99 HISTORIES BY JULIA CHO The New School for Drama, October 31st to November 3rd, 2018 Cast: Eunice: Katharine Chin Sah-Jin: Hyojin Park
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99 HISTORIES BY JULIA CHO The New School for Drama, October 31st to November 3rd, 2018 Cast: Eunice: Katharine Chin Sah-Jin: Hyojin Park
BIG BAD WEBSITE UPDATE!
Took one last walk around the rehearsal room this morning. Over the past three days, I’ve seen all of this inspiration transform into reality: in the performances, the design, everything.
I don’t have the words to express how proud I am of this show and how excited I am to share it with the outside world. First preview tonight. Opening tomorrow. Shows through Saturday. Come join us.
Art by Thi Bui and Jee Young, words by Amy Tan.
NEW VISIONS 2018
It appears they’re not only going to let us graduate but they’re also giving us money and run of a theatre for the next few months. The good news is that we’re in the process of making three shows as bold and diverse as we are.
The indomitable Sarah Young is first up with her epic take on Jose Rivera’s Sueño, followed up with my take on Julia Cho’s 99 Histories, and finishing with the mad genius Joey Rizzolo’s Roberto Zucco. It’s an epic season and I can’t wait.
All photos by Joe H. Loper
For all interested parties, here is my Merchant of Venice. Apologies for the video quality, but it’s a decent enough representation of the project.
Before I started grad school, I had only dipped my toes into directing new work a few times and never as anything more than a reading or private workshop. In my nearly two years at The New School, I’ve devised two pieces of new theatre and directed workshops and full productions of three new plays. This next piece has been particularly challenging, but a real joy to bring to life. My very brilliant, kind, and big-hearted classmate Collin has used a fictional apocalypse to explore the loneliness of immigration, the challenges and joys of coming out, and ultimately how much better we are as a people when we come together instead of drifting apart.
This is the first time I’ve directed a play where I have to create a raft, a basement, an elevator shaft, a board room, and a little dingy floating in the middle of flooded Bushwick. It’s the first time I’ve directed a play where one character speaks almost entirely in Korean. This is also the first time where I’ve actually felt like I’ve found my sea legs when it comes to approaching a play that is just taking its first steps. I have felt my notes getting sharper, my problem solving skills getting faster, and it’s showing up in rewrites and performances. I’m excited to share this one. It’s going to be stunning.
I’ve avoided directing this play for a LONG time. It scares me. It upsets me. Then November 2016 happened. And the bomb threats of 2017 happened. And the cemetery desecration and then Charlottesville. And something inside me snapped. I couldn’t avoid this play anymore and this year long dive into discomfort has produced something really exciting. Four weeks to go. Can’t wait.
Drumroll please… I can finally announce that my thesis production next year is going to be Julia Cho’s exquisite mother/daughter immigrant narrative “99 Histories.” I’ve been searching for this play for a long time. It was the last play I read in my search and when I finished it, it felt like the last piece of a puzzle snapping into place. I’ve been trying to figure out this strange business of being a first generation American for my entire adult life, but I’ve never made theatre about it. For whatever reason, it’s always been too hard, too painful, too vast an experience to boil down into two hours. Turns out I just hadn’t found the right play yet. This play says everything I’ve been trying to say for years and I am excited, nervous, scared, and overjoyed to begin.
Coming Fall 2018. I’m so beyond thrilled.
Simhat Torah by Lloyd Bloom (1984)
On The Merchant of Venice:
After the election of Donald Trump, anti-Semitic incidents rose by a staggering 75%: synagogues burned to the ground, Yeshiva school buses lit on fire, #AreJewsPeople trended on Twitter, hundreds of bomb threats called in to Jewish Community Centers. In August, Nazis marched through the streets of Charlottesville, shouting “JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US.” None of this is new to American Jews. We know that these attitudes have been quietly festering, as overlooked as our national problem with racism. And yet, in the wake of the Charlottesville marches, even amongst my well-meaning, white, liberal, gentile friends, anti-Semitism is an afterthought.
My audiences are largely comprised of these self-same well-meaning people. Many of them also share a love of gutsy feminist heroines and of the romantic comedies in which they feature. In Merchant of Venice, bright, passionate Portia, held prisoner by her gender and her father’s oppressive love, reminds me both of myself and many women I know and love. Audiences eagerly empathize with Portia, because, anti-Semitism aside, she’s a compelling heroine. Many others will feel for Antonio, played to be openly in love with Bassanio. My audiences (including myself) easily identify with a plucky heroine and a pining gay men.
