Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | asian american theater
839
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June 13, 2013

daleli Colorado's first Asian American theater company, Theatre Esprit Asia (TEA), has launched its debut season with a pair of one-person plays in repertory, and I was fortunate to see one of them, "Dust Storm," last week starring Dale Li. If you haven't seen this or the other play, "Spirit and Sworded Treks" starring Maria Cheng, hurry -- they run tonight through Sunday, and then close after next weekend. "Dust Storm" is a monologue about the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. It's loosely constructed on a real incident, an attack on Chiura Obata, a celebrated artist, in Topaz, an internment camp in Utah. The story is told from the perspective of Seiji, an angry teenager who's imprisoned at Topaz (with his family, but he abandons them to hang with a bunch of tough teens). Like Obata, Seiji was rounded up in Berkeley, California after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which allowed the camps to be built. Anyone of Japanese descent in the Bay Area, including U.S.-born citizens like Seiji, were told they could pack whatever they could carry, and were first sent to a temporary holding center before being transferred to Topaz.
November 21, 2009

MAY 2011 UPDATE: After a year and a half of hard work, revisions and improvements, East West Players has opened a finished production of "Krunk Fu Battle Battle" which runs through June 26, 2011. If you're in LA or gonna be in LA, don't miss this musical -- we wish we could fly from Denver to see it! Here's a video trailer: Now, back to the original post: It's not often that we get the chance to see the embryonic stage of a theatrical project, and see how a play is developed. So we were fortunate that our visit to LA to attend the BANANA conference of Asian American bloggers coincided with a free "workshop" performance of a new project being developed by East West Players. "Krunk Fu Battle Battle," is a hip-hop musical, which features hip-hop music and b-boy dancing, woven around familiar but tried-and-true plots of a boy who falls in love with a girl from the other side, and has a mentor who helps him overcome his obstacles. Think "Romeo and Juliet" meets "West Side Story" meets "Karate Kid." East West Players produced a reading of the play, which is in very early stages, by rehearsing a partial script, several songs and dance numbers, and performing a 35-minute excerpt for anyone who showed up, then asked audience members for their opinions and reactions. The preview was hosted by the Japanese American National Museum (the EW Players' home, the David Henry Hwang Theatre around the block in Little Tokyo, was busy with performances of its latest play, "Po Boy Tango").