Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

262 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
El Paso–born Octavio Solis moved into the top tier of American
playwrights with his brilliant, Pulitzer-finalist Lydia in 2009. This
production, directed by Juliette Carrillo and performed in a mixture of
English and Spanish at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, starred
Onahuoa Roderiguez (left) as Ceci, a young girl whose brain was shattered
in a car accident days before her quinceañera (traditional fifteenth
birthday celebration). We mainly see Ceci, however, in her dreams of
her past life as a vivacious young woman. Stephanie Beatriz plays the
mysterious Lydia, a young Mexican undocumented immigrant who uses
magical powers to comfort Cici and translate her unexpressed thoughts to
her bewildered parents and brothers. © Craig Schwartz Photography
Child, about the conflict between Chinese traditions
(foot-binding in particular) and contemporary values,
which was nominated for a best-play Tony Award, and
his semiautobiographical 2008 Yellow Face, which covers
his own career as an Asian American playwright,
including his winning the Tony and then losing his
battle to keep a white actor from playing the lead role
of an Asian character in the Broadway Miss Saigon.
Hwang’s most recent plays, the brilliant comedy Chinglish
and the exhilarating Bruce Lee biography Kung
Fu, had extensive runs on Broadway in 2011 and off-
Broadway in 2014, respectively, and his Cain and Abel
joined with Rivera’s Sermon of the Senses at the Flea
Theatre’s 2014 Mysteries.
Hwang is only the most prominent of the many Asian
Americans now solidly ensconced in the American
repertoire, however. Philip Kan Gotanda, Lonnie
Carter, Diana Son, and Elizabeth Wong are among the
others writing about relations between American and,
respectively, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Chinese
cultures. Gotanda’s The Life And Times of Chang and
Eng, about two real-life twins from Siam who were
joined at the hip—and who toured the United States
as the world’s original “Siamese twins”—has become
popular at universities, including UC Berkeley, UC
Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, Princeton, and the University
of North Carolina.
Finally, Native American theatre has also entered the
American national theatre repertoire. The Californiabased
Native Voices theatre company performs Native
American plays regularly at its Autry Theatre home
base in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, and tours plays and
play readings to the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego;
the company’s 2011 world premiere of Cherokee Carolyn
Dunn’s The Frybread Queen—with an all-Native
American cast—was one of the highlights of the Southern
California theatre season (see photo). Its most recent
work, a 2015 presentation of Off the Rails, adapted from
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure by Native Voices’
Artistic Director Randy Reinholz (Choctaw), deals with
America’s Indian boarding schools in the American Wild
West in the 1880s. The Thunder Theatre, operated by the
Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas,
has also been devoted to producing Native American
plays and training Native American theatre artists; its
website lists more than one hundred Native American
dramatists working around the country. Native American
theatre, which is certainly the oldest form of performance
on the North American continent, has once more
come to public attention in the current century.
A MACARONIC THEATRE
There is no official language of the theatre of today;
plays are increasingly written in multiple tongues.
The theatre scholar Marvin Carlson uses the term
macaronic—originally referring to maccarone (macaroni),
a term for the interwoven languages of medieval Italy—
to describe plays that employ such a mix.
The European theatre has long been macaronic:
even Shakespeare’s plays include many lines in
French, Italian, Latin, and Welsh. Postmodern plays
take this multilingualism much further. Canadian playwright
David Fennario’s Balconville (1979), about
the relationship of French-speaking and Englishspeaking
Canadians, is presented in both languages of
officially bilingual Canada. The French comedy Les