It would be easier for the audience to watch the characters in this play and distance themselves from what they do. It’s much harder if they find themselves relating to them. Compelling the audience to engage, I will ultimately show them the insidious nature of anti-Semitism in their own lives. Genre pieces like romcoms, sci-fi, and horror engage audiences because they are digestible. It is easier to get audiences through the door with genre and provoke them into thinking about hard concepts using recognizable plots. This conceit therefore allows us to talk and think about abstractions in a relatable way that doesn’t risk revealing personal failings. In the 2017 horror film Get Out, this use of genre as a way to demonstrate a clear metaphor for the abstract concept of racism and cultural appropriation. My version of Merchant of Venice will be a romantic comedy to Anti-Semitism as Get Out’s horror is to racism.
Portia and Antonio are emblematic of today’s white moderates. They may both be members of oppressed classes, but they both wittingly and unwittingly contribute to the disease of anti-Semitism. It’s possible that Antonio uses anti-Semitism as a smoke screen for his sexuality, but he is the most cruel to Shylock in private. Portia’s anti-Semitism is so ingrained, the first thing she does after entering the world outside Belmont is eviscerate the life of a Jewish man she’s never met. To the Christians in this play, anti-Semitism is just their opinion and Shylock is awfully mean to them, so doesn’t he deserve it? It is possible to do this play without acknowledging the Christian characters’ remorseless anti-Semitism, but that would be a disservice to a play that lives in moral ambiguity.
Ironically, Venice is an elegant visual metaphor for this play. It is an impossible city: stunning Renaissance architecture, glittering canals, art on every corner. It’s also sinking into the ocean and rotting from the foundation up. Over the course of The Merchant of Venice, this decay becomes unavoidable. The effervescent citizens of a gorgeous city—characters with whom the audience is complicit— put a metaphorical foot through the damp, surface and are confronted by reality; both of the world they live in and the people they are.
This is Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan. This is my heart on stage. This is perhaps the best thing I’ve ever directed.
Last spring, my best friend pointed me towards a book about Jews in Ireland. I couldn't put it down and I found myself daydreaming about the story constantly. It begged to be theatre. Now, months later, the daydream is on the cusp of becoming a reality.
I’ve always wanted to adapt a novel for the stage, but I’ve never quite had the confidence or the ability to even attempt it. One year of grad school under my belt and it’s feeling MORE than doable. In fact, I’m ready to do so much more.
An Australian production of Merchant of Venice changes the final scene, adding completely new phrases. It’s profoundly affecting – but is it right?
After Nazis goose-stepped through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, wreaking havoc and screaming hate, all of my well-meaning liberal gentile friends got on Facebook to reject Nazism. I saw lots of people repeating the maxim that to be a Nazi was inherently un patriotic; that we had fought a war against the Nazis and white supremacy. They meant well. But they’re wrong. Back in the 1930’s, America had it’s own, very popular fascist party. We also had the KKK and anti-immigration laws that specifically targeted Jewish and Asian immigrants. Boatloads of Jewish people were turned away at the border and sent back to Europe to die. We tell ourselves that we entered the Second World War to fight the Nazis and fascism, but the simple fact of the matter is that we fought because we were attacked. We fought because it was convenient and profitable. Anti-Semitism is alive and well in America. It has been since this country’s inception. Positioning ourselves as saviors of the Jews when we were anything but is not only ahistorical, it denies the very real and present dangers facing American Jews today.
The Merchant of Venice is a critically important play for current audiences, and particularly white, liberal, gentile audiences. Liberals (and I include myself in this demographic) do a lot of self congratulation about how enlightened and progressive we are when we need to be working a hell of a lot harder to examine our own unconscious biases. The Bell Shakespeare Company’s production of The Merchant of Venice is nothing short of enraging, but it’s not that different from what we usually do with this play. We sanitize the Shylock Shakespeare wrote; ignoring the fact that he is a brutal, greedy, blood hungry villain. We also let the Christians in the play off the hook, giving them a remorse for their actions they never feel. When we do this, we let gentile audiences off the hook for their own anti-Semitism unconscious or otherwise. The Merchant of Venice is an ugly play, packed with messy, cruel people and moral rot. The take away shouldn’t be: “It’s terrible how bad things were for Jews.” We should be asking ourselves: “How am I mimicking the actions of the Christians in this play? What am I doing to perpetuate the stereotype Shylock represents? How am I contributing to white supremacy?”
That’s why I’m directing The Merchant of Venice in the first place. It’s an opportunity to look in the mirror, to do some hard work. It’s uncomfortable, sure, but the discomfort is worth the reward.
This week, for my directing seminar, I had to make a Joseph Cornell sculpture box inspired by The Merchant of Venice and honestly, the process helped me articulate my thinking about the play in ways I never expected.
Shakespeare’s Venice, much like the actual Renaissance Venice, was a beautiful, cultured city, overflowing with the freedom granted by wealth and education. Except a significant portion of the city’s residents were denied citizenship, freedom of movement, and almost all basic civil liberties because of an accident of birth. Underneath the gold is profound moral rot. And the longer you look, the more hideous and obvious that rot becomes. Eventually, it becomes impossible to ignore. “All that glisters is not gold...”
The imagery Shakespeare uses in The Merchant of Venice alternates between the visceral (flesh, blood, passion), the poetic (Greek mythology, great romantic heroes), and the mercantile (gold, silver, lead)-- painting a world that evokes heroes and lovers as much as it does cutpurses and cold business deals. I found myself immediately drawn to Klimt’s paintings. His emphasis of sensual female beauty juxtaposed with grotesque creatures and elements of Byzantine iconography represent everything the play is: strong sensual women, a fixation with money, ugly behavior, and a preoccupation with the appearance of religious morality. From there I moved outwards, bringing in images relating to Venice’s relationship with the sea and storms, representations of Greek mythology referenced in the play, and the looming presence of Venice’s ostracized Jewish population. The longer you look at this box, the more darkness is revealed.
Now I just have to get this from the box to the stage. Baby steps.
So this semester, because I'm a GLUTTON for punishment, I am working , not only on The Merchant of Venice, but on an adaptation of Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan. Nine Folds... is one of the saddest, most beautiful books I've ever read, and it happens to partially be about a young Lithuanian Jewish family that ends up accidentally immigrating to Cork, Ireland. They cope with isolation, anti Semitism, and the collapse of the family as their dreams pull them in different directions. In short, it's intensely personal. It speaks to my identities as an immigrant, as a Jew, but also to A LOT of my lived experiences.
I often chase highly personal source material and I'm not particularly interested in telling stories that don't amplify the voices of oppressed people. Even when I direct Shakespeare, it's about the downtrodden or systems that destroy people's lives. But when you make art like this, it feels like you're walking around with your rib cage cracked open for everyone to see. And, after a while, it COSTS. I've openly wept in rehearsal on multiple occasions, across different projects. And I always beat myself up when it happens. Directors are supposed to be strong, certain, analytical. I am those things, but I'm also emotional and sometimes my emotions get the better of me.
So what do I do? Swallow all of the things that make my work MY work? Nah. That's not going to produce anything that's more than competent. My head of department is very close with Tarrell Alvin McCraney. She's directed a few of his plays and she told me he often cries in rehearsal but that he does it with his head held high so everyone can see him.
There's a limit, of course, and there's some stories I won't touch yet. I do have to carve out some sense of critical distance to avoid spinning into something self indulgent. But there is no shame in tears. There is no shame in living and surviving and feeling what the cost of that survival does to me on a day to day basis. After all, I'm a human being in the business of telling stories about other living, breathing human beings. I can't be anything else.
I live in San Diego, CA and the JCC in La Jolla is putting on a dramatic stage reading of a play about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in a couple of weeks. My grandfather is a holocaust survivor and I read a lot of holocaust memoirs and definitely agree that Jewish voices, stories, and narratives should be the focus.
Oh that is AWESOME. I’m looking for more information about the play and the playwright, but I’m not seeing anything on the JCC website. Either way, I’m thrilled to bits the play exists and is getting a reading.
Costume fittings start today with Athena and Aphrodite. Renderings by our costume designer, Jenni Oughton. #hissifit #hissifitmusical #grecopunk #nyc #nyctheatre #brooklyn
This, ladies and gentlebeings, is how you make a toga punk rock.
Hey hey the band’s all here! Here’s a look at the first night of rehearsals for our world premiere production of HISSIFIT: A Punk Rock Myth with Snake Appeal by Krista Knight and Barry Brinegar.
Taking my first crack at directing a (sorta/kinda) musical this summer and I am BONKERS excited.