was me half-entertaining them, but also trying to bring our story into existence.“With this show,” Wong said, “I wanted to find a way to tell the story that’s more than us just being beat up, beat up, beat up, but also about how we survived.”Calla Kessler for The New York TimesWhat changes did you make for the in-person production?Doing the show from my home on Zoom — and the fact that we were all in a pandemic — was a great shorthand for the audience, but now I’m moving into a neutral space that is a representation of my home. So I realized I’d have to spend more time laying out context that we might’ve forgotten, and also trying to think about the bigger meaning of all this, rather than just putting moments to memory.You use comedy as a way of talking through micro- and macro-aggressions against Asian Americans. How did anti-Asian sentiment affect you personally?The great irony is that I didn’t even wear a mask for the first few weeks I was sewing them, because I felt like the mask I permanently wear on my face was already a sign to the world: “I’m a foreigner. I’m an immigrant. I brought the virus here. Come get me.” With this show, I wanted to find a way to tell the story that’s more than us just being beat up, beat up, beat up, but also about how we survived.Were you concerned that people wouldn’t want to relive the pandemic?We need to figure out how to visibly see Asian Americans and culture. During the pandemic, I saw Asian American women not as quiet, subservient virus passers but as warriors behind sewing machines doing the work of protecting Americans. If there’s a museum one day about this moment in history, please let there just be a little footnote that remembers our work. And I’ve learned that, especially as an artist of color, I can’t wait for someone else to write that footnote, so this show is really me screaming at people to know how to respect our labor.As recently as 2015, your mother was still sending you newspaper articles with the average pay for careers like doctors and government officials to try to dissuade you from pursuing a performing arts career. Is she more supportive now?My mom called me when I first started this and told me, “You’ve got to stop making those masks; stay inside!” I got really mad at her, but then she completely surprised me — she was like, “OK, mail me some fabric, get me the patterns.” Then she recruited all her friends and got really into it. I think she feels really proud.Is she coming to see the show?She was really scared to come to New York because of hate crimes and the Delta variant, but she and my dad are coming to watch the show. I’m really happy she gets to see it, and I think she’ll be surprised because she doesn’t know how much she’s in it. My shows have been my way to have honest conversations with my parents from a distance — they learn more about me from watching my shows than us sitting at the dining room table, where I’m mostly just lying to them and hiding stuff. And I think they know this!How much of the show is just you, Kristina Wong, on that stage, and how much is you playing a character?This is my great dilemma! I play a character named Kristina Wong who’s mostly me, but highly dramatized. Did I really crawl on my belly to go to the post office? No, but it did feel like life or death a lot of the time. More