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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 Theater

      Making Every Second Count in Plays Too Short to Miss

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      Theater shrank to tiny proportions during the pandemic. Sometimes that’s a big plus.Forever ago, in March 2020, a press agent handed me tickets before a show and said, “Ninety minutes, no intermission, thank God.”But those days of durational drama are gone. The pandemic has been whittling down running times as if attention spans, like paper towels, were running short. Even “Angels in America” caught the disease, showing up online in October at 50 minutes instead of the customary seven hours.So when I heard that the British playwright Caryl Churchill, already a master of concision, had upped (or lowered) the ante with a 14-minute play — not a doodle or a one-act meant for pairing with others, but a stand-alone event — I began to wonder what advantages might be found in the shorter forms that online theater made feasible. Or was the pandemic just an excuse for clearing out the small ideas that clutter every writer’s notepad and napping dreams?That Churchill play — “What If If Only,” presented by the National Asian American Theater Company — is the briefest of three I saw in the last week alone. “The Floor Wipers,” from the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, runs 15 minutes; “Ali Summit,” from the Actors Theater of Louisville, weighs in at 23.Paradoxically, their similar lengths — just a gulp, and they’re over — help to differentiate them, as the various ways in which they pack their brief time are highlighted instead of papered over.Churchill is not, in any event, a paper-overer. “What If If Only” is harrowing from nearly the first instant, as a woman begs her late husband, who may have committed suicide, to make contact from beyond.“Are you not trying?” she cries. “If you’d wanted to talk to me you could have stayed alive.”Soon the husband does appear, as the wisp of a ghost that could become real, he says, if only his wife would make him “possible.”Merging Churchill’s frequent themes of dread (“Escaped Alone,” “Far Away”) and duplication (“A Number,” “Love and Information”), “What If If Only” dismisses its speculative worlds as quickly as it creates them. The wife’s despair, tearing a hole in space-time, soon releases a multiplicity of possible versions of her husband, had he lived, crowding out the “real” one. Even when she shoos them away in terror, one remains stuck in her hair.“Just brush with your fingers,” her husband says gently. “All gone.”I call the main characters “she” and “her husband” because the livestreamed production, perfectly and creepily “realized” by the stage director Les Waters and the theater tech guru Jared Mezzocchi, casts the roles to suggest that the mourner is a woman (Mia Katigbak, superb as always) and the ghost is a man (Bernard White).But the play’s horror, which in Churchill is never just cosmological but also spiritual, comes from the combination of its radical relevance to any human and its freakish compression, in which 14 minutes becomes a literal deadline. The extreme brevity — typical one-acts more often last an hour or longer — serves as a tool, like a socket wrench, to make clear that grief is unbearable, even in small doses.One of Andy Perez’s collages from “Ali Summit.”via Actors Theater of Louisville“Ali Summit,” by Idris Goodwin, also feels usefully short, in the manner of a teaser designed to encourage deeper research and reflection. The subject is the June 1967 meeting at which major Black athletes — including Jim Brown, Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (not yet known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) — questioned Muhammad Ali about his conscientious objection to military service.Though Ali’s justification now seems incontrovertible — “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” — he was nevertheless convicted of draft evasion, stripped of his heavyweight title, sentenced to five-years in a federal penitentiary and fined $10,000. Five years later, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction.None of that falls within the scope of “Ali Summit,” which limits itself to the disruptive and galvanizing effect Ali had on his colleagues that summer. In fact, Ali, though he is represented, like all the characters, in a series of beautiful collages by Andy Perez, does not speak in the play. Only the others do, voiced by actors who give full force to the confusion and anguish of men who are already questioning what it means, as Black athletes working for white “owners,” to fight.“We are soldiers, all of us really, enlisted since birth,” says the Griot, or narrator figure, portrayed by the playwright and rendered as a wide-eyed witness.The language, mixing earthy jargon with breakbeat poetics, is as much a collage as the visuals and does a good job of setting the tone of urgent reflection. But also like the visuals, which are filmed in the familiar documentary pan-and-scan style, it tends to flatten conflict that wants to be more argumentative and three-dimensional. (An immersive virtual reality element is scheduled to be added later this summer.) As if to make up for that, “Ali Summit,” directed by Robert Barry Fleming, mines emotion from the pressurized implications of its transitional moment, a moment we are somehow still living through.“I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali,” Russell says. “I’m worried about the rest of us.”Jaylene Clark Owens, left, and Taysha Marie Canales in “The Floor Wipers.”via the Wilma TheaterAthletes figure in “The Floor Wipers,” too — indirectly. Its two characters, Racine and Tiana, are members of an “elite squad” given the responsibility, during the N.B.A.’s coronavirus-bubble playoffs last year, of keeping basketball courts dry and sweat-free. (This is a real job.) An exaggerated, “Law & Order”-style introduction immediately identifies “The Floor Wipers” as quick-take comedy; in a handful of episodes of just a few minutes each, the women gossip and sass on the sidelines while waiting for their big moments.For Tiana (Jaylene Clark Owens), those moments are about furthering God’s plan that she marry one of the players; she’d prefer Jayson Tatum but would settle for Nikola Jokic. Racine (Taysha Marie Canales) has more modest goals: to work off her pandemic 15 and save money for her first trip “abroad” — to Texas.Conceived by Canales, directed by Akeem Davis and written by both along with Owens, “The Floor Wipers” is really just a sketch, but it does not ignore the way the outside world penetrates even a bubble. Tiana and Racine wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts, take note of the kneeling players and lose work when games are canceled in protest over the shooting of Jacob Blake. The sure touch of the writing and especially of the performing mean that the comedy isn’t canceled by the intimations of tragedy. Instead, you laugh with a catch in your throat, and the whole thing evaporates before you can ask too much of it.That’s smart, and something I wish other sketch shows, some of which are televised on Saturday nights, would learn from.For dread, though, a heavy boil may be best. That’s what Churchill gives us in “What If If Only,” and why it will likely stand on its own even when mounted live in a theater, as the Royal Court in London plans to do this fall. But be warned that Churchill, even at 14 minutes, doesn’t evaporate. When she leaves a kettle on the fire that long, it often bursts into flames.What If If OnlyThrough June 20; naatco.orgThe Floor WipersAt wilmatheater.orgAli SummitAt actorstheatre.org